LOVE IN THE TIME OF TURBULENCE
A PRIZEWINNING ROMANTIC SAGA SET IN A PERIOD OF DEEP HISTORICAL TRANSITION
Since it was published last spring, copies of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent have been flying off the shelves as fast as booksellers have been able to stack them. You could spot the jacket a mile off, and usually you didn’t have to look that far, as the dazzling William Morris-inspired artwork spread like a rash in window displays up and down the country.
The novel scooped up prize after prize—Waterstones Book of the Year, British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year, Sunday Times Bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and longlisted for the Bailey’s—and became the flavour of the month for book clubs and reading groups. The accolades were well-deserved. Perry’s novel hits the sweet spot reserved for those rare works of fiction that are both critically acclaimed and wildly popular.
Set in 1893, it centres on Cora Seabourne. Liberated from an unhappy marriage by the death of her husband, she’s discovering, or rediscovering, her self. Her intense relationship with vicar William Ransome qualifies the book as a historical romance, but it’s much more than that. Ransome’s parish, Aldwinter, is awash with rumours of a terrible beast lurking in the estuary. Is it a devil fish sent by Satan himself, a mythical sea serpent or a collective hallucination? Cora hopes it’s a new species waiting to be discovered and named—the scientific find of the century.
The story unfolds amid a historical transition, pulled in opposing directions by scientific rationalism and religious belief, and beneath them both the darker, pagan undertones of myth, magic and superstition. A keen amateur naturalist, Cora’s
intelligence and zest for knowledge drive her to question faith, friendship, love, and nature itself. As she explains to William, “I’m always thirsty—for everything, everything!... Sometimes I think I sold my soul so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience—I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go...”
Those who characterise this novel as a ‘woman’s book’ and highlight only its romantic and costume-drama aspects do it a great disservice. The highpoint is not the consummation of Cora and William’s fraught love, but the description of Cora’s friend Luke’s daring open-heart surgery. The writing in this passage is as keen as a scalpel, as delicate and sure as a surgeon’s hand.
The book, too, is an extraordinarily fine dissection of the human heart, laying out its hidden involutions and recesses as skillfully as Luke does his patient’s, not only in the story of Cora’s love for William but also the friendship between Cora and her ‘lady’s companion’ Martha; the love lavished by Cora upon William’s wife; the ties of tonguetied loyalty and friendship between Luke, the ‘Imp’ as Cora dubs him, and the good-hearted Spencer; and the unrequited passion Luke has for this infuriating, handsome and fiercely intelligent woman. Find yourself a sofa, switch off your phone, and follow the snake’s tail down to the Blackwater estuary where science and poetry call out
monsters from the deep.
THE BOOK IS A FINE DISSECTION OF THE HUMAN HEART, LAYING OUT ITS HIDDEN INVOLUTIONS AND RECESSES