I must confess that I was convinced I would like The Essex Serpent even before I started reading it. What I had heard about the novel—its context of the Victorian Zeitgeist, its gothic air, the city-country dichotomy it explores, its free-thinking women, in addition to the Morris design on the book’s cover—was enough to persuade me that this one would be right up my street. Still, I was surprised when I entered its pages.
The narrative is like the emerald-green, speckled serpent of the cover that coils around you slowly and arrests you with a thousand flickering images in its eyes, to consume you and then to spit you back to reality, which looks bleached after the colours you have tasted. To find your grip once the enchantment is over, you have to go back to the book’s opening sentence: “One o’clock on a dreary day and the time ball
dropped at the Greenwich Observatory.” It is London, 1893.
The haunting
Soon we meet the exceptional Cora Seaborne, who embodies all the contradictions of the novel. She is rich and London-bred, and yet would roam around in mannish boots and jackets in the salt marshes of the Essex countryside; tall and large, with piercing grey eyes, she can seem like a waif weathering life’s misfortunes; described by her friend as having a ‘masculine intelligence’, Cora has argued god out of existence after reading Darwin, and yet looks for a design in the universe, if not to prove the workings of a divine mind then to be confirmed about steady evolutionary progress.
She is newly widowed: having been delivered by providence from the clutches of an abusive husband, she embraces liberty like a child allowed to run free for the first time.
Her young son, Francis, gathers feathers and pebbles as talismans of a faith private to him, in an obsessive way that would have put him somewhere on the autism spectrum today. But doesn’t his mother have a passion for geological specimens too?
With Francis and his nanny turned Cora’s closest companion, Martha (the two women curl up together on hag-ridden nights), Cora ventures out to Aldwinter in Essex on a leisurely hunt for bird fossils, to celebrate her new-found freedom.
And in Aldwinter, a fossil has been breathed back to life: a serpent with leathery wings and a snapping beak from 1669 has supposedly returned to haunt the villagers. The serpent slithers into the cavernous space of everyone’s worst fears, which can be an object of desire or repulsion or both.
The thought of the serpent evokes hysteria among adolescent girls, rakes up guilt in adults, and allows Cora and the rector of Aldwinter parish, William Ransome, to engage in heated debates about the possibility of its existence.
Thus the two fall in love: The Essex Serpent is a novel of ideas, in the line of the novels of A.S. Byatt or Iris Murdoch. Cora and William talk endlessly — they touch each other with words because their bodies are still encased in Victorian morality (William is much married, with a pretty, ‘feminine’ wife, and a brood of children).
But the conversation, punctuated with Perry’s intoxicating descriptions of nature, is as heady as a beaker full of the warm South. “They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone… ‘I like you better on paper,’ says Cora”.
Perry is something like a thieving magpie who makes new art out of the bits and pieces she takes out of other works; but she is no thief, for she acknowledges each of the works that has contributed to this novel. This makes The Essex Serpent stylishly ‘meta’ without being affectedly so.
Falling hairpins
There is much of A.S. Byatt, especially of Possession and The Children’s Book, in the lovingly described quotidian objects, like Cora’s posh black scarf on which birds are stitched, or the blue silk cushion, which seem as solid as real; of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in the play with feminism, socialism (Martha is a stubborn socialist trying improve the living conditions of poor tenants in the tenements of London), Marxism (there is a little bit of Eleanor Marx, Marx’s daughter, in Cora, in the way she keeps dropping her hairpins all over the place: the real-life Eleanor also makes a brief appearance in the novel) and the 19thcentury social realist novel.
Going further back, there is Middlemarch, in the comradeship of Cora and William that has the flavour of the ‘intellectual love’ of Dorothea and Will Ladislaw.
Given all these influences, the novel could have been predictable. But Perry makes things look both familiar and strange. The book’s fascinating contrariness can be seen to be in tune with the spirit of the Victorian Age and of Cora, who contradicts herself at every turn. “I am torn and I am mended — I want everything and need nothing…” writes Cora in the letter which concludes the novel.