Dave's Book Blog: "The Essex Serpent" by Sarah Perry

As recently widowed Cora Seaborne and her strange son Francis travel to Essex, strange things begin to happen around the Blackwater. But despite the quasi-Gothic aura (as well as the monster, possibly a survivor from prehistoric times, we encounter a Fata Morgana and noctilucent clouds, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are in the recent past), this is fundamentally a love story. Luke the poor surgeon is in love with Cora but she is in love with married vicar Will who loves both her and his wife. Meanwhile Spencer, Luke's bosom buddy, is in love with Martha but she fancies Edward.

The first few pages are written in the present tense but the bulk of the book is in the past tense. Except in the letters between the characters that interleave the chapters, the perspective is third person, often from an omniscient PoV but frequently writing from the PoV of one of the characters.

The setting

Not only is it set in (late) Victorian times, it has the feeling of a Victorian novel. The start (after the 'hook' of the brief prologue) reminded me of the start of Bleak House. Compare:

“One o’clock on a dreary day and the time ball dropped at the Greenwich Observatory ... Skippers marked the time and tide ... a freight of iron was bound for Whitechapel foundry, where bells tolled fifty against the anvil as if time was running out. Time was being served behind the walls of Newgate jail, and wasted by philosophers in cafes on the Strand; it was lost by those who wished the past were present, and loathed by those who wished the present past.” (January 1)
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.” (Second paragraph of chapter one of Bleak House. The first paragraph mentions mud several times and even a Megalosaurus. It can't be a coincidence.)

On the other hand, the Blackwater coastline seems to mirror the Kent coastal marshes at the start of Great Expectations, when Pip meets the monstrous Magwitch in the mist.

But if there is a Dickensian feel to the descriptions and the setting, the major characters are less eccentric than the caricatured grotesques of Dickens.

The main characters are:

Cora, a keen collector of fossils, a woman who is full of life, instantly loved, the centre of attention, whose motto is “I’m always thirsty - for everything.” (March 3) She was the victim of an abusive relationship with her first husband but it doesn't seem to have cowed her spirits at all.
Will, the vicar, torn between two loves, and torn between the old and the new, and between science and superstition. His dogmatic dismissal of the idea of the Serpent as nonsense makes it seem that he is on the side of progress but in fact his rejection is instinctive rather than rational, just like his rejection of hypnosis and a surgical intervention for his wife’s disease. Despite the books in his library, he fears change, represented by the Londoners who come to visit, and seeks sanctuary in the village, even though the villagers are almost pagan in their superstitious beliefs.
Luke, the hugely talented surgeon, filled with hubris: “Though he knew how pride precedes a fall, it seemed so novel to have any distance to tumble he willingly faced the risk.” (May 4). He would seem to be the classic tragic hero except in so far as his fate is not poetic justice.
Francis, Cora's strange son, like his hero Sherlock Holmes in so many ways.
Stella: Will's wife: whose disease progressively worsens. One of the members of my reading group thought she was quite manipulative.

The major characters are ambitious. Luke wants to be a pioneering surgeon, Cora a famous fossil-hunter, and Martha wants to start the socialist revolution with better housing for the poor. But, as Charles (already at the top of his tree) complacently says: “She’ll grow out of hope, as everyone eventually does.” (September 1)

Is this an issue-driven novel?

But one member of my book group thought that the characters had been created for a purpose (as are all characters in novels, but the art of the author is to make the reader believe otherwise). I think perhaps the problem was that this is an issue-driven book. I felt that Perry's primary purpose was to address issues of:

Progress versus traditionalism, in particular the clash between Cora’s science and Will’s religion but also the clash between Luke’s pioneering surgery and the traditionalists
Feminism: Martha and Cora are independently-minded ‘liberated’ females; Stella is a wife; Cora roams the countryside, Stella stays at home (though she rather rules her household).
Domestic abuse:Cora’s husband, dead at the start of the book
Autism/ Asperger’s syndrome: Francis
Social conditions: Martha’s drive to improve housing for the poor

This was overtly in the context of Victorian England but there was a definite feel that these issues were being considered through a modern lens. This meant that the characters felt a bit like puppets, manipulated by their author (as are all characters in novels but the secret is not to let the reader see the strings).

This feeling extended to the treatment of class in the novel. It seems clear that the author (again, perhaps, from a modern perspective) is endorsing Martha's frustration with the idea that poor people should only be entitled to decent housing if they lead morally upright lives (while the rich can be as debauched as they please). But the subtext of the novel seems to suggest that the author is rather more on the side of the rich. Luke and Martha may be examples of upward social mobility but they are both reliant on the patronage of rich friends. The focus of the book is on characters who have the money and leisure to travel, to collect, and the education to speculate. Most of the working class characters are decorative (the superstitious villagers, the legless beggar, the stabbed clerk). There is a distinctly feudal feel to the structure of society.

The indications in the text tell us that the bulk of the story is set in 1892.

Selected quotes:

There are some wonderful metaphors:

"He wants to feel the wind's edge strop itself sharp on his skin" (New Year's Eve)
"Memory unfurled like smoke from a blown candle" (January 1)
"He took his Sunday duties as seriously as if he'd taken instruction at the burning bush." (March 2)

Other great quotes:

“He thinks he sees - is certain he sees - the slow movement of something vast, hunched, grimly covered over with rough and lapping scales; then it is gone.” (New Year’s Eve)
“What was built on deceit, however kindly done, would not withstand the first blow.” (Jan 3)
“Martha turned the pages of a magazine, and watched Francis silently threading feathers from gulls and crows through the weave of Spencer's coat until he looked like an angel dismayed by its fall.” (March 1)
“She had no hymn book but the fury of folk songs setting English suffering to English melody.” (March 1)
"Sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realising it and all the earth's a graveyard." (March 1)
"A diamond which broke the light and threw it against the wall." (March 2)
“But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they'll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing ... and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand?” (March 2)
“The wings, Cora conceded, laughing. were a little sinister, looking as if a bat had mated forcibly with a sparrow.” (March 3)
“He reserves the blood from his Sunday chicken and goes out that night to paint the lintel of every door in Aldwinter, that God's judgment might pass over them. There's a downpour before sunrise and no one's any the wiser.” (May 1)
“He discovers Parliament’s habit of making policies benevolently enough, then covering its eyes and shaking hands with industry.” (May 1)
“‘Sin?” said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.” (May 2)
“Always a clever child, with a habit of reading her father's library with particular attention to books placed furthest out of reach.” (May 3)
“Is a dreadful liar bad at lying, or good at it?” (May 4)
“I always thought that was the great benefit of being religious: get the guilt over and done with, and move on to another sin.” (May 5)
“One might as well do good as do anything at all.” (June 1)
“What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. ... Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.” (August 1) Plus ca change ...
"The fear of the crowd came then to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue" (September 3) (the same metaphor is used later)
"It was simply an animal, as they all were; and was dead, as they all would be." (September 3)
"To live at all is to be bruised." (September 3)
"If you want to insist on your faith you ought at least to concede it's a strange business and very little to do with well-ironed cassocks and the order of service." (September 5)
“If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.” (September 6)
"There's enthusiasm in Parliament, but what counts for enthusiasm in the Commons would look very like laziness elsewhere." (September 10)
“The downspin of a sycamore key.” (November 1)

Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Award and winner of both the 2016 Waterstones Book of the Year and the 2017 Fiction Book of the Year in the British Book Awards.

December 2018 & January 2024; 417 pages