The Essex Serpent

Much of this tale takes place in the fictional Essex town of Aldwinter where many of the local yokels are terrified of a creature said to inhabit the Blackwater and is blamed for all manner of inexplicable disappearances or disasters both large and small.
 
Enter Cora Seaborne, a widow from London. Her interests in the creature are secondary to her enthusiasm for her new-found freedom from an oppressive marriage. Although not traditionally attractive many are captivated by her in spite of her big boots, messy hair and fascination with fossils and such. We are never really quite sure what she suffered at the hands of her late husband Michael or the exact nature of her relationship with her friend Martha, who is a progressive socialist of sorts. Cora’s only child, Francis, is obviously autistic or suffers from Asperger’s before either of those conditions had a name but sadly there doesn’t seem to be any real affection between mother and son.
 
There is also the simpering sick sweetness of the vicar’s wife Stella who becomes addicted to all things blue while her husband Will tussles with rescuing sheep and explaining religion and is also intent on axing a carving of the serpent from the pews that is probably an allegory on his growing desire for Cora. His rival, arrogant and “imp-ish” London doctor Luke is "cut" in more ways than one; by Cora and also a thug who puts an end to his surgical celebrity. Others include the Ambrose couple, all hale-and-hearty do-goody-ness, a legless beggar who quotes poetry, a girl with webbed fingers and another angelic child who smokes cigarettes, plus the creepily Gothic man Cracknell who skins moles, harbours earwigs up his sleeves and lives with two goats, Gog and Magog, in a moss-ridden house called World’s End.
 
Perhaps it’s a reaction to the brusque nature of much contemporary fiction or our modern sound-bite way of life, but there is a trend for some authors of recent historical novels to go to the opposite extreme and indulge in the long-winded intellectual styles of 19th Century literature with florid detailing of everything from fogs to furbelows. But like any intricate work of art, the individual characters within in it can get swamped by too powerful a background. For some reason it also feels oddly mid-Victorian and therefore old-fashioned within its own context which is post-1890.
 
The beautifully-designed cover displays abundance and sinuousness and the narrative certainly reflects those qualities. Like the mythical serpent of the title it meanders with symbolism and superstition only to slither off into the stinky Essex marshes leaving one wondering what the heck it was really all about …
 
Summary:-  a novel weighed down by its own brilliance. Three stars.

(With many thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC)

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