‘I get really Essexy when I talk to someone posh’
Sarah Perry is a literary sensation who still feels like an ‘oik’, she tells Jake Kerridge
‘Last time The Telegraph came to interview me, I was lying flat on my back on a sofa and I was high,” Sarah Perry tells me. The author of the phenomenally successful novel The Essex Serpent would not have been the first Gothic writer to experiment with the effect of drugs on her prose style. But as we talk in the kitchen of her terraced house in Norwich – over nothing stronger than coffee – she assures me that it was unintentional.
In April 2016, Perry was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition that weakens bones and muscles and led to her rupturing a disc in her back so badly that it damaged her spine. She had neurosurgery and was on a cocktail of medication, including opiates and tranquillisers.
The Essex Serpent, a chewy, gorgeously written tale of faith, doubt and unconventional friendships in late Victorian England, became an unexpected and huge hit that year, just when Perry was in no state to appreciate the adulation.
She recalls the night it won two prizes, including Book of the Year, at the British Book Awards 2017.
“I had to be helped up on stage… I probably looked drunk. I’ll never forget it because I’d sooner go to the stocks than be drunk at a public event, certainly to the point of staggering. At a time when I would have liked to be at my most composed and robust, I was, in fact, not. So it will be nice, whatever happens to Melmoth, to experience it properly.”
Melmoth is her new novel, inspired by Charles Maturin’s creepy classic, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Written again in strikingly sonorous prose, it is the story of Helen, an academic from Essex living in Prague and nursing a horrific secret, who stumbles on the legend of a ghostly woman called Melmoth who has hunted down the guilt-ridden through the centuries and offered them relief – at a terrible cost.
Perry admits that she really wanted to terrify her readers, and gurgles with delight when I tell her that at times I found myself unable to raise my eyes from the page for fear of seeing Melmoth myself, beckoning me to join her on her journeys through time and space to bear witness to some of humanity’s worst atrocities.
The book, which was written while Perry was ill and on medication, has an unsurprisingly hallucinatory quality. “I would have a couple of weeks of lucidity and I would write and then I would be in too much pain, and then I would have lucidity and then I would have surgery and it went on and on.”
She thinks that, as a result, the book is more ambitious than it might have been. “Being in an altered state lends you a kind of euphoria where you don’t keep listening to that very stern inner critic that doesn’t think much of what you do. I think writers can be hobbled by expectations of others. What that period did was make me just not care.”
She drew on her own illness in portraying one character, a paralysed stroke victim struggling to achieve independence. “There’s something about prolonged chronic illness that is very humiliating if you have always considered yourself as being quite a robust individual, and then suddenly you’re in bed and the glass of water’s out of reach, and you have to calculate the energy and effort and pain required to get the glass against being thirsty, against being weak enough to have to ask someone to get it for you.”
Perry says she is “hale and hearty” now, and hopes the experience has made her kinder and more patient. She seems full of energy, talking at tremendous speed in a singsong voice, conveying an intensely felt pleasure in discussing books and ideas, and accompanying her pronouncements on profound themes with self-deprecating glosses (“I sometimes worry I sound like a preachy little w-----”).
She was born in Chelmsford in 1979 and had an unconventional upbringing; her father was both a scientist and a creationist, and she was brought up as a Strict Baptist. “Of course, one wistfully thinks it would have been nice to have had a youth and to have had boyfriends and gone to parties. But I was exposed to grand ideas from the moment I first went to church, which would have been at days old. My mind was trained up, rather than across or down, and I’ll always be so grateful for that.
“The world and everything in it is composed of fathomless questions of mortality and goodness and evil and reason and madness, and all of those things were accessible to me right from the start, which is why I would never want to write books that are just, ‘Oh my God, I fancy someone, does he fancy me?’”
Perry’s faith has become less strongly defined over the years. “When you start to doubt things, you believe that you’re being tempted by the Devil and it’s a question of you persevering in your faith, and it took me a long time and lots of conversations with Anglicans, actually, to come to terms with the idea that my intellect and how I felt about stuff wasn’t a wickedness.”
She has undertaken this journey with her husband, a police officer whom she met when she was 13 – his family attended her church – and married at 20. “When I was about 27 and my husband and I were very active in a fundamentalist evangelical church in Tottenham, the legislation around equal marriage went before Parliament and I simply could not worship a god that thought that people shouldn’t make a public declaration of love and fidelity.”
Nowadays, she goes to formal places of worship – Norwich Cathedral or St Julian’s Church – only occasionally. “But there’s always personal spiritual life that can be carried out outside those walls. I do occasionally try to become an atheist, but I never get very far.”
Perry’s family were not affluent, and she paid her own way through Anglia Polytechnic. Despite subsequently earning a PHD in creative writing from Royal Holloway, she has confessed in the past to feeling self-conscious about her background and accent. “Sometimes if I go to a publishing party I feel like a real oik. I’m being really unfair because not everybody in publishing went to Oxford and Cambridge. But I used to be alert to things like, someone once said to me, ‘Do you ride?’ Of course I don’t ride, I’ve never even touched a horse. I don’t worry so much now, but I do get really Essexy if I’m talking to someone really posh, it’s very obnoxious of me, but I just hear it coming out.
“One of the things I like to challenge is the idea that certain kinds of fiction comes from certain kinds of places. I don’t like the idea that the world is going to become co-opted by the people who can afford to tutor their kids to get them to the school that has the highest Oxbridge intake.”
Perry has always been an idiosyncratic novelist, even without benefit of hallucinogens. Her first book, After Me Comes the Flood (2014), was turned down by 15 publishers. “They gave me these lovely rave rejections: ‘Beautiful language, totally original, I’ve never really heard a voice like this, I can’t sell it’.”
She was eventually taken on by a small independent publisher, Serpent’s Tail. The Essex Serpent her follow-up in 2016, was no less unusual but took off in a huge way; it was heavily promoted by Waterstones, enjoyed astonishing sales, and has been credited as one of the main factors in the struggling bookseller turning a profit for the first time in years.
“I think readers are not as cowardly as people like to think and I think they are willing to deal with sentences that go on for half a page.”
‘I’d sooner go to the stocks than be drunk at a public event, certainly to the point of staggering’
‘There’s a personal spiritual life outside church walls. I occasionally try to become an atheist, but I never get far’
After years of being not very well off as she tried to write, Perry hopes Melmoth will be a comparable success – “I have a mortgage now!” But, she says, “you have to write the book that’s in you at the time and unfortunately another nice, warm, semi-fantastical neo-victorian epic was not what was on my mind.
“I would very, very often hear what an enormous consolation The Essex Serpent had been to people, that it had enabled them to feel very deeply that their friendships of all different kinds were beautiful and valid in a way that they hadn’t quite been able to feel before. Melmoth is not quite the same, but hopefully, it will be a different form of consolation and companionship.”