Sarah Perry – The Essex Serpent (Serpent’s Tail)

Fiction / Sunday, April 29th, 2018

I first came across this book when browsing shelves in a local Waterstones and chatting to the bookseller who heartily recommended it.

At the time, I was desperately trying to be related to books in any other ways than a just reader, and I remember asking him about his job in Waterstones. He answered that to do it you have to be a bit of a bookworm. That is the reason why you can ask for recommendations on reading in any Waterstones bookstore – the sellers are required to read a lot. In fact, they even have book clubs which they take very seriously (and I believe there is wine served).

Back to The Essex Serpent. 

During our short conversation at the till, among other books to read, he recommended The Essex Serpent one to me and said the intriguing ‘we made it happen for the book’. Something about how everyone in Waterstones loved it, and through the personnel’s promotion it has gained its popularity. So I thought – this would be a sure win – and bought it.

Now I tend to buy more books than I can read in a lifetime and pile them up all over my flat, and not shelve them – if I do that means I’ll never read them, right? So there they are, on the floors, on the nightstands, on my Ikea Raskog trolley (purchased specifically for that purpose), glaring at me accusingly – didn’t I say I cannot wait to read them when I was hugging them close at the till? Oh well.

By the time I read it, The Essex Serpent didn’t need any promotional undertakings – it was everywhere. 

To think of it, the success was predictable. How could a Victorian novel exploring such issues as women empowerment, struggle between science and religion, lack of luck in love and – most importantly – London housing issues not do well? It just couldn’t.

The main heroine is Cora, whom we meet at her rich husband’s deathbed, unable to believe her luck. Now, before you judge her, can I say a few words in her defence? We’re never let on the details much, but we do find out that for a long time she has been sadistically oppressed by that dying husband and suddenly we don’t feel so judgemental anymore. 

After the funeral, jubilant Cora travels to Essex to escape the memories of her London home and also to try and establish herself as a palaeontologist. She is always out at the coast looking for rocks and fossils with her companion Martha (oh, blessed days of companionship as a profession!) and her autistic son Francis. 

Her streak of luck continues – the nearby village of Aldwinter has been terrorised and brought into a pagan stupor by an idea of giant serpent, which Cora, being the scientific mind she is, determines to be some kind of an ichthyosaurs. She is convinced that the uncovering of the creature will engrave her name on a plague in British Museum. So to Aldwinter she goes, introduced to a local vicar with socialite past, William Ransome, who lives there with his beautiful wife and kids. 

We witness many strange things as the story progresses. Superstitions, oddities, hysteria, all wrapped into mystical, atmospheric setting. Such a vivid sense of place, created with such mastery. You can’t help but feel yourself pulled into the book, surrounded by that landscape, that uneasiness. 
The novel is structured beautifully. It jumps between places just when you need it to, every now and then you get glimpses of letters written by the characters – the trick that only makes a book better when it is done well. Which in this case it was. We also see the vicar’s wife diary pages, catch sight of her ‘blue’ thoughts and understand that no matter how caring and loving she is to her family, the distance between her and the rest is growing every day.
 
That brings my only point of criticism – the strange role she played in the relationship between Cora and William. I won’t open all the cards, but I just don’t believe in a person acting that way. It doesn’t seem fair to her, and makes the other two look detesting, and you don’t want to think that about the main characters in the book. I much preferred their conversations, trying science and faith as opposing notions, and then realising they can co-exist in the mind of a single person just as they do in the world. 
 
The Essex Serpent was definitely everything I expected it to be. It just wasn’t more. However, that is a lot to ask from a book so heavily marketed and for someone who reads it with a sceptical state of mind.