We haven’t changed so much since Victorian times. They chased after mysteries, fell in love inappropriately, refused to be pigeon-holed, got passionate about causes, died bright-eyed of lingering illnesses, and tried to make the world a better place for the less fortunate. The Essex Serpent is very much a character story with a perfect selection of characters: each distinct, with their own needs and foibles, each with their own way of engaging with the others. If that sounds a bit trite it absolutely is not: there is no feeling of a manufactured band here, this is not one of those dreadful ‘found families’ stories. They just meld together all over the place and it’s magic.
Our main narrator is Cora, who escapes a nasty marriage when her husband dies. We don’t dwell on the marriage, but a remembered comment from the man is telling: ‘I’ll fill your wounds with gold, Michael had said, and pulled one by one the hairs from the nape of her neck, leaving a bald place there the size of a penny.‘
The husband’s doctor falls in love with her. Cora doesn’t have much understanding of love but she finds him clever and attentive and that is tremendously attractive. She calls him her Imp, which you’d think should be a sign that this is an unrequited love, but the doctor is pretty full of himself and thinks he is in with a chance. He has a sycophantic fellow doctor friend who he treats badly; this friend is dead keen on Cora’s companion, Martha. Martha is a slow burn. It takes a while to realise that this Victorian ladies’ companion has a power all of her own. She loves Cora but her passions are political. If she had been born in the current era… but no, it is late 1800s and women need to use powerful men to move ahead. Another compelling figure if you’re looking for love interest (oh, who isn’t?) is the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, whose wife is dying of hot, bright consumption. It’s all very gothic. But wait, there’s more.
Cora, like many Victorians, is interested in paleontology and goes hunting for a ichthyosaur that may still be living on the Essex coast. God, I love this age. After centuries of Europeans being tied to the bible, suddenly all belief is open to dispute. Sea serpents, punishments, God – how much do you really believe, deep down? Does God deliver punishments to a village that doesn’t know its sin, and was the world really created in six days? What about these old bones in the cliff, then? The plot of the story follows the search for a sea monster that is causing all sorts of trouble to a local community in Essex as Victorian monsters have a wont to. It has leathery wings and a sharp beak and drowns fishermen, makes the crops fail, gives the children a laughing hysteria and so on.
Mutual friends introduce the recently widowed Cora to the handsome rector, William. She challenges him and he cannot resist her (but he must, of course, as he has a wife and a flock to tend). His wife with consumptive madness surrounds herself with blue things and Cora’s (possibly autistic) son finds a soul mate in Stella and brings her blue sea glass and blue striped stones. Children hang horse shoes in Traitor’s Oak to keep the serpent away and all the peripheral characters ebb and flow on this small stretch of coast.
Although Cora is our main narrator we jump from head to head to see other views of the world, all that wonderful confused morality and superstition and fierce but outdated beliefs that are beginning to come unstuck. And occasionally we get a recap of who is where: ‘Spencer thinks of his family home in Suffolk, where recently his mother discovered another room they’d never known was there, and is nauseated. Over at World’s End Cracknell turns a wary eye on the estuary. He keeps his fences thickly hung with stripped moles, and a candle burning in the window.‘ ‘At about the time Luke was choosing his own gallows from among the Essex oaks, Banks sat beside a fire high up the shingle, near the black bones of Leviathan.’
There are some brilliant descriptions in this book: I marked up many passages to read aloud. Some very funny, like this description of an otherwise likeable character who has twisted Darwinism to fit into the world as he sees it:
Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk?
Poor old Bethnal Green! And then, one of my favourite things, a perfect sentence. I’m going to save this as an example when anyone wants to know the difference between ‘pop fiction’ and ‘literature’. Here the rector doesn’t just go for a walk when he can’t sleep.
He’d taken it into his head to walk the River Colne, setting out in that mean time before dawn when even the lightest burden is intolerable and the prospect of sunrise laughably remote.
Loved this book.
Cristina Sanders' blog 