Deborah Adelaide

Not that I thought I've got to respond to Belinda's brief by choosing the most Australian book I can think of.

Absolutely not.

In fact, Snake wasn't my first choice.

I had thought of a couple of others.

And to be frank, there are many wonderful Australian novels.

But this novel is extremely brief.

For very pragmatic reasons, I've set it for students because they can actually read it in an evening.

But it also is a very bold, audacious kind of novel because it's the work of a novel of someone who's primarily a poet.

And you see that in these brilliant, short, sharp little scenes.

Some of them, some of the chapters are only a paragraph and they are packed with imaginative possibility.

And of course, when we're teaching creative writing, we're not really teaching students how to write.

We're teaching them how to read critically and we're giving them a license to let their imaginations spark and fly in all sorts of directions.

And this

This is what Snake does because of its great brevity.

You can read a chapter or page and it's like the tip of the iceberg of the story and you can encourage students to go in and sort of start thinking of other possibilities that the words on the page inspire in them.

So for a teaching text, it's incredibly useful.

But it's also a very compelling story and one of the things that is so compelling about it and which I find particularly interesting is its main character, Irene, is a pretty unlikable character and that to me is something that often makes a novel very, very interesting.

Well, I'll leap in here if you like and just say absolutely emphatically not.

And I think this is one of the things that happened to me when I was a student at high school where other people didn't want to read texts and didn't want to analyze them and didn't want to discuss them in class because the idea was it would destroy the book for you.

And I found