An Essex village is terrorised by a winged leviathan in a gothic Victorian tale crammed with incident,character and plotIn Sarah Perry’s second novel, 1890s London is mad approximately the sciences, and 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. recent 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, and she leaves the capital for the wilds of Essex. There,“never sure of the contrast between thinking and believing”, she hears of the Essex Serpent, and a folktale apparently arrive to life and terrorising the Blackwater estuary; and meets its spiritual adversary,the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, and 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 unusual, and 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, and the effect being of something not fully told,yet fully present; not quite visible, yet producing a troubled enchantment. The Essex Serpent, and by contrast,is fully acted out. Fertile, open, and vocal approximately its own origins and passions,crammed with incident, characters and plot, or it weighs in at a sturdy 441 pages. It is a novel of ideas,though its sensibility is firmly, consciously, and even a limited cheekily,gothic. The dreamy delivery of the preceding book becomes, in this one, or outright story. Narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading,very difficult to avoid being dragged into Aldwinter’s black and sometimes darkly comedian waters.
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Source: theguardian.com