Vernon and Penelope Moore never want to see their son Caleb again. Not after he hit his wife and ended up in gaol. A lifetime of careful parental love wiped out in a moment.
But when retired teacher Vernon hears that Caleb is being regularly visited and savagely bashed by a local criminal as the police stand by, he knows he has to act. What has his life been as a father if he turns his back on his son in his hour of desperate need? He realises with shame that he has failed Caleb. But no longer.
The father of the man bashing Caleb is head of a violent crime family. The town lives in fear of him but Vernon is determined to fix things in a civilised way, father to father. If he shows respect, he reasons, it will be reciprocated. But how wrong he is.
And what hell has he brought down on his family?
Reading like a morality tale Western but in a starkly beautiful Australian setting, Snake Island is a propulsive literary thriller written with great clarity and power. It will take you to the edge and keep you there long after the final page is turned.
Snake Island, Ben Hobson
‘Vernon shifted his weight in the seat. He didn’t want violence. Just an audience. Just a sit-down, man to man, with Ernie. He wouldn’t even bring the gun in. Just the kid.’
Everyone has at least one hilarious family portrait. In my family’s case it’s a photo of my father, my two younger siblings and myself. Why is this one hilarious, for a start we’re all in Pipe Band uniform and my father is the only one of us who’s smiling. Looks of abject misery is how I would describe the faces of my brother and sister. Me, I just look glaikit. So what has this to do with Ben Hobson’s second novel Snake Island, you may ask? The photo was most likely taken before the Tarra Festival parade in Yarram, a parade which takes place every Easter Saturday. Snake Island is set in a fictional version of Yarram and a parade is a key part of the conclusion of the novel. More importantly, it's also a portrait of families, the individuals within and the effect that each generation has on the next.
Snake Island was a singularly rare treat for me. I’ve lived in Gippsland almost all of my life and until now I’ve never read a novel wholly set in Gippsland, albeit a fictionalised version, and not only that, it’s set in a part of Gippsland which I love to visit on a regular basis. Location is of course just one part of a novel, the landscape on which the story is painted, and in the case of Snake Island it’s the story which makes it a very satisfying novel. It centres around two families who both live outside of the township of Newbury. The Moores who live in Port Napier, a nearby coastal town, and the Cahills who live in the bush, well away from any prying eyes who might disturb their dope growing enterprise. In portraying these two families Ben Hobson looks at the effect that two negative male traits can have on subsequent generations. Vernon Moore is a Vietnam Vet who is prone to long periods of silence and absence, that lack of communication eventually leads to his son Caleb being jailed for assaulting his partner. Ernie Cahill knows how to dish out violence, even to his adult sons, and when his oldest son Brendan decides that Caleb should be physically punished for his actions it’s sets off a chain of events which leads to a violent and devasting conclusion. There are two other crucial characters in Snake Island, Sidney Cahill, the youngest of Ernie’s sons and perhaps the most important character in the book, and Sharon Wornkin, the local police sergeant whose own history of family violence leads to her turning a blind eye to Ernie’s endeavours.
Snake Island is not only a thoroughly satisfying novel to read it is also a vital lesson on how we should communicate with each other, how we should be aware of what our actions say to each other and finally how we should learn from the past, because if we don’t our mistakes are not only repeated they sometimes become worse.
Note: Glaikit is a Scottish word meaning stupid, foolish or thoughtless. Given the pipe band reference I couldn't resist using it.
Snake Island, Ben Hobson
There is little sympathy to be found anywhere for a man who beats his wife. Caleb Moore finds this out soon enough into his stay in prison, convicted for the assault that has finally severed his shaky marriage to Melissa. The prison staff are fine with turning a blind eye to a little lay justice, which comes in the form of visits from a local thug, Brendan Cahill.
Caleb’s father Vernon, who has not visited Caleb for the last two years, learns of the attacks and knows that the time for staying away is now over. Much like Agamemnon petitioning Achilles for the return of the body of Hector, Vernon truly believes that a fathers plea must be heard and respected. His idea of speaking to Brendan’s father, the head of a local crime family, comes to be the worst decision made in his long life.
SNAKE ISLAND, like other notable Australian mentions published in the last couple of years, straddles a literary space between dark drama and crime fiction. The term literary thriller has of late been used to describe such works. Acts of violence committed in small or otherwise closed communities offer rich opportunities for intensive explorations into what comes next beyond the act itself. Great conflicts all have a point of origin, and they all escalate to catastrophes by a series of ill-considered decisions.
SNAKE ISLAND is at first a busy work, introducing its readers to a host of characters that are all passively waiting for their lot to change. You won’t need to suspend your belief in the plights of these people but there will be the necessity of overcoming a natural repulsion for some of the key players (a wife beater, even repentant, is still a wife beater). Also, there is the necessity of immersion in such a depressing place populated with desperately forlorn characters.
There is a rising tide of despair and hopelessness that threatens to swamp everyone we meet in the pages of SNAKE ISLAND. We encounter towns people who believe themselves trapped by circumstances and morosely accept their fates as being inevitable. What author Ben Hobson deftly guides the reader to is to the understanding that there is a process in such chaos. There will be a purpose to the witnessing of so much relentless suffering.
The time period in which SNAKE ISLAND is set is the late 1990’s, before the rise of Australia’s access to the internet and of course smartphones with their instant connectivity. The events of SNAKE ISLAND are all that more suffocating for their technological and geographical isolation. There is such a weight to the narrative, such a sense of impending doom, that the final chapter is incredibly tense and you don’t dare take your eyes off the page. This is a very violent novel, and breaks more than one taboo of reading crime fiction, so steel yourself for this and you will be sucked into such darkness that you may find it hard to imagine how it is all going to be wrapped up by novel’s end.
Ben Hobson currently teachers English and Music at a Queensland state high school. Hobson’s first novel, TO BECOME A WHALE, was published in 2017.