Snake Bite

…I kept coming back to this family I’d seen on an advertisement on the telly, I think it was for a bank or a car or something: mum, dad and three kids, a boy and two girls, standing out the front of a house in the suburbs, all smiling happily, their arms around each other. I think they had a dog, too—a border collie with its tongue hanging out. I don’t know any families like that. I truly fucking don’t.

Seventeen year-old Jessica (Jez) has one year of high-school left, and no idea of what she wants to do after it. Her best friend Lukey has hooked up with Laura, an annoying wannabe who’s just moved to town from Melbourne with her lesbian parents, Dana and Joan. Her alcoholic mother Helen spends most of her time down at the club where she works; the rest of the time she’s generally on the drink with her long-time, jaded friend Shaz, or passed out. Her father doesn’t want anything to do with her. And her sometimes-friendly neighbour Casey is a treacherous wild-child turned stripper who seems to cause nothing but trouble for Jez. Yes life as a teenager can be a confusing time, and when everyone in your chaotic life is busy battling demons of their own, life can seem insurmountably lonely.

It’s these surrounds—that for all their frenetic mayhem are bleak and boredom-inducing—that  Jez looks for any distraction from. She experiments with body modification in the form of piercings (to which the book’s title may derive its name). She experiments with boys: with Cash—her neighbour Casey’s older brother; with schoolmate Martin Carroll; and with Lukey, at least in between his ‘mackings on’ with Laura. And she experiments with drink and drugs, bingeing on whatever she can ingest in sufficient quantities to elevate her above the gloom and boredom, however temporarily:

I drank because I was young and dumb and bored and wanted a laugh with my mates. I took pills because it made me happy. I smoked weed because it made me forget, and sometimes even made the world look strangely beautiful for a spell. What else was there to do?

Jez looks to anything that can take her away from her reality for five minutes, it would seem. But with Lukey contemplating leaving town, and her Mum’s attentions focussed increasingly on a new man in her life, Jez is going to have to deal with her reality soon before the chance to have a role in shaping it slips completely away from her…

Snake Bite is the debut novel from Christie Thompson, an ACT-based PhD candidate. And it’s a highly engaging debut, notwithstanding the grim outlook of its bogan, first-world-problem-suffering characters. It’s set in a suburban Canberra summer; in a few weeks of the lives of Jez and an assortment of characters around her, as they meander aimlessly around a ‘sunken pit of suburbia surrounded by yellow hills,’ unable to identify the direction they want their lives to head in, or unwilling to admit that the direction has already been determined.

It’s a story about teens languishing in their bored youth, fuelled by the alcohol and drugs that keep bleak, unpalatable realities at bay. It’s also a story about adults, jaded and sad, let down by their circumstances and unwilling to acknowledge their ageing. But above all, it’s a story about family—about the strength and importance of human bonds, and all the different forms family can take.

Jez as protagonist sees the narrative told from a youthful perspective, and it’s a perspective that is relayed authentically by Thompson. For instance she captures perfectly the meaninglessness that time has for teens; a feature of adolescence that so clearly differentiates it from adulthood. Jez, Lukey, Laura and co hang out til all hours, they sleep in, they haven’t been up to much that day, they have nowhere to be the next day…

The dialogue too, is spot on; it rings true and doesn’t sound forced, or try-hard. It’s characterised by a lot of youth-speak: fanged, hectic, Facestalking, off tap (though also enough references to ‘vom’ to make you want to vom) but it’s not dialogue that you can’t follow, or that you won’t know what’s going on if your teenage years are behind you.

What’s also notable about the dialogue is that there is a lot of it. Occasionally, the weight of its sheer volume can be suffocating. The story is underpinned by conversations between the characters within it. Rather than Thompson offering third-party description, much is revealed about the characters and story in those characters’ own conversations; in conversations had in parent-free lounge-rooms, bedrooms and suburban backyards. So there’s a sense of ‘listening in’ to the stories of Jez and her friends—a sense that you’re eavesdropping on this point in their lives and hearing the story first hand.

And, largely, this works. Thompson hasn’t butted her way into the story with the intention of showing off, through unnecessary description and prose. It also supports a story that rattles along, and before you know it, while not much has happened, at the same time a lot has actually happened. In a story about teens with little more to do than smoke bongs, play Grand Theft Auto and go swimming, a great deal is being revealed under the surface: the bleak sameness of suburbia, the effects of absent parents and the pain of evolving emotional attachments.

The weight of the dialogue can feel a bit suffocating at times; the narrative barrels along, bouncing from conversation to conversation at such break-neck speed that you barely get time to draw breath, and in such a way as is incongruous with the languor of those speaking. But there are moments of real power within it, and there are passages that rise above the self-obsession, self-pity, dialogue-heavy youth-speak and really capture a raw angst and pain—an unsettled feeling of helplessness and hopelessness and a sense that life really should be better than this.

There’s a lot to like about this book. It’s as fun as it is gloomy, and it feels real and recognisable (and if you’re from Canberra, references ranging from the Kambah pools to the Tuggeranong Hyperdome, and the dress sense of the people who roam it, will ensure it feels particularly recognisable). There’s a lot of dialogue to cut through, but it’s worth the effort: these are conversations we could have had in our own lives; these are conversations we should have had in our own lives.

Christie Thompson, Snake Bite, Allen & Unwin, 2013, 319pp, $25