The Essex Serpent

‘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 where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that…’ Frowning, she ran her thumb along the serpent’s spine and said, ‘I’ve never said this before, not to anyone, though I’ve meant to: but yes I’ve sold my soul, though I’m afraid it didn’t fetch too high a price. I had a 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!’
‘You think—you really think—that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?’

The Essex Serpent is a magnificent work that uses the form of the Gothic novel to explore real-world and very human concerns. It may be set in the late 19th century, but it resonates with issues just as compelling as those of the 21st. Superstition and faith versus science and fact. The nature and limits of friendship, the moral limits of medicine. Sarah Perry has said, “What most interests me about the past is not its otherness but its sameness.” One manifestation is a concern with the housing horrors of the poor in 19th century London, being squeezed by landlords, and their residences being replaced by more posh lodgings.

I wanted to portray a late nineteenth century which was in many respects ‘modern’, rather than a sort of Victoriana theme-park of pea-soupers and smelling-salts. By the 1890s you could travel by Tube and walk along an Embankment lit by electric lights, you could have a tooth pulled under anaesthesia, join a union, read the Times, buy frozen lamb shipped over from New Zealand, and so on. I suppose the obverse of saying ‘they were rather like us’ is to say ‘and we are rather like them’, and I do fear that we are regressing to a decidedly Victorian state when it comes to housing, and a tendency to think of those who live in poverty as in some way deserving it due to a lack of virtue rather than mere ill fortune.

Cora Seaborne, lately and happily relieved of her unloving, but controlling husband, by virtue of a fatal illness, is no one’s idea of a damsel in distress. Quite the opposite. She has a passion for learning and exploration. 1893, in the final decade of Victoria’s reign, was an exciting time. The World Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago. Wall Street suffered another stock crash. Women voted for the first time in a national election in New Zealand. Cora is eager to be a part of this new age of scientific growth. Shedding her London home, (At Euston Square and Paddington the Underground stations received their passengers, who poured in like so much raw material going down to be milled and processed and turned out of molds.) and indulging her growing interest in paleobiology, Cora, along with her on-the-spectrum son, Francis, and his nanny, Cora’s friend Martha, heads to Colchester, in Essex. (“They’re finding fossils on the coast…Cora will be happy as a schoolboy there, up to her knees in mud.”).

Strange News out of Essex – a woodwork from the 1669 pamphlet

It is while on a random explore in the rain, and considering her oneness with nature,

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance—not quite animal, but not merely earth; where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself a part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

that she first meets Pastor Will Ransome. It definitely counts as meet cute when they, neither knowing who the other is, team up to retrieve an animal that had gotten stuck in the considerable mud.

The pastor and the naturalist will form a beautiful bond as they engage in a dialectic of faith, reason and respectful consideration, and sometimes hostile confrontation. The core of faith in tension with science is central. Rumors of a serpent have been making rounds, a return of a creature last reported in the 17th century. Many of the locals indulge in superstition as fear spreads. Will is determined to put an end to such notions, but the naturalist, Cora, is hoping it might be a remnant of what had been thought a lost species, a plesiosaur perhaps, bringing to her scientific approach a considerable store of faith in the possible. Perry plays these tensions like Itzhak Perlman on a Stradivarius.

Sarah Perry – from The Guardian

The tension between faith and science is far from the only buzzing string here. The connection Cora and Will make leads to battles of both the expected and surprising sorts, and while the core of their words is beyond reproach, their growing affection for each other, excitement at intellectual challenge, but also excitement at the very presence of the other, makes for more than a bit of discomfort. While Cora is happily widowed, Pastor Will remains smitten with his beautiful, both in body and spirit, wife, Stella, a star who would sparkle in any firmament. Of course, lustrous though she may be, Stella is not exactly in the best of health. Can Cora and Will’s friendship sustain, or will it transform into something else?

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his; children of the earth and lost in wonder.

As for that beastie, the notion for the story was a happy accident.

It was Sarah Perry’s husband who told her, on a car journey through Essex, having spotted a sign to the village of Henham, about the legend of a serpent. Perry felt her scalp tighten, the better to grasp the idea and keep it safe inside her head – a feeling she has become used to when she thinks of something she knows will make a great book. “Immediately, I thought if that beast came back in the Victorian era, post-Darwin, when there was a trend for natural history and people were fossil-collecting, people would have a very different response from those in the 17th century, who had seen this beast.”– from The Guardian interview

The structure of the core conflict came to Perry in a flash… between myth and superstition and faith and reason and science and all of those clashing over this one potential beast. But how best to orchestrate it?

The Gothic form offered a welcome approach. There are familiar elements, sometimes reimagined. The typical spooky castle finds an outlet in a more natural setting, a spot where civilization tapers off and the natural (or supernatural?) picks up, a marshland, abutting the Blackwater River, near an estuary, the fittingly named World’s End. Darkness abounds there, as do barely visible things and events that offer rich fodder for active imaginations. In the darkness he grows afraid. There’s something there, he feels it, biding its time—implacable, monstrous, born in water, always with an eye cocked in his direction… An atmosphere of mystery pervades. Just what the hell is going on? An ancient and obscure prophecy portends unpleasantness ahead. Well, folks thereabouts are persuaded that the promise of the serpent’s return was being fulfilled. Omens, portents, visions. So many. Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable events. Yep, and some pretty outstanding natural ones as well. High, even overwrought emotion. Fuh shoo-uh. Science-minded, free-at-last widow meets studly, passionate, intellectually curious cleric. And plenty of raised voices beside. But the high emotional level also extends to being dazzled by beauty. Women in distress. Well, not the usual sort. Stella is particularly unwell, but seems less stressed than enthralled by it. Cora is a modern woman, so no poor-weak-thing act being performed. There is plenty of the vocabulary of the gothic. For example, chapter one begins One o’clock on a dreary day…

There is also the romantic element in the gothic approach. The Will-Cora connection has already been mentioned. There are a few other connections of this sort that are addressed. But the overwhelming connection throughout the book is of friendship, even if the lines between where friendship leaves off and another kind of relationship picks up can be a bit murky, and even if love is the beating heart of all sorts of friendships.

What I absolutely didn’t want to do was to write a book about two people who madly fancy each other and at the end of the book they fall in love and they get married. That’s so tiresome and life is so much more rich and complex and complicated than that. I wanted to write about a relationship that is intimate and tender and exciting and even erotic but not a conventional ‘boy-meets-girl and they’re soulmates and they live happy ever after’ story.

Perry aimed to write about as many different kinds of friendship love as I could find. Ones which blur the boundaries between romantic love and friendship, seeing sexual desire as something cathartic and benevolent, even when it’s not connected to any kind of romantic attachment. I still maintain that Cora and Will are basically friends but that their friendship is capacious and different and subject to change – as human relationships are.” – from the Waterstones interview

There are external elements throughout the book that buttress both nature and the sublime. Perry has the eye of a naturalist. She makes considerable and stunning use of this talent to breathe life into her landscapes.

When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty—birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloths, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path.

There are plenty more bits of this here. Stella adds a particularly ethereal appreciation for the color blue, both in its natural state and as manufactured. Blue, in fact, tints the novel for a considerable swath in a way that is both beautiful and alarming. Cora’s son, Francis, has an interest in the natural world as well, and offers some insights, although he lacks the experience to be able to interpret what he observes.

There is a rich supply of secondary characters, some of whom receive starring role treatment. They serve to illuminate issues of the day. One is a doctor on the cutting edge of his profession, another a memorable local, who will mar your dreams with visions of unspeakable fence decorations and resident earwigs. Martha’s social activism highlights the housing issues in London, but also a sexual freedom that addresses the constraints of Victorian mores.

Perry is not a satirist, but she does offer a particularly delicious line from one of her supporting cast, someone who dismisses notions of a returned monster: I’m quite religious, you know: no patience for the supernatural.

As for gripes, blissfully few. The vanishing of one young lass lacked a persuasive rationale, I thought. There was one scene late in the book that I found a bit off-putting, but it would be too spoilerish to note it here. Neither of these imperiled for me the overall joy I experienced reading this book.

For me the notion of the bliss of the beautiful that permeates TES can be summed up in a line from Cora.

’It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’

A wondrous read, satisfying to both heart and mind, The Essex Serpent is a spectacular achievement, a masterpiece by a gifted writer at the peak of her power.

Review posted – 3/24/17

Publication
—–May 27, 2016 – the original hardcover, in the UK
—–June 6, 2017 – by Custom House, in the USA
—–April 24, 2018 – trade paper

November 15, 2017 – The Essex Serpent is named one of the top fifty notable works of fiction of the year by The Washington Post

November 22, 2017 – The Essex Serpent is named one of its The New York Times

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s

Interviews
—–The Guardian –
—–FiveBooks.com –
—–Waterstones –

The Essex Serpent
——British Library –

The Gothic Novel
—–A fabulous lesson – This is where I got the list of Gothic novel characteristics I used for that part of the review –
—–A wonderful video from Study.com –

FWIW
—–In classical mythology, Cora–or Kore– was another name of Persephone, goddess of fertility and the underworld. – from nameberry.com is a brilliant employment that uses the form of the Gothic novel to explore real-world and very human concerns. It may be set in the late nineteenth hundred, but it resonates with issues just adenine compel as those of the 21st. superstition and faith versus skill and fact. The nature and limits of friendship, the moral limits of medicine. Sarah Perry has said, “ What most interests me about the past is not its otherness but its sameness. ” One manifestation is a business with the house horrors of the poor in 19th century London, being squeezed by landlords, and their residences being replaced by more classy lodgings.Cora Seaborne, recently and happily relieved of her unloving, but controlling conserve, by merit of a fateful illness, is no one ’ second mind of a damsel in distress. Quite the antonym. She has a heat for learning and exploration. 1893, in the final decade of Victoria ’ randomness reign, was an stimulate prison term. The World Columbian Exhibition opened in Chicago. Wall Street suffered another stock crash. Women voted for the beginning fourth dimension in a national election in New Zealand. Cora is eager to be a character of this new senesce of scientific growth. Shedding her London home, ( ) and indulging her growing interest in paleobiology, Cora, along with her on-the-spectrum son, Francis, and his nanny, Cora ’ s ally Martha, heads to Colchester, in Essex. ( ) .- a carpentry from the 1669 pamphletIt is while on a random explore in the rain, and considering her oneness with nature, that she first meets Pastor Will Ransome. It decidedly counts as fitting cute when they, neither knowing who the other is, team up to retrieve an animal that had gotten stuck in the considerable mud.The pastor and the naturalist will form a beautiful chemical bond as they engage in a dialectic of faith, reason and respectful consideration, and sometimes hostile confrontation. The core of religion in tension with skill is central. Rumors of a serpent have been making rounds, a return of a animal last reported in the seventeenth hundred. Many of the locals indulge in superstition as fear spreads. Will is determined to put an end to such notions, but the naturalist, Cora, is hoping it might be a end of what had been thought a helpless species, a plesiosaur possibly, bringing to her scientific approach a considerable storehouse of religion in the possible. Perry plays these tensions like Itzhak Perlman on a Stradivarius.- from The GuardianThe tension between religion and skill is army for the liberation of rwanda from the merely buzz string here. The connection Cora and Will make leads to battles of both the expected and surprising sorts, and while the core of their words is beyond reproach, their growing affection for each other, excitation at cerebral challenge, but besides exhilaration at the identical presence of the other, makes for more than a sting of discomfort. While Cora is happily widowed, Pastor Will remains smite with his beautiful, both in body and heart, wife, Stella, a asterisk who would sparkle in any celestial sphere. Of course, bright though she may be, Stella is not precisely in the best of health. Can Cora and Will ’ s friendship prolong, or will it transform into something else ? As for that beastie, the notion for the report was a happy accident.The structure of the core conflict came to Perry in a flash…. But how best to orchestrate it ? The Gothic phase offered a welcome approach. There are companion elements, sometimes reimagined. The typicalfinds an mercantile establishment in a more natural arrange, a topographic point where refinement tapers off and the natural ( or supernatural ? ) picks up, a marsh, abutting the Blackwater River, near an estuary, the appropriately named World ’ s End. Darkness abounds there, as do scantily visible things and events that offer rich fodder for active voice imaginations.Anpervades. Just what the sin is going on ? Anportends unpleasantness ahead. Well, folks thereabouts are persuaded that the promise of the serpent ’ s return was being fulfilled.So many.. Yep, and some pretty outstanding natural ones as well.. Fuh shoo-uh. Science-minded, free-at-last widow meets studly, passionate, intellectually curious cleric. And plenty of raise voices beside. But the high emotional tied besides extends to being dazzled by beauty.. Well, not the usual sort. Stella is peculiarly ailing, but seems less stressed than enthralled by it. Cora is a mod womanhood, so no poor-weak-thing dissemble being performed. There is batch of the. For example, chapter one beginsThere is besides the romantic element in the medieval set about. The Will-Cora connection has already been mentioned. There are a few other connections of this sort that are addressed. But the submerge connection throughout the koran is of friendship, even if the lines between where friendship leaves off and another kind of relationship picks up can be a bit cloudy, and even if sexual love is the beating heart of all sorts of friendships.There are external elements throughout the ledger that buttress both nature and the sublime. Perry has the eye of a naturalist. She makes considerable and stun use of this endowment to breathe life into her landscapes.There are batch more bits of this hera. Stella adds a peculiarly aeriform taste for the color blue, both in its natural state of matter and as fabricate. Blue, in fact, tints the novel for a considerable swath in a means that is both beautiful and alarming. Cora ’ s son, Francis, has an interest in the natural global as well, and offers some insights, although he lacks the have to be able to interpret what he observes.There is a ample provide of secondary characters, some of whom receive starring character treatment. They serve to illuminate issues of the day. One is a doctor on the cutting edge of his profession, another a memorable local, who will mar your dreams with visions of ineffable fence decorations and nonmigratory earwigs. Martha ’ s social activism highlights the house issues in London, but besides a sexual exemption that addresses the constraints of victorian mores.Perry is not a satirist, but she does offer a particularly delectable line from one of her supporting cast, person who dismisses notions of a come back freak : As for gripes, blissfully few. The fly of one new lass lacked a persuasive rationale, I thought. There was one scene late in the record that I found a moment off-putting, but it would be besides spoilerish to note it here. Neither of these imperiled for me the overall joy I experienced reading this book.For me the notion of the bliss of the beautiful that permeates TES can be summed up in a line from Cora.A wonderfully read, satisfying to both heart and judgment, is a spectacular accomplishment, a masterpiece by a give writer at the flower of her power.Review posted – 3/24/17Publication — — -May 27, 2016 – the original hardbacked, in the UK — — -June 6, 2017 – by Custom House, in the USA — — -April 24, 2018 – trade paperNovember 15, 2017 -is named one of the acme fifty luminary works of fiction of the year byNovember 22, 2017 -is named one of its 100 celebrated Books of the year by=============================Links to the writer ’ sulfur personal and Twitter pages. You should know that as of the date of this mail, her personal locate was hush under construction.Interviews — — -The defender – The Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry : ‘ Kids at school found me strange. I didn ’ triiodothyronine mind ’ – interview by Emine Saner — — -FiveBooks.com – sarah Perry recommends the best medieval Fiction – consultation by Beatrice Wilford – December 1, 2016 — — -Waterstones – The Book Perry Was Meant to Write – by Sally Campbell – December 10, 2016The Essex Serpent — — — british Library – On the trail of the Essex Serpent – Perry describes her encounter with the original 1669 booklet that inspired the novelThe Gothic Novel — — -A fabulous moral – This is where I got the list of Gothic novel characteristics I used for that part of the review – Elements of the Gothic Novel — — -A fantastic video recording from Study.com – medieval Novels : Characteristics & Examples – it is circumscribed, though. One must be a subscriber to see it all. distillery, worth a look.FWIW — — -In authoritative mythology, Cora — or Kore — was another name of Persephone, goddess of richness and the underworld. – from nameberry.com