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Summary
Summary
An NPR and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2017, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction. Winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year, selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year, and a Costa Book Award Finalist
"A novel of almost insolent ambition--lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it's part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home." -New York Times
"An irresistible new novel...the most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice...By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature 'from the illuminated margins of a manuscript': friendship." -Washington Post
"Richly enjoyable... Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply... The Essex Serpent is a wonderfully satisfying novel. Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that." -Wall Street Journal
An exquisitely talented young British author makes her American debut with this rapturously acclaimed historical novel, set in late nineteenth-century England, about an intellectually minded young widow, a pious vicar, and a rumored mythical serpent that explores questions about science and religion, skepticism, and faith, independence and love.
When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at nineteen, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend.
While admiring the sites, Cora learns of an intriguing rumor that has arisen further up the estuary, of a fearsome creature said to roam the marshes claiming human lives. After nearly 300 years, the mythical Essex Serpent is said to have returned, taking the life of a young man on New Year's Eve. A keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, Cora is immediately enthralled, and certain that what the local people think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. Eager to investigate, she is introduced to local vicar William Ransome. Will, too, is suspicious of the rumors. But unlike Cora, this man of faith is convinced the rumors are caused by moral panic, a flight from true belief.
These seeming opposites who agree on nothing soon find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart--an intense relationship that will change both of their lives in ways entirely unexpected.
Hailed by Sarah Waters as "a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author," The Essex Serpent is "irresistible . . . you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I've read in years" (Daily Telegraph).
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Perry's (After Me Comes the Flood) excellent second novel, set in the Victorian era, recent widow Cora Seaborne leaves London with her 11-year-old son, Francis, and loyal companion, Martha, and goes to Colchester, where a legendary, fearsome creature called the Essex Serpent has been sighted. Scholarly Cora, who is more interested in the study of nature than in womanly matters of dress, tramps about in a man's tweed coat, determined to find proof of this creature's existence. Through friends, she is introduced to William Ransome, the local reverend; his devoted wife, Stella; and their three children. Cora looks for a scientific rationale for the Essex Serpent, while Ransome dismisses it as superstition. This puts them at odds with one another, but, strangely, also acts as a powerful source of attraction between them. When Cora is visited by her late husband's physician, Luke Garrett, who carries a not-so-secret torch for her, a love triangle of sorts is formed. In the end, a fatal illness, a knife-wielding maniac, and a fated union with the Essex Serpent will dictate the ultimate happiness of these characters. Like John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, whose Lyme Regis setting gets a shout-out here, this is another period literary pastiche with a contemporary overlay. Cora makes for a fiercely independent heroine around whom all the other characters orbit. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
An Essex village is terrorised by a winged leviathan in a gothic Victorian tale crammed with incident, character and plot In Sarah Perry's second novel, 1890s London is mad about the sciences, especially palaeontology. Every six months someone publishes a paper "setting out ways and places extinct animals might live on", while smart women collect ammonites or wear necklaces of fossil teeth set in silver. New widow Cora Seagrave is patently relieved by the death of her unpleasant husband, a civil servant with "twice the power of a politician and none of the responsibility"; accompanied by her socialist companion Martha and her autistic son Francis, she leaves the capital for the wilds of Essex. There, "never sure of the difference between thinking and believing", she hears of the Essex Serpent, a folktale apparently come to life and terrorising the Blackwater estuary; and meets its spiritual adversary, the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, with whom she is soon entangled in a relationship of voluble opposition and unspoken attraction. Perry's excellent debut, After Me Comes the Flood, was short and strange, narrated out of a sensibility difficult to define or place, from a distance that seemed both alienated and intimate. Scenes shifted filmily across one another, characters slipped in and out of view, the effect being of something not fully told, yet fully present; not quite visible, yet producing a troubled enchantment. The Essex Serpent, by contrast, is fully acted out. Fertile, open, vocal about its own origins and passions, crammed with incident, characters and plot, it weighs in at a sturdy 441 pages. It is a novel of ideas, though its sensibility is firmly, consciously, even a little cheekily, gothic. The dreamy delivery of the previous book becomes, in this one, outright story. Narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading, very difficult to avoid being dragged into Aldwinter's dark and sometimes darkly comic waters. Since the discovery after new year celebrations of a drowned man, "naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his eyes", the village has felt itself "under judgment". Why has the serpent -- which last terrorised the locality with its leathery wings and snapping beak in 1669 -- returned? What have the villagers done wrong? They're a simple, pagan lot, stringing up dead animals to scare it off, hanging horseshoes in the branches of a tree known as Traitor's Oak. Even the children are performing rituals, down by the water. With Cora's arrival, everything ramps up, and an outbreak of madness at the school leads to a disastrous attempt to hypnotise the rector's daughter. A winged leviathan "with eyes like a sheep", which causes men to lose their reason and never find it again: the author's glee at all this hugger-mugger is barely hidden. Perry artfully exploits her monster's symbolic potential, leaving the reader to sort the many subtexts from the good red herrings, displaying both with a collectorly enthusiasm, on equal terms. It's a trick of the light, a tale told to frighten children, a story sold to tourists; it's an upwelling of individual or collective guilt, a blatant sexual symbol hauling itself like Bram Stoker 's White Worm out of the Blackwater estuary in convulsions of Victorian anxiety. It's an Aesculapian metaphor and a cheerful pastiche of "eerie England". In some lights and on some days, according to whose point of view Perry is inhabiting at the time, it represents nothing less than the Essex landscape -- its coils being the Blackwater's moods and weathers, the skilfully depicted serpentine passage of its year. For Cora, a woman who wants more from life than choosing a skirt to wear at the Savoy, it is less a serpent than the possibility of a genuine Palaeozoic survival, a living ichthyosaur -- a taste of the surprise, the delight, the opening-out of the world promised by feminism and the death of her husband. For the rector of Aldwinter, it is a nuisance. In reducing the certainties of his parishioners, William believes, science has left them deep in explanatory failure. People need the security of religion, or they begin to invent demons. Besides, he says, geology and evolution are only today's intellectual fads; tomorrow, something else will come along, and then something else again, theory replacing theory and nothing settled. We need God, he believes, if we are to remain rational. Cora's modernity, meanwhile, confuses him further. She is rich and attractive, but dresses like a bag lady and so energetically breaks stones in search of specimens that the air around her reeks of cordite. She hasn't so much lost her faith, as willingly given it up in exchange for the freedom to think. There are "no fewer miracles," she tells him, "in the microscope than in the gospels". They already agree on this, in a way: their oppositions so obviously stem from a shared immersion in the Victorian sublime, the fall into the "miracle" of the natural world. But, of course, there is more to folie a deux than a sense of wonder, and intellectual attraction can cover a multitude of sins. Eventually they strike sparks off each other once too often, as we knew they would. The consequences ripple away to perturb their circle of friends: Luke Garrett, London's finest young surgeon, whose hands are so clever he can sew up a pericardial sac, desperately in love with Cora since page one; George Spencer, a rich man trying to approach socialism through his doomed admiration for Cora's companion; the rector's beautiful wife Stella, racked with consumption, who writes in her diary, " HE sent the serpent into Eden's beflowered garden/and he sends it now and the penance must be paid ... "; Charles and Katherine Ambrose, high-ranking conservatives with hearts of gold, who, safe and secure, will always do their generous best to pick up the pieces nearest, dearest or most familiar to them. Inadvertent emotional damage is the novel's other major theme. "What use," Francis the autistic child asks at one point, crawling out from under the table, "to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind." This volatility infects the politics of the novel: the narrative, moving restlessly between the city and the marshes, concerns itself increasingly with "the problem of London", the relationship between governance, business and poverty summed up in slum renting, slum life -- the endless, insoluble matter of how privilege can be persuaded to act outside its own interests, or even see beyond its own limits. In the tenement dwellers of Bethnal Green, Charles Ambrose -- otherwise, we are led to believe, a decent man -- sees "not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race". From this distance it seems impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perry extends her considerable generosity not just to her characters but to the whole late Victorian period, with its fears for the present and curious faith in the future; at the same time she is asking clearly, how do we do better than that? Life is an excitable medium. Every thoughtless act knocks on. How do we forgive, mend, give ourselves space to breathe, move forward? - M John Harrison.
Kirkus Review
The unlikely friendship between a canny widow and a scholarly vicar sets the stage for this sweeping 19th-century saga of competing belief systems.Widow Cora Seaborne knows she should mourn the death of her husband; instead, she finally feels free. Eschewing the advice of her friends, Cora retreats from London with her lady's maid, Martha, and strange, prescient son, Francis. The curious party decamps to muddy Essex, where Cora dons an ugly men's coat and goes tramping in the mud, looking for fossils. Soon she becomes captivated by the local rumor of a menacing presence that haunts the Blackwater estuary, a threat that locks children in their houses after dark and puts farmers on watch as the tide creeps in. Cora's fascination with the fabled Essex Serpent leads her to the Rev. William Ransome, desperate to keep his flock from descending into outright hysteria. An unlikely pair, the two develop a fast intellectual friendship, curious to many but accepted by all, including Ransome's ailing wife, Stella. Perry (After Me Comes the Flood, 2015) pulls out all the stops in her richly detailed Victorian yarn, weaving myth and local flavor with 19th-century debates about theology and evolution, medical science and social justice for the poor. Each of Perry's characters receives his or her due, from the smallest Essex urchin to the devastating Stella, who suffers from tuberculosis and obsesses over the color blue throughout her decline. There are Katherine and Charles Ambrose, a good-natured but shallow society couple; the ambitious and radical Dr. Luke Garrett and his wealthier but less-talented friend George Spencer, who longs for Martha; Martha herself, who rattles off Marx with the best of them and longs to win Cora's affection; not to mention a host of sailors, superstitious tenant farmers, and bewitched schoolgirls. The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry's prose invite close reading, as deep and strange and full of narrative magic as the Blackwater itself. Fans of Sarah Waters, A.S. Byatt, and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things should prepare to fall under Perry's spell and into her very capable hands. Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of astonishing breadth and brilliance. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Secret love and the suggestion of something unearthly moving in the Essex Blackwater drive the intricate plot of this atmospheric historical novel about Cora Seaborne, a widow visiting Colchester with her companion, ostensibly to explore the estuary for fossils. A medieval winged serpent myth still holds the inhabitants of Aldwinter in thrall, despite the best efforts of the local rector, Will Ransome; and as Perry's second novel (following After Me Comes the Flood, 2015) wends its way through mysterious disappearances, fog-laden visions, suspicion, and tragedy, it seems as if the monster is real. The vivid, often frightening imagery (the Leviathan, a shack sinking in the bog, the scrape of scales moving up the shingle) and the lush descriptions (stained glass angels had the wings of jays) create a magical background for the sensual love story between Sarah and Will. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt. Like Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton (2008), the appearance of a sea monster sheds more light on humanity than on natural history, while the sudden revelation of a creature of the deep heralds change and revelation, as in Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide (2005).--Baker, Jen Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FORCE OF NATURE, by Jane Harper. (Flatiron, $16.99.) In this thriller from the hugely popular Australian crime novelist, five colleagues set out for a hike in the bush, but only four return. Aaron Falk, a federal agent, investigates the missing hiker - a woman who was widely disliked and secretly looking into her firm's dodgy finances. He turns up a web of betrayals and secrets, and acts as the book's moral compass. FEEL FREE: Essays, by Zadie Smith. (Penguin, $18.) Ajoyful current guides these selections, which touch on everything from a philosophical consideration of Justin Bieber's appeal to the thrill of public parks in Italy. As our reviewer, Amanda Fortini, put it, "It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she's headed." ANATOMY OF A MIRACLE, by Jonathan Miles. (Hogarth, $16.) When an Army veteran who has been paralyzed from the waist down suddenly can walk again, his recovery raises a number of questions: Was it divine intervention? A medical breakthrough? And above all, why him? Miles's novel mimics a New Journalism narrative style, and our reviewer, Christopher R. Beha, called the book "a highly entertaining literary performance." DAUGHTERS OF THE WINTER QUEEN: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots, by Nancy Goldstone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Goldstone is known for her histories of royals, and this one charts the stormy life of Elizabeth Stuart. The daughter of Charles I and known as "the most charming princess of Europe," she schemed for her children in 17th-century England. The book doubles as a useful introduction to a time when Britain's relations with Europe were strained. THE ESSEX SERPENT, by Sarah Perry. (Custom House/William Morrow, $16.99.) In this romance-meets-ghost-story, it's 1893 and Cora, recently widowed, heads to the coast of England with her son. There, she finds a town racked with worry that a fearsome monster has returned. As Cora investigates the phenomenon, she is drawn to a local pastor, and their dialogues about faith and science help create a richly satisfying relationship. THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER, by Francisco Cantú. (Riverhead, $17.) To better understand immigration in the United States, Cantu joined the Border Patrol. He writes of his time with the agency, where he witnessed casual cruelty toward migrants. A later section, which tells the story of a friend who was deported, makes a meaningful contribution to literature of the border.
Library Journal Review
In good Queen Victoria's heyday (the year is never specified but would seem to be in the early 1890s), rumor has it that an earthquake has opened a fissure in leafy, bucolic, and apparently very muddy coastal Essex, through which a serpent slithers, part local bogey-beastie and part tourist attraction. Perry's (After Me Comes the Flood) large cast of characters centers on Cora Seaborne, recently widowed, who visits the town of Aldwinter, both because of her interest in fossils and to try out her newfound freedom. It turns out that her marriage had not been happy. While in Aldwinter, Cora meets married Rev. William Ransome, and they discuss faith and fossils, among other things. Almost 30 years ago, A.S. Byatt's take on the Victorian era, Possession, caught fire with readers. Lightning just might strike twice with this winner of British retailer Waterstone's 2016 Book of the Year. -VERDICT Exercise caution approaching this literary garden pavilion, floored with mud, glorious mud, and canopied with lush and lovely blue English roses. You just may find yourself unable to leave. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/16; see "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/17.]-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.