book review: the essex serpent

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Serpent's Tail, 416 pp.
Published May 27, 2016

Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890's, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.

They are Cora Seaborne and Will Ransome. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. But Will sees his parishioners' agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.

Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.

This beautifully written novel flourishes in the grey areas of our lives. Its truth lies somewhere between faith and fact, perception and intention. Every character and their relationships with the others grows in a wondrously messy fashion; for as much as they all become transfixed, in one way or another, with the mythical serpent, rumors of the creature serve more as fuel for an exploration of the forms love can take and how some may even prove toxic when indulged.

Perry has made her dislike of the term "strong female character" known, so I'll refrain from using it to describe Cora Seaborne. Cora is, however, a strongly written character. In some ways she eschews the demands of Victorian society on a woman of her station: after her husband's death she casts off her black clothes after the funeral, mucks about after fossils wearing unseemly boots and frumpy clothes, and expresses very little interest in polite entertainments of the time. Yet she also relies on the comfort and shelter bestowed on her by her status as a financially secure widow. She does not always think of others—at least as considerately as she could—and struggles mightily with the emotional duties of raising her son, leaving most of his care to her maid. There are moments in her friendship with the vicar Will Ransome where she demonstrates excessive tact and restraint; there are others where she behaves with incorrigible selfishness.

Cora might understandably frustrate some readers. She makes human choices and suffers human mistakes, rather than following the smooth path a writer is capable of laying out for her protagonist. Yet it's her wonderfully flawed and deeply functional relationship with Will that encapsulates the clashes drawn out by the Essex Serpent's rumored reemergence.

There's a sly wit at work, as well. More than once I found myself retracing sentences or passages not because I missed the main backbone of the action, but thanks to the constant subtext and innuendo flowing beneath what's written on the page. At the risk of painting myself as unforgivably American, I found an unmistakable British sensibility running through the very heart of every scene. This applies so far beyond the characters themselves. Droll observations cut to the quick yet cauterize at the same time, often purposefully undermining the polite surface of conversations. Class and gender stereotypes inform the establishment of much of the plot, while their subversion drives it forward. The Essex Serpent is so thoroughly grounded in its specific time and place that to tease out individual details is to encourage the entire structure to crumble.

While the rumor of a sea serpent terrorizing a small town may draw the eye of fantasy readers, there are no grand supernatural elements at play. Strong whiffs of a gothic sensibility do drift across the page: blurry shapes in an early morning fog, indistinct forms offshore, and the seeping prevalence of superstition that transforms oddities into horrors. As hysteria builds among the townspeople, even the most credulous reader may find herself wondering if a ravenous creature really is lurking in the brackish water. Through strong(ly written) characters and unshakable atmosphere, Perry manipulates her readers into abandoning—or at least questioning—their senses and confronting their own moral strictures.

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