(June 2017)
A drily amusing (and on occasion
laugh-out-loud funny) historical novel from the author of After Me Comes the Flood. The
Essex Serpent has been receiving plaudits left, right, and centre, and it’s
certainly very readable (that most ambiguous word of praise); it’s a little
over 400 pages and I got through it in a weekend. It’s not, on the surface, a hugely
challenging book. Engaging, yes. Thoughtful, certainly. Erudite, even, but you
don’t emerge at the end feeling as if you’ve been put through the wringer,
emotionally or intellectually. This is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing
at all.
In amongst all the other things you could
like about this book (and which I’ll cordially invite you to Google), what I’m
interested in here is how it deals with that oft-considered notion of ‘conflict’.
While the people we meet certainly don’t have everything go their own ways, it’s
clear that Perry has little time for Vonnegut’s diktat that authors should make
awful things happen to their characters. It’s not bad advice in and of itself,
but the problem (as so ever) is when it’s applied ineptly or lazily: shitty
things happening to luckless people as a transparent device for keeping the
plot moving. The conflict here is less to do with the characters’ actions than
their emotions, and, more interestingly, the setting and mode of the book
itself.
The setting is London and the Essex coast
during the 1890s. The mode is surprisingly gothic. The main story concerns Cora
Seabourne, a young, recently widowed woman emerging from the death of her
abusive husband as a wholehearted devotee of Charles Darwin and Mary Anning.
Fleeing the unhappy environs of London, she sets up her household in Colchester
and is introduced to the Ransomes. William is a rector, tending to his parish
in the coastal village of Aldwinter, and living in the rectory with his three
children and wife (who has an ominously stubborn cough that just won’t shift).
Cora and William’s unlikely friendship is the core of the book, and this is
what gives us the conflict, as they play off each other in volatile but affectionate
arguments about the nature of god, science, and progress. In a neat little
twist, Perry avoids these two being bald proxies for a simplistic “Rationality
vs Belief” debate by introducing the eponymous Serpent, a local legend that the
villagers believe has resurrected and cursed them, and while William dismisses
it of hand, Cora finds herself not-so-secretly longing to confirm the rumour’s
truth.
There is, of course, a certain amount of
sexual tension between the two main protagonists (including, memorably, a
gentle allusion to Will angrily wanking in a field), but while a consummation
of sorts is clearly inevitable, their relationship never comes across as
contrived. Consider their introduction, which has all the ingredients of a
textbook meet cute: She helps him rescue a sheep from a bog, leaving them both
covered in mud and unrecognisable. When they are later more officially
introduced, Will recognizes Cora quickly, but rather than string the knowledge
imbalance out to create some cheap tension, Perry has Cora click to Will’s
almost immediately as well, thus setting the tone for the rest of their
relationship as one between relative equals.
I enjoyed this book much, much more than I
expected to, given how deliberately odd its precursor was. The only real
downside was with one of the subplots, in which another acquaintance of Cora’s
sparks a campaign focusing hosing conditions for the working poor in London. A
supporting character is an MP (a former colleague of Cora’s late husband), who,
despite being a relative charming, clubbable fellow, seriously dallies with
social Darwinism: The poor deserve to be poor. They are, in fact, genetically
predestined to be poor, and could and should never hope for better. This story
strand is fine in and of itself, but reading it in the immediate aftermath of
the Grenfell Tower fire inescapably impacted upon the experience, not least the
book’s consideration of humanity’s supposed enlightenment and progress. It is
not a one-way street at all.
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