THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry
I had little idea of what to expect from this book, save for the first page I read before buying it. On completion, I feel I have lived at least the full year depicted in its pages between Essex and London. The writing is delicious and exquisite. Sarah Perry weaves so easily between the narratives of each character it is easy to forget you are not actually each person in turn.
The writing is often poetic but never denigrates to being flowery or extravagant. It simply and delicately paints a tempting picture of Victorian England, whilst including important issues of the time such as the housing crisis, poverty, a pre-NHS healthcare system and inequity. Sound familiar? There is love and lust, unrequited and not; there is friendship and hatred, the rich and the poor. It is a stunning tapestry of an era none of us have experienced, yet we still face many of the human problems today. It is the kind of polished writing that will make any author reading, aspiring or published, jealous at their comparative lack of skill.
Between the goings-on of Victorian society there was of course the matter of the Essex Serpent. Perry has created such a believable world in the fictional village of Aldwinter, bolstered perhaps by the real-life seventeenth century legend of such a beast. It permeates village life and becomes main character Cora’s – if any of them is truly the main character, it’s her – obsession. In the end everything is fairly neatly tied up, which may disappoint those who wish for further tragedy, but it felt fitting to me. Immediately after finishing the book I wanted to know more – to check whether Aldwinter was fictional or otherwise, to read the legend of the Essex Serpent – things I had stopped myself from checking before for fear of spoilers. In short, I highly recommend this book – the best I have read since Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a book similarly ebbing between its characters’ thoughts and experiences. For those of an aural disposition, THE ESSEX SERPENT was recently adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, and is available to listen for a few more days.