The Essex Serpent

Perry’s second novel is a powerful, beautifully written historical novel about love, friendship and superstition.

Cora Seaborne, widow of a cruel husband, becomes intrigued by rumours of a mythic beast, the Essex Serpent, who may or may not haunt the Blackwater near the village of Aldwinter. Here she meets the vicar, William Ransome, a man of faith while Cora is a woman of science. Despite their differences a fast friendship grows up. Drawn to each other their lives are changed in subtle ways and neither of them will ever be the same again.

But the cast of characters doesn’t end with theses two. There are the Ransome children, and Will’s wife Stella, ill but the light of his life. Francis, Cora’s possibly autistic son; Luke Garrett, a brilliant surgeon in love with Cora; Spencer, his faithful friend. Martha, Cora’s companion who becomes an activist in the nascent women’s movement. For as well as folklore, this tale deals with the injustices of Victorian slums and the efforts to reform society.

It’s an ambitious, sometimes meandering, sometimes chilling book. Perry writes intelligent, graceful prose and this novel encompasses many aspects of love and friendship as her characters’ lives revolve and entwine around each other. I read, and enjoyed her debut novel, After Me Comes The Flood, but this is a huge leap forward, both in scope and execution.

Well worth your time.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. The premise sounded irresistible to me, yet even though The Essex Serpent had all the ingredients for a book I ought to love, I had a hard time warming to it somehow. Perhaps this was partly because the constant switching of perspective also made it hard for me to settle into the story. Certain threads and relationships were not developed as much as I would have liked, as the zigzagging plot kept dropping one to pick up another. I remained oddly distant from the characters, and sometimes had the sensation of being told rather than shown about their characteristics; they felt intellectually constructed out of era-appropriate ingredients (paleontology, anatomy, consumption, sexual repression, etc.) rather than spontaneously living.

Unsettling is definitely what The Essex Serpent is all about, though, so perhaps this is an appropriate effect. And at the end, suddenly, the characters came together in a way that surprised me, bringing them to life more vividly. If the book had gone on from there for another hundred pages or so, I might have felt more connected to it.

This book was a pleasant surprise. I was thinking it was going to be pretty pulpy. But it wasn't. It's a gothic or mystery type novel. It has mystery and unraveling. It is a work that has elements of feminism and socialism which is a nice break from most Victorian-era novels. Which are mostly about modesty and puritanism.

Update: reread it in English. It was even better.
Some things I liked:
p. 24: “ Come tomorrow, if you like, to the grave. I said I'd go alone, but perhaps that's the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.”
p.127: “Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience - I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that..' .... ‘I've sold my soul, though I'm afraid it didn't fetch too high a price. I had faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I've seen what it does and I traded it in. It's a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad - to turn your back on everything new and wonderful - not to see that there's no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!”
p. 216: “‘No such business', he said cheerfully. ‘I'm quite religious you know: no patience for the supernatural'”.
p. 343: “We've loved each other so long I've never been a man and not loved her. I can no more imagine life without her than without my own limbs. Who will I be if she is gone? If she is not looking at me - will I still be here? Will I look in the mirror one morning and find my reflection gone?

Some words I liked or did not now:
genuflect - kneeling in a religious manner (for a shrine or something)
auspicious - favorable circumstances
declivity - incline or gradient in height
beck - brook or stream
tincture - a trace or vestige
distrait - preoccupied
homunculus - a miniature human
caul - a portion of the enclosing sac of a fetus
shingle - beach gravel