Book Review - Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Published by: Custom House
Publication Date: May 27th, 2016
Format: Kindle, 433 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
The death of Cora Seaborne's abusive husband means she can finally cast aside the shackles of the life she was forced into. She can indulge her desire to be the next Mary Anning. Taking her household, which consists of her companion Martha and her disturbed son Francis, to Colchester, she spends her days mucking about the countryside wearing men's boots and unflattering clothing looking for ammonites. Once she even tangled with a man trying to rescue a sheep from the muck. But soon Colchester is abuzz with rumors of the Essex Serpent. It's hunting the estuaries and killing children and pets. Cora doesn't believe in something so fanciful, but she does wonder, could a creature from long ago have survived in an out of the way place to be discovered in the present day? Science doesn't deny it is possible and her hero, Mary Anning, often hoped to make such a discovery. Cora longs to have her name next to such a find in a museum and therefore jumps at the opportunity that fate hands her. Through mutual friends she is introduced to the Ransomes who live in Aldwinter. As fate would have it the Reverend Will Ransome is the man she helped to rescue the sheep. Despite such an inauspicious beginning the two become fast friends. Cora is fascinated by a pew in his church which is carved to represent the serpent, while Will is incensed by his parishioners obsession with fairy tales and threatens to destroy the pew. They argue over everything, from religion to science, it is a meeting of true minds. Everyone comments on their closeness, Cora even moves to Aldwinter. Yet Will's wife Stella doesn't seem to mind, and Martha, well Martha has more important things to worry about. But then there's an incident at the school. Cora begs her friend, Doctor Luke Garrett, to come down and investigate the medical reason behind the hysteria. This causes a breach between Cora and Will. A breach that will be healed and ruptured on one fateful night. So while they might not survive, the question remains, does the serpent?
The Essex Serpent is one of those books that seems to polarize people, and it has since it's publication. You either love it or you hate it and I decided to take the wisest approach and just avoid it. But then I bought Sarah Perry's Melmoth and a lot of reviews started referring to it as a companion piece to The Essex Serpent, which I took to mean I should read The Essex Serpent... Which went from being a "never " to a "some day" to a "now" event rather quickly because of the Tom Hiddleston starring adaptation that is filming. Will Ransome is a role Hiddles is born to play in my mind. But that adaptation is the future, and this is now, and this is about the book. The Essex Serpent is beautifully and lushly written yet is rather light on plot. It fits more into the style of Gothic literature and romance from the 19th century than what we necessarily think of as Gothic now. The book is all about duality as epitomized by the word "cleave," to cling and to separate all at once. The serpent is both a supernatural entity and a rather large fish. Stella is both dying and luminous. The world runs on both religion and science. Cora and Will's romance is both everything and nothing. Two states of being happening simultaneously. This recurs over and over again, reality versus fallacy. And at one point, the hysteria of Aldwinter with regards to the serpent reaches such a fever pitch that the young schoolgirls act out in a way that would best be described as Salem in 1692. And the fact that the doctor swings in and brings up ergot poisoning made my dorky history heart soar! Because it could very well be hysteria OR ergot OR none of the above. The problem is that the book reaches this fever pitch just before the summer solstice and then it just peters out. Cora had been the driving force of the book and she sees what she has done and retreats. She's barely in the rest of the book and her larger-than-life personality which carried everyone means that the other characters had to try to carry themselves, and they failed. So while the book technically ended, I like to think that in some other way it didn't and that one day the characters will find their proper endings.
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