Contemporary Authors

• After Me Comes the Flood Serpent's Tail (London, England), 2014
• The Essex Serpent Serpent's Tail (London, England), 2016
• The Essex Serpent: A Novel Custom House (New York, NY), 2017

1. After me comes the flood LCCN 2014431240 Type of material Book Personal name Perry, Sarah, 1979- Main title After me comes the flood / Sarah Perry. Published/Produced London : Serpent's Tail, 2014. Description 232 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781846689451 1846689457 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 174482 CALL NUMBER PR6116.E776 A38 2014 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) 2. The Essex Serpent : a novel LCCN 2016056531 Type of material Book Personal name Perry, Sarah, 1979- author. Main title The Essex Serpent : a novel / Sarah Perry. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced New York : Custom House, [2017] ©2016 Description 416 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780062666376 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PR6116.E776 E87 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The Essex Serpent LCCN 2016417446 Type of material Book Personal name Perry, Sarah, 1979- author. Main title The Essex Serpent / Sarah Perry. Published/Produced London : Serpent's Tail, 2016. Description 416 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781781255445 (hardback) 178125544X (hardback) (ePub ebook) CALL NUMBER PR6116.E776 E87 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Sarah Perry - https://www.sarahperry.net/

  Sarah Perry
  Site Title
  Sarah Perry
  Photo Credit: Jamie Drew 2016

  The Essex Serpent

  Waterstones Book of the Year 2016

  Sunday Times number one bestseller

  Shortlisted for Costa Book Award

  iTunes Book of the Year 2016

  Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize 2017

  Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2017

  Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017

  Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017

  Shortlisted for the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award 2017

  British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017 (Fiction and Overall)

  ​

  After Me Comes the Flood

  Winner East Anglian Book of the Year 2014

  Shortlisted for Guardian First Novel Award 2014

  Nominated for the Folio Prize 2014

  ​

  Winner of the 2014 Shiva Naipaul Prize - 'A Little Unexpected'

  ​

  Residencies

  Essex Book Festival, 2017

  UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence Prague, 2016

  Gladstones Library Writer-in-Residence, 2014

  ​

  Writer
  Sarah Perry is the author of The Essex Serpent and After Me Comes the Flood. A number one bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, The Essex Serpent was nominated for a further eight literary awards, including the Costa Novel Award 2017, and the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2017. After Me Comes the Flood was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2014 and the Folio Prize 2014, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award 2014. Sarah has been the UNESCO City of Literature Writer-In-Residence in Prague and a Gladstone's Library Writer-in-Residence. Her work is being translated into eleven languages, and her essays and fiction have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and RTE 1. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and the Financial Times.

• Sarah Perry - https://www.sarahperry.net/bio-1

  Biography

  Sarah Perry portrait
  Painting by Alan Coulson

  Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979, and was raised as a Strict Baptist. Having studied English at Anglia Ruskin University she worked as a civil servant before studying for an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing and the Gothic at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2004 she won the Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Award for travel writing.

  In January 2013 she was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone's Library. Here she completed the final draft of her first novel, After Me Comes the Flood, which was published by Serpent's Tail in June 2014 to international critical acclaim. It won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award 2014, and was longlisted for the 2014 Guardian First Book Award and nominated for the 2014 Folio Prize. In January and February 2016 Sarah was the UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Prague.

  Her second novel, The Essex Serpent, was published by Serpent's Tail in May 2016. It was a number one bestseller in hardback, and was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2016. It was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2017, and was longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction 2017, the Wellcome Book Prize, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the New Angle Prize for Literature. It was broadcast on Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime in April 2017, is being translated into eleven languages, and has been chosen for the Richard and Judy Summer Book Club 2017.

  Sarah has spoken at a number of institutions including Gladstone's Library, the Centre of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, and the Anglo-American University in Prague, on subjects including theology, the history and status of friendship in literature, the Gothic, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Her essays have been published in the Guardian and the Spectator, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and the Financial Times.

  She currently lives in Norwich, where she is completing her third novel.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Perry

  Sarah Perry
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Sarah Perry
  Sarah Perry, Writer.jpg
  Born 1979
  Chelmsford, England
  Occupation Writer
  Alma mater Royal Holloway University
  Sarah Grace Perry (born 28 November 1979) is an English author. She has had two novels published, both by Serpent's Tail: After Me Comes The Flood (2014) and The Essex Serpent (2016).

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life and education
  2 Novels
  2.1 After Me Comes the Flood
  2.2 The Essex Serpent
  2.3 Melmoth
  3 References
  4 External links
  Early life and education[edit]
  Perry was born in Chelmsford, Essex into a family of devout Christians who were members of a Strict Baptist church, Perry grew up with almost no access to contemporary art, culture, and writing. She filled her time with classical music, classic novels and poetry, and church-related activities. She says this early immersion in old literature and the King James Bible profoundly influenced her writing style.[1]

  She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway University where her supervisor was Sir Andrew Motion. Her doctoral thesis was on the Gothic in the writing of Iris Murdoch, and Perry has subsequently published an article on the Gothic in Aeon magazine.[2][3]

  I wrote about the power of place in my PhD thesis, particularly the importance of buildings in the Gothic (a genre which I find myself inhabiting without ever having meant to). Fiction in the Gothic inheritance makes much of the potent importance of the interior, from the castle where Jonathan Harker finds himself holed up to Thornfield, and from the suburban homes in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black to the ghastly crypts in The Monk.

  In 2013 she was a writer in residence at Gladstone's Library.[4]

  Perry won the 2004 Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize for travel writing for 'A little unexpected', an article about her experiences in the Philippines.[5][6]

  Novels[edit]
  After Me Comes the Flood[edit]
  Perry's debut novel, After Me Comes the Flood, was released in 2014 by Serpent's Tail, receiving high praise from reviewers including those of The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.[7] The novel tells the story of a man named John Cole who wanders into a strange world while seeking out his brother amidst a drought. John Burnside, writing for The Guardian, called it "extraordinary" and "a remarkable debut." [8]

  The Essex Serpent[edit]
  Her second novel, The Essex Serpent, was also published by Serpent's Tail in 2016. Inspired by the myth of a sea-serpent on the Essex coast, it tells the story of a Victorian widow, Cora Seaborne, and the friends who surround her after the death of her bullying husband. Cora is intrigued and compelled by the possibility of the serpent's return, but clashes with the local vicar, William Ransome, who is determined to lay superstition to rest in his rural parish.

  The novel is again written in a gothic style, and explores themes of goodness, friendship, superstition and love and once again received positive reviews; John Burnside, quoted on the book's cover, writes: "Had Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker come together to write the great Victorian novel, I wonder if it would have surpassed The Essex Serpent? No way of knowing, but with only her second outing, Sarah Perry establishes herself as one of the finest fiction writers working in Britain today."[9]

  The Essex Serpent was nominated in the Novel category for the 2016 Costa Book Awards[10] and was named Waterstones Book Of The Year 2016. [11] It was placed on the long list for the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.[12]

  Melmoth[edit]
  Her next novel will be titled Melmoth, and is inspired by Charles Maturin's gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer. [13]

  References[edit]

• Omnivoracious - http://www.omnivoracious.com/2017/06/sarah-perry-the-essex-serpent-amazon-book-review.html

  Challenging Misconceptions About Victorian Women: A Q&A With Jessica Shattuck & Sarah Perry About "The Essex Serpent"
  Erin Kodicek on June 20, 2017
  Share
  EssexIn Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, a pragmatic, whip-smart widow and naturalist teams up with a devout man of faith to investigate the veracity of a fantastical claim: a diabolical beast has returned--after 300 years!--to feed its blood-lust yet again, starting with a young victim on New Year's Eve. Here, Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle, asks Ms. Perry about how her personal background informed the story, the unlikely duo featured in it, and more.

  J.S.: I've read that you had a very strict Baptist upbringing and were prohibited from reading any 20th century fiction. Do you think that made writing a novel set in the 19th century--and very much written in a style reminiscent of the great Gothic novels of that era—easier?

  S.P.: It isn’t quite the case that I was prohibited from reading 20th century fiction (I read E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, for instance); it is more that there was no contemporary culture in the house – pop music, television, cinema trips and so on. And most of the literature and culture that surrounded me was 19th century or indeed a great deal older.

  I have no way of knowing whether this upbringing made it easier to write a novel set in the 19th century, simply because I have no other experience against which to judge it! I suspect so, however. I do know that while writing my debut novel (which is set in contemporary Norfolk) I would fret that my writing style was insufficiently modern (whatever that means), and that, after that, writing a novel set in the 19th century allowed me to feel a certain kind of freedom – that my natural lexis, which is drawn from all the influences that surrounded me as a child, and which would have been very similar to what would have surrounded a child born 100 years early, was fitted to the subject.

  J.S.:I so enjoyed Cora Seaborne’s character. What was it like to write a woman with such modern sensibilities who lived during the Victorian era?

  S.P.: I am so glad you enjoyed her: thank you!

  I found it thrilling to write a Victorian woman who challenges false ideas about what Victorian women were like. She does not have “modern sensibilities” in the anachronistic sense: rather, she was as modern as many Victorian women were at that time.

  We labor under misapprehensions about Victorian womanhood that I am extremely keen to correct. These were far from the feeble, fainting, fragile women trapped in gilded cages that we so often take them for. I looked at contemporary letters and memoir pieces, and other historical documents such as speeches and government documents, and found that Victorian women – despite all the barriers to equality they faced - were urgent, cerebral, politically active, socially radical, emotionally rich and accorded a great deal more freedom than we assume. For example, there are records of women – including poorer women such as servants – voting in local elections in the 1840s, and some wonderful letters between two young Victorian women show how they cheerfully travelled into London on their own by train or on foot. Women such as Eleanor Marx and Annie Besant were active in politics and in trades unions, and by the close of the 19th century women were training – in some cases at the forefront of their field - in medicine, math and the sciences, and had close relationships with each other and with men. And it was far from just the wealthy women who were able to show agency and spirit in politics: some of Britain’s most important labor laws have their roots in a strike at the Bryant and May match factory in 1888, when young girls and women, many of whom would have been illiterate but had been motivated by hearing Annie Besant speak, refused to work until accorded better rights.

  Cora Seaborne and Martha are both intended to give voice to the brilliant, fearless, independent, educated, important Victorian women whom we so often sideline in favor of a more saccharine view. As the historian Rachel Holmes says, “Feminism did not begin in the 1970s, it began in the 1870s.”

  J.S.: Tell us about Cora and the pastor, William Ransome. How would their story and relationship have been different if set in Aldwinter, 2017?

  S.P.: I wanted to create a relationship which was recognizably human, complicated and messy. Many novels have been written about buttoned-up, sexually repressed Victorians seething hopelessly at each other over cups of weak tea: I wanted to write something different, and something which more reflected the relationships and friendships I had read about in first-hand accounts. For example, a key aspect of their relationship is that it is essentially a passionate friendship, and friends did write to each other in very warm and open terms in the 19th century (and obviously in preceding periods). Same-sex relationships were often very ardent indeed – women often lived together in physical intimacy that we would nowadays regard as gay relationships, but which at that time were simply regarded as intimate friendships. Nor were Victorians the sexually repressed folk that we tend to think they are: I am especially fond of reading one of the letters of Jane Carlyle, who recounts, in a very casual way, that one of their housemaids gave birth in the house while they were on holiday, having managed to keep her pregnancy out of wedlock a secret. This isn’t met with horror and outrage, but only spoken about as a bit of daily gossip: 19th women did have sex, they did have lovers, they were not a different species from us. That Will and Cora are of the opposite sex, and that Will is married, of course creates a tension that would not have been there had they been the same sex. But Will’s conflicts come not from the manners of the age but from something universal and timeless: his love for his wife, and his faith in God. Similarly, Cora’s confusion does not come from the fact that she is a Victorian woman, but only that she is a woman: that she has just come out of an abusive marriage and is unable or unwilling to see the effect that she has on people. I am not sure that much would have been different had these events taken place in 2017: Will would still have loved his wife, he would still have been a man of faith, Cora would still have walked a very uneasy line between intellectual friendship and physical intimacy. I suppose they might have met up in the pub rather than gone for country walks, and might have texted rather than written letters, but these are not the essentials.

  J.S.: In your writings over the years, you've set stories in the past, in the present, and in a dreamy state between the two. How do these time periods allow you to explore your curiosities and ambitions?

  S.P.: This is such a lovely and perceptive way of putting it – because in both my books, and in the one I am working on now, I am exploring my curiosities and ambitions, which seems a little self-indulgent in some ways. I suppose I don’t want my imagination to be fettered by anything – not by whether I am writing contemporary or historical fiction, not by prose style, not by subject matter, not by whether I am writing about “what I know”. I am very interested in ideas of universality – about what has outlasted customs and fashions, about what is human rather than a matter of where someone was born, or what they wore, or what they ate. I suppose this may account for why, when I write about the present, readers wonder if I am writing about the past; and when I write about the past, they often wonder if I am writing about the present. Recently I read an extremely cross reader review that said something like, “This is supposed to be a Victorian novel, but it was so confusing, it felt like I was reading a book set in modern times!” and I was--mischievously!-- absolutely thrilled.

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Print Marked Items
The Essex Serpent
Jen Baker
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p60+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Essex Serpent. By Sarah Perry. June 2017.432p. Morrow/Custom, $26.99 (9780062666376).
Secret love and the suggestion of something unearthly moving in the Essex Blackwater drive the intricate
plot of this atmospheric historical novel about Cora Seaborne, a widow visiting Colchester with her
companion, ostensibly to explore the estuary for fossils. A medieval "winged serpent" myth still holds the
inhabitants of Aldwinter in thrall, despite the best efforts of the local rector, Will Ransome; and as Perry's
second novel (following After Me Comes the Flood, 2015) wends its way through mysterious
disappearances, fog-laden visions, suspicion, and tragedy, it seems as if the monster is real. The vivid, often
frightening imagery (the Leviathan, a shack sinking in the bog, the scrape of scales moving up the shingle)
and the lush descriptions ("stained glass angels had the wings of jays") create a magical background for the
sensual love story between Sarah and Will. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery,
the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt. Like Lauren Groffs The
Monsters of Templeton (2008), the appearance of a sea monster sheds more light on humanity than on
natural history, while the sudden revelation of a creature of the deep heralds change and revelation, as in
Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide (2005).--Jen Baker
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Baker, Jen. "The Essex Serpent." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 60+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035086/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=837588ae.
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495035086
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The Essex Serpent
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Essex Serpent
Sarah Perry. Custom, $26.99 (432p) ISBN 978-0-06-266637-6
In Perry's (After Me Comes the Flood) excellent second novel, set in the Victorian era, recent widow Cora
Seaborne leaves London with her 11-year-old son, Francis, and loyal companion, Martha, and goes to
Colchester, where a legendary, fearsome creature called the Essex Serpent has been sighted. Scholarly Cora,
who is more interested in the study of nature than in womanly matters of dress, tramps about in a man's
tweed coat, determined to find proof of this creature's existence. Through friends, she is introduced to
William Ransome, the local reverend; his devoted wife, Stella; and their three children. Cora looks for a
scientific rationale for the Essex Serpent, while Ransome dismisses it as superstition. This puts them at odds
with one another, but, strangely, also acts as a powerful source of attraction between them. When Cora is
visited by her late husband's physician, Luke Garrett, who carries a not-so-secret torch for her, a love
triangle of sorts is formed. In the end, a fatal illness, a knife-wielding maniac, and a fated union with the
Essex Serpent will dictate the ultimate happiness of these characters. Like John Fowles's The French
Lieutenant's Woman, whose Lyme Regis setting gets a shout-out here, this is another period literary pastiche
with a contemporary overlay. Cora makes for a fiercely independent heroine around whom all the other
characters orbit. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Essex Serpent." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820738/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2aa7709.
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820738
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Perry, Sarah: THE ESSEX SERPENT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Perry, Sarah THE ESSEX SERPENT Custom House/Morrow (Adult Fiction) $26.99 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-06-
266637-6
The unlikely friendship between a canny widow and a scholarly vicar sets the stage for this sweeping 19thcentury
saga of competing belief systems.Widow Cora Seaborne knows she should mourn the death of her
husband; instead, she finally feels free. Eschewing the advice of her friends, Cora retreats from London
with her lady's maid, Martha, and strange, prescient son, Francis. The curious party decamps to muddy
Essex, where Cora dons an ugly men's coat and goes tramping in the mud, looking for fossils. Soon she
becomes captivated by the local rumor of a menacing presence that haunts the Blackwater estuary, a threat
that locks children in their houses after dark and puts farmers on watch as the tide creeps in. Cora's
fascination with the fabled Essex Serpent leads her to the Rev. William Ransome, desperate to keep his
flock from descending into outright hysteria. An unlikely pair, the two develop a fast intellectual friendship,
curious to many but accepted by all, including Ransome's ailing wife, Stella. Perry (After Me Comes the
Flood, 2015) pulls out all the stops in her richly detailed Victorian yarn, weaving myth and local flavor with
19th-century debates about theology and evolution, medical science and social justice for the poor. Each of
Perry's characters receives his or her due, from the smallest Essex urchin to the devastating Stella, who
suffers from tuberculosis and obsesses over the color blue throughout her decline. There are Katherine and
Charles Ambrose, a good-natured but shallow society couple; the ambitious and radical Dr. Luke Garrett
and his wealthier but less-talented friend George Spencer, who longs for Martha; Martha herself, who rattles
off Marx with the best of them and longs to win Cora's affection; not to mention a host of sailors,
superstitious tenant farmers, and bewitched schoolgirls. The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry's prose
invite close reading, as deep and strange and full of narrative magic as the Blackwater itself. Fans of Sarah
Waters, A.S. Byatt, and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things should prepare to fall under Perry's
spell and into her very capable hands. Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of
astonishing breadth and brilliance.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Perry, Sarah: THE ESSEX SERPENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=195a3a4b.
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105295
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Snakes on a plain
Ben Myers
New Statesman.
145.5323 (July 15, 2016): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
The Essex Serpent
Sarah Perry
Serpent's Tail, 424pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]
From Celtic mythology and the malevolent, sheep-eating Lambton Worm of Durham to Bram Stoker's Lair
of the White Worm and Ken Russell's outlandish film adaptation, the serpent has a potent mythological
status that is deeply embedded in British and Irish folklore. In The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry harnesses the
power of this unknowable creature to drive a novel that is a fitting addition to the genre.
Reviewers of her 2014 debut, After Me Comes the Flood, noted Perry's strict Baptist upbringing, during
which her formative cultural intake was limited almost entirely to the Bible and classical literature--but it is
in her second novel that these core influences are given free rein. Lest we forget, Gilgamesh loses his power
of immortality to a snake, while the hissing hustler of Genesis tricks Adam and Eve into exile from the
Garden of Eden. Even if she didn't have access in her youth to the schlocky folk-horror films of the 1970s,
for Perry, it seems that the figure of the snake was unavoidable.
Set in the 1890s, The Essex Serpent writhes amid the confluence of conflicting modes of thought that made
that era so fascinating and forward-thinking. The enlightened, late-Victorian strand of thinking is slowly
embracing myriad theories posited by the recently departed Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell. Butting up
against all this reason and pragmatism is a dusty old English take on Christianity that is mindful of God and
the threat of the serpent to His order. And beneath it all is something far more insidious and inexplicable:
persistent rumours and sightings of a winged serpent out in the moiling salt waters and sparse marshes of
the Blackwater Estuary.
The characters reflect these disparate strands. There is the impish, pioneering London surgeon Luke Garrett
and the vicar Will Ransome, who can't abide even the effigy of a snake that is carved on to one of his pews,
much less the ungodly talk among heathen locals in the Essex village of Aldwinter of an actual sea monster
and the influence it is having on Ransome's tubercular wife. Most memorable is Cora Seaborne, an urbane
and wealthy wanderer and amateur geologist whose husband has recently died, and who has a vitality that
sparks from the pages. Between them, a network of infatuation and love emerges.
Now a national nature reserve, these eerie boglands of Essex surrounding the fictional village are a world
away from the common perceptions of the county. Here, we find a "foreign shore" ("You may require a
phrasebook," one character warns), a place of "kissing-gates and Croats and acres of tidal land they call the
saltings" and children with webbing between their fingers.
Taking place over the course of a year that begins with the discovery of a drowned man --naked, his head
turned 180 degrees, his eyes wide with dread--and continues with Cora relocating to the county's outer
reaches in search of adventure, The Essex Serpent is a heady account of contrasts. Faith and medicine, myth
and science, romance and ritual, rural vigour and the urban squalor of east London: all of these exist in
opposition to each other.
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Perry writes like someone of another time. Her free-flowing prose is that of a stylist capable of evoking the
high drama of the end-of-empire years and reflecting the late-Victorian setting without resorting to pastiche.
It is breathlessly poetic one moment, considered the next.
As the tension increases with portents such as "a plague of cuckoo-spit in the gardens" and "a cat aborting
its kittens on the hearth", The Essex Serpent recalls variously the earthiness of Emily Bronte, the arch, hightensile
tone of Conan Doyle, the evocation of time and place achieved by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters
and the antiquarian edgelands horror of M R James.
As in the work of James, the England of Chelmsford-born Perry is one of half-myths, secrets unearthed and
meddlesome outsiders, where sea and sky can induce anxiety and old ways are troubled by new ideas. Her
humour is dry, too, boasting such lines as: "Her mother had lived long enough to be disappointed in her
daughter's failure to be disappointed." She has an especially keen eye for scents, colours, flavours and
details: splashes of mud on the hem of a skirt, or lingering glances. All these collude to elevate The Essex
Serpent into a suspenseful love story, though one imagines Perry modestly blushing into a nosegay at the
merest hint of such a well-deserved compliment.
Ben Myers's novel "Turning Blue" will be published by Moth in August
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Myers, Ben. "Snakes on a plain." New Statesman, 15 July 2016, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A460574246/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0e8543d4.
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460574246
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Strange sightings in Essex
Anthony Cummins
Spectator.
331.9799 (June 18, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Essex Serpent
by Sarah Perry
Serpent's Tail, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 442, ISBN 9781781255445
I suspect some readers might be too cool for this lovely book, partly because, despite its gothic horror setup,
it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits; and partly because historical novels are sometimes derided as
escapist, as if they're only a fallback for authors who can't keep up with, say, immigration or the internet.
It takes place over a single year in the 1890s, in an Essex village where--if the rumours are to believed--a
monstrous sea creature skulks in the estuary, blamed for horrors from disembowelled livestock to a man's
corpse washing up on the marsh, his neck snapped.
Up from London amid this panic is Cora, a wealthy amateur naturalist, liberated by the death of her abusive
husband. When friends introduce her to the local vicar, Ransome, their jousts over God and geology turn to
will-they-won't-they ardour, observed by his wife (whose dodgy-sounding cough escapes attention) and
Garrett, a maverick surgeon who took a shine to Cora while treating her dying husband.
These relationships fuel the novel, together with the question of what the villagers actually see. The writing
has a gorgeous lilt, and for a novel with a built-in anticlimax (unless you're a Nessie truther), it sustains
tension remarkably well. The research that can swamp this kind of enterprise is put in the service of
excitement: witness the jeopardy rung from a snip-by-snip description of Garrett pioneering a heart
procedure on a knifed clerk.
A plus-ça-change frisson comes from references to war in Afghanistan and a housing crisis in London. The
latter most concerns Cora's Marxist maid, Martha, who shames a rich suitor into activism when he admits
that until recently he didn't even know how many rooms there were in his house. The novel takes Martha
seriously but doesn't forbid teasing: she views the Essex natives as 'halfwits', 'her astonishment that coffee
could be had in such a backwater had been matched only by her disgust at the astringent liquid she'd been
served'.
As befits a tale of strange sightings, the novel's cast teach each other to question first impressions and revise
long-held beliefs--a low-voltage source of drama with surprising emotional charge. The method is itself
Victorian--an omniscient narrator scattering sackfuls of sympathy-but the message never gets old: the world
is poorer if we don't put ourselves in each other's place once in a while.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cummins, Anthony. "Strange sightings in Essex." Spectator, 18 June 2016, p. 36. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A455406174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a51961e.
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
12/21/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513869910617 7/9
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455406174
12/21/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513869910617 8/9
Briefly Noted
Andrew Martin
The New Yorker.
93.26 (Sept. 4, 2017): p87.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Where the Line Is Drawn, by Raja Shehadeh (New Press). A Palestinian human-rights lawyer who has
written several books about life under the Israeli occupation here focusses on his friendships with Israeli
Jews, in particular with the Jung scholar Henry Abramovitch. "I was looking for solace in the midst of the
chaos all around, and I found it with Henry," he writes. Over forty years, their friendship has been nurtured
through letters, conversations in the Ramallah hills, and, initially, a studious avoidance of politics. Yet
increasingly hopeless national politics, intractable identity narratives, and the quotidian humiliations of the
occupation come to affect the assumptions and the expectations of friendship. Shehadeh describes with
courage and grace the internal struggle to remain fair.
Henry David Thoreau, by Laura Dassow Walls (Chicago). This lucid biography presents a warmer and
more socially engaged Thoreau, devoted to his friends and family and fond of belting out sea shanties at
parties. He led boating and berrying expeditions, and brought home flowers to decorate his family's house.
As a teacher, bucking common practice, he rejected corporal punishment, and took students on field trips,
often to his treasured woods. His two-year sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond was, Walls argues, a kind of
"performance art." Far from becoming the hermit of popular imagination, Thoreau used the experiment to
transform himself into "a new kind of being, that product of modern commerce and communications: a
celebrity."
Blameless, by Claudio Magris, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (Yale). A museum
"dedicated to the documentation of war for the promotion of peace" lies at the center of this remarkable
novel. It was the project of an obsessive collector of war paraphernalia, who burned to death in a warehouse
holding much of his collection. The task of seeing the idea to fruition falls to his designated curator, and the
novel toggles between the story of her family's experience of war in Europe and a meticulous cataloguing of
the collection's grim holdings. The book comes most alive in bravura set pieces, such as the tale of a bow
and an axe belonging to a Chamacoco Indian who was brought from Paraguay to Prague for medical
treatment.
The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry (Custom House). This novel offers a sideways look at the Victorian age
through the story of a woman who, liberated by widowhood from a ghastly marriage, sets out to join the
male-dominated ranks of eminent natural historians. After hearing rumors of a sea monster lurking near an
English village, she and a group of friends embark on a series of adventures, arguments, and philosophical
discussions. In keeping with the period, Darwinism and tuberculosis figure prominently, and the letters
studding the novel call to mind the fun and the melodrama of "Dracula." Still, beneath their greatcoats,
Perry's Victorians are rather contemporary-chatty, lusting, and preoccupied with the virtual intimacy of
messages.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Martin, Andrew. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 87. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503410569/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89ea5973.
12/21/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513869910617 9/9
Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A503410569

Baker, Jen. "The Essex Serpent." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 60+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495035086/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017. "The Essex Serpent." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820738/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017. "Perry, Sarah: THE ESSEX SERPENT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017. Myers, Ben. "Snakes on a plain." New Statesman, 15 July 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A460574246/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017. Cummins, Anthony. "Strange sightings in Essex." Spectator, 18 June 2016, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A455406174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017. Martin, Andrew. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 87. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503410569/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/books/review-essex-serpent-sarah-perry.html
  Word count: 1364

  A Spirited Widow and a Monstrous Serpent Propel a Lush Novel
  Books of The Times

  By JENNIFER SENIOR JUNE 7, 2017

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  THE ESSEX SERPENT
  By Sarah Perry
  422 pages. Custom House/William Morrow. $26.99.

  Sarah Perry’s “The Essex Serpent” is a novel of almost insolent ambition — lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate. Set in the Victorian era, it’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. It’s wonderfully dense and serenely self-assured. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home.

  Recapitulations of plot are often dull as oats, but this novel, which took top prize at this year’s British Book Awards, spills over with so much intrigue that a plot summary can’t be helped, nor should potential readers be spared the pleasure.

  The book opens with a death, but we do not mourn the deceased (an abusive man, though at least a rich one). It’s his widow, Cora Seaborne, we care about. She ditches her whalebone corset for an oversize coat to go fossil-hunting in the Blackwater marshes of Essex with her son. He’s clearly on the autism spectrum, even if it’s never directly said, and his watchful presence is a source of both anguish and comfort to those around him.

  Cora blossoms in widowhood. It’s a pleasure to behold. Her husband was a monster.

  But not as big a monster as the one that’s haunting Essex. It seems that a giant sea dragon — “some kind of leviathan with wings of leather and a toothy grin,” in the words of an amused Londoner — is making its first appearance in the estuary since 1669. (A true scare that year, according to an author’s note. You can see the original pamphlet of warning at the British Library.) The citizens are terrified, swearing the serpent has stolen their children and broken the necks of grown men.

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  Those with unbroken necks go to extreme lengths to protect themselves. A weathered old grump named Cracknell — he wouldn’t be out of place in a novel by Annie Proulx — skins moles and strings them along his fence like chili pepper lights to keep the beast at bay. “The point is not what I see, but what I feel,” he explains to the local parson, William Ransome.

  The Victorian era was one of tremendous social and scientific progress. But it was one of woo-woo spiritualism, too, with mesmerists entrancing the ailing, and mediums trying to coax conversation from the dead. Tales of monsters and supernatural doings — by Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, to name a better-known few — sat on bookshelves alongside volumes by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. That a serpent should resurface at just the moment scales were falling away from people’s eyes is probably no accident.

  Yet Ransome has no patience for the occult. He doesn’t speak much of the Devil, either. He’s secretly put out by the parishioners who believe that the serpent has been unloosed on Essex as punishment for their sins. (“Where are your wits?” he asks Cracknell.) If this strikes you as an unusual view for a parson, you are not alone. When Ransome and Cora meet — the moment that things become really interesting — she grills him about the creature in the estuary. Why shouldn’t it be taken as a sign?

  Photo

  Sarah Perry Credit Jamie Drew
  “Our God is a god of reason and order,” he tells her, “not of visitations in the night!”

  Science and faith, he insists, do not live in mutual opposition. Cora disagrees. It is a debate they will have many times — with Cora, the society Londoner, generally coming off as the more parochial of the two.

  An electric current runs between them.

  Yet, for now, sparks will have to do. Ransome is married to a Stella, a woman as warm and radiant as her name suggests. He loves her deeply, and Cora has tremendous affection for her, too. Cora has come to Essex with Martha, her son’s nanny, who also adores Cora in her own way. So does Luke Garrett, a surgeon who treated Cora’s husband for cancer. (Bonus: The medical plotlines in “The Essex Serpent,” which run in several unexpected directions.)

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  There are enough love triangles in “The Essex Serpent” to confound Euclid himself. But the essential one, of Cora and Stella and Ransome, never reads as tawdry or tiresome, largely because all parties have plenty of love to go around. Besides, Cora is too independent-minded, too stubborn and too injured to lure Ransome away from his marriage; Stella is too ill (with consumption) to be left; and Perry has deliberately (and wisely) made Cora the opposite of a traditional feminine threat — she walks for miles, has the appetite of a longshoreman.

  “I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,” she declares, “and I was never more happy.”

  We believe her. All the women in this book insist on taking custody of their bodies in crucial ways.

  Perry’s writing engages the senses. You can almost smell the brine, the oyster, the “secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak.” When Cracknell shows up at church in a coat crawling with earwigs, you’ll spend pages squirming, wishing to pick them off; when the wet air creeps in, you’ll feel it in your own bones. “There’s a penetrating dampness coming from the walls,” Cora writes to Ransome. “It feels personal.”

  “The Essex Serpent” is also an example of what the nature writer Robert Macfarlane calls “a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape.” Perry writes of blue lias and saltings; gorse thickets and bladderwrack; coltsfoot and cowslips.

  But the real abundance here is of feelings between characters, not all of them sentimental. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book in which a man and a woman quarrel quite so much, and quite so forcefully, without something devastating coming of it. “They sharpen themselves on each other,” Perry writes of Cora and Ransome, “each by turn is blade and whetstone.”

  At times, their arguments are a bit heavy-handed, their themes too bluntly expressed. But Perry is generally light on her toes. She has to be. It takes a gentle touch to create the proper awkwardness of two people in love. “I’ve never liked the look of you (do you mind?),” Ransome writes to Cora. “But I seem to have learned you by heart.”

  Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @JenSeniorNY

  A version of this review appears in print on June 8, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Widow and a Sea Dragon. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/06/10/530794385/the-essex-serpent-spreads-its-wings
  Word count: 742

  'The Essex Serpent' Spreads Its Wings
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  June 10, 20177:00 AM ET
  ANNALISA QUINN

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  The Essex Serpent
  The Essex Serpent
  by Sarah Perry

  Hardcover, 416 pages |

  purchase

  The best kind of nature writing celebrates not the placidly, distantly picturesque — mountaintops and sunsets — but the near, dank, and teeming. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry's gloriously alive historical novel, squirms with bugs, moss and marsh.

  Liberated by the death of her brutal husband, Cora Seaborne escapes London for little Colchester — with "a ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud." She abandons the corset, the elegant town house and Victorian society for fossil-hunting and dirt under her fingernails. "I've freed myself from the obligation to try to be beautiful," she says, "and I was never more happy."

  "Had it always been here — this marvelous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-colored fungus frilling the branches at her feet?" Cora wonders.

  Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it? She supposed they had, and that it had never been very far from her door. She supposed there must have been other times when she'd laughed alone into the wet bark of a tree, or exclaimed to no one over the fineness of a fern unfolding, but she could not remember them.

  Out on the salt marshes where Cora hunts for fossils live the Reverend William Ransome and his lovely sprite of a wife ("no bigger than a fairy and twice as pretty"). Their fierce friendship, and ensuing love triangle — though mercifully not a bitter or dramatic one — forms the backbone of the novel.

  Perry is good at catching the special collective dread that enflames communities — the fear that something sinister is stirring, waiting just out of sight.

  Near the coastal village of Aldwinter, where Cora eventually moves to be closer to the Ransomes, nature is not inertly beautiful, but dangerous and alive: A sheep is sucked into the mud, boats are taken by the water, earthquakes split houses, and the residents wake in the mornings "from dreams of wet black wings."

  Those wings belong to the titular Essex Serpent, a water serpent terrorizing the village — or according to William Ransome, just rumor a born of the dead man who washed up on shore, the missing sheep, a lost child, the unseasonable darkness, and a strange waver in the line of the water. Though even he, in moments, thinks, "But was it too great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish?"

  It can't be an accident that Perry placed her story about collective panic in Essex. Not only was there really a mythical winged serpent that terrorized locals there in the 17th century, but it was the location of the notorious Essex witch trials. The self-styled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, traveled through the county, cutting women to see if they bled — if not, they were witches. Perry is good at catching the special collective dread that enflames communities — the fear that something sinister is stirring, waiting just out of sight. That gives a special magnetism to a story that needed none.

  The moments of greatest emotion happen outdoors, as if only the layered and living woods could contain them.

  The moments of greatest emotion happen outdoors, as if only the layered and living woods could contain them. "Look, we are in a cathedral," Will says, walking in the woods with Cora. The Essex Serpent made me think of a line from George Eliot, "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence," she wrote. "As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

  At its very best moments, when it shows how love, death, and regeneration all go hand-in-hand, The Essex Serpent is so painfully lovely that it removes a bit of that padding, only just as much as we can bear.

• Dear Author
  http://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/b-plus-reviews/review-the-essex-serpent-by-sarah-perry/
  Word count: 829

  September 28, 2017
  REVIEW: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
  JanineB REVIEWS / B+ REVIEWSadultery / epistolary novel / Historical / Late Victorian / Literary fiction / love triangles / vicar / widow3 Comments

  Dear Ms. Perry,

  Your novel first came to my attention when Robin, posting as Janet, reported that it won both Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. I waited impatiently for it to be published in the United States and then checked it out of the library, since my success at finishing literary novels has been spotty in recent years.

  The Essex Serpent caught my interest because it sounded like it had a lot of elements in common with what might be my favorite literary novel, Possession by A.S. Byatt. The reality was completely different from Possession, despite the presence of letter exchanges, romantic triangles, naturalism and a sea serpent, as well as a Victorian setting.

  Set in late Victorian England over the better part of a year (1893), this is an observant novel, with a lot of interesting historical detail. The main characters are Cora Seaborne, a politician’s widow from London, and William Ransome, a married vicar from Aldwinter, a village in Essex.

  Cora’s late husband, Michael, was abusive, and his death has freed her. She and her companion, Martha (a socialist feminist who loves Cora), as well as her young, neuroatypical son, Francis, come to Essex and are introduced to Will, his wife Stella, and their three children, by mutual friends.

  Besides these, residing in London are the mutual friends, Charles, a middle-aged, complacent politician, and his wife Katherine, as well as Luke, the surgeon who operated on Cora’s husband and who is also in love with her, and his friend Spencer, who loves Martha.

  Though Martha doesn’t reciprocate Spencer’s feelings, she is aware of them and uses them to encourage him to put some of his wealth and clout behind a humane solution to London’s urban housing crisis. Edward, one of Luke’s patients, whom Martha is interested in, is another London character the book follows.

  In Essex, we encounter Thomas Taylor, a panhandler, and a few villagers—Bates, a fisherman, his daughter, Naomi, a friend to Will’s teenage daughter Joanna, Cracknell, who lives by the estuary, and others in the village of Aldwinter.

  Most of the villagers fear that the Essex Serpent, a sea monster rumored for centuries to reside in the estuary, has returned and is responsible for a drowning and some other recent misfortunes. Will tries to steer his parishioners to be more rational, with little success; Cora, meanwhile, has a strong interest in naturalism and believes the serpent may be a living fossil (dinosaur) that she hopes to be credited with discovering.

  Soon after Cora and Will meet, a friendship fraught with attraction develops between them. Stella, Will’s wife, is at first tolerant and later subtly uneasy with it, while Luke and Martha seethe with resentment.

  Will and Cora’s romance is a quiet one, steeped in the details of their ordinary lives but also in their intellectual interests. You give a lot of attention to the setting, from the omnipresent mud to the blue flowers and trinkets that Stella collects, as well as to the scientific beliefs of the times, the London housing crisis, and to social interactions. The novel feels well-paced; it’s not rushed but nor does it drag.

  The book has what I think of as the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream trope — most everyone is in love with someone who loves someone else — but unlike Shakespeare, you don’t play that for laughs. On the other hand, you don’t go as tragic with it as you could have either, and I was glad of it. The threat of tragedy is there, and it lingers over much of the book, but never quite envelops it. There are also occasional touches of humor, a nice sense of the absurd.

  The main external conflict is between science and religion, reason and superstition. This is primarily reflected in Will’s struggle with his community, but Will and Cora’s internal conflicts parallels this conflict. Neither wants to feel the emotions they feel, but their feelings stubbornly stick around, driving them to make choices they don’t entirely understand and can’t reason away.

  The strongest element in the book, for me, was the fervor in the villagers’ superstition, the infectious nature of their insistence that what they felt must supersede what rational logic or science might say. I was reminded of some of the issues our own society faces today.

  Ultimately, The Essex Serpent wasn’t revelatory, but I did find it both interesting and quietly satisfying. B/B+.

  Sincerely,

  Janine

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-most-delightful-heroine-since-elizabeth-bennet/2017/06/05/64805410-4795-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.67ea2482d611
  Word count: 1116

  Books
  The most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet
  By Ron Charles June 5
  2:36
  Dinosaurs are still out there in 'The Essex Serpent,' and Ron Charles finds them

  0:00

  (Ron Charles/The Washington Post)

  Standing at the shoreline on a calm, moonless night, you can hear a low-pitched roar. Some say it’s just the waves; others claim it’s a winged monster swimming through the watery depths. But it’s actually the sound of thousands of fans cheering for “The Essex Serpent,” an irresistible new novel by Sarah Perry.

  (Custom House)
  Last month, “The Essex Serpent” won the British Book Award, and it’s already sold more than 250,000 copies, which should convince any skeptic that this slippery beast is real.

  There have been sightings for months in America: tantalizing tweets, shots of its gorgeous cover on Instagram, breathless reports from tourists vacationing in London. But now the novel has finally washed up on our shores.

  Admittedly, the Loch Ness Monster has better PR, but the Flying Serpent of Essex has been terrifying residents since it was first reported in 1669. Perry sets her story near that spot in a fictional village called Aldwinter more than 200 years later. In the enlightened 1890s, the creatures of mythology have been banished by the discoveries of paleontology, but — as we’re still hearing today — the science remains unsettled.

  That tension between science and belief persists throughout “The Essex Serpent,” which is both charmingly Victorian and subtly modern. As the story opens, the good people of Aldwinter are wondering whether an earthquake has unloosed their old monster from the estuary depths. How else to explain the body of a man found on the saltings with his neck broken? Yes, it’s possible he was drunk and tripped, but maybe he was attacked by the old scaly beast. Who’s to say? Real or imagined, the serpent slithers through the public imagination, coiling around each resident’s private guilt.

  Into this conflicted village, Perry brings Cora Seaborne, the most delightful heroine I’ve encountered since Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” Newly widowed, Cora is finally released from her abusive husband in London and free to spend his fortune however she pleases. She worries only that she might “betray her shameful happiness.”

  “I laugh when I shouldn’t,” she admits. “I know I don’t give what’s expected of me . . . these last few weeks I’ve thought over and over that there was never a greater difference between what I ought to be, and what I am.” Hearing of the recent fossil discoveries in Essex, she decides to follow in the footsteps of the paleontologist Mary Anning and see whether she can’t find some petrified bones of her own. Or perhaps there’s something even more vital swimming around Aldwinter. After all, as Cora tells a friend, “Charles Lyell was firmly of the opinion that an ichthyosaur might turn up.”

  Author Sarah Perry (Jamie Drew)
  What definitely turns up is an absorbing story told in a style that’s antique without being dated, rich but never pretentious. The narrative sometimes shifts into an interchange of intimate letters, a bittersweet reminder of what we gave up to send each other emoji and self-destructing snapshots. Raised on the classics and the Bible, Perry creates that delicate illusion of the best historical fiction: an authentic sense of the past — its manners, ideals and speech — that feels simultaneously distant and relevant to us.

  If “The Essex Serpent” never unearths an actual dinosaur, it more than compensates by excavating the character of its extraordinary heroine, a woman determined not to let anyone repress her again. Arriving in Aldwinter, Cora meets the town’s handsome minister, the Rev. William Ransome, and the two of them immediately begin sparring over the evidence of things not seen. In Perry’s hands, flirting is raised to elegant perfection, a clash of intellects electrified by desire. “Each considers the other to have a fatal flaw in their philosophy which ought by rights to exclude a friendship,” she writes, “and are a little baffled to discover it does nothing of the kind.” The Rev. Ransome decries the widow’s faith in materiality; Cora mocks the minster’s blindness to anything new. He’s happily married with three children, but it’s clear he adores this provocative, witty woman.

  Indeed, everybody in the novel adores Cora — I adore her — and who can blame us? “Her presence,” the reverend confesses to himself, “is impossible to ignore, however hard one tried.” Cultured but dismissive of all pretense, beautiful but entirely unconcerned about her appearance, Cora tromps around the shore looking for bones while a parade of admirers pine for her.

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  Those characters caught in Cora’s gravitational field allow Perry to explore a variety of political and social issues we’re still wrestling with today. Cora’s only child is autistic, though no such diagnosis exists to keep Cora from feeling she simply isn’t a sufficiently loving mother. Her most persistent suitor is a surgeon pushing aggressively against the limits and inhibitions of medical science. His best friend hopes to alleviate the housing crisis in London, where the government, like our new administration, is determined to make sure that any assistance comes with a bitter dollop of humiliation. And Cora’s female companion is a socialist trying to move uncompromised between the worlds of the rich and poor. They all circulate through the stratified society that Perry re-creates — from elegant drawing rooms to dark back alleys, from a London hospital to a country church.

  By the end, “The Essex Serpent” identifies a mystery far greater than some creature “from the illuminated margins of a manuscript”: friendship. That’s a phenomenon we discount in romantic comedies and too often take for granted in real life. But in the fertile environment of this novel, Cora is determined to identify a species of devotion between men and women that doesn’t involve subjugation. She may be digging in the past, but she’s clearly looking to the future.

  Ron Charles is the editor of Book World.

  THE ESSEX SERPENT
  By Sarah Perry

  Custom House. 416 pp. $26.99

  We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/16/the-essex-serpent-sarah-perry-review-novel
  Word count: 1385

  The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry review – a compulsive novel of ideas
  An Essex village is terrorised by a winged leviathan in a gothic Victorian tale crammed with incident, character and plot

  A woodcut from a 1669 pamphlet called ‘The Flying Serpent or Strange News Out of Essex’
  A woodcut from a 1669 pamphlet called ‘The Flying Serpent or Strange News Out of Essex’.
  M John Harrison

  Thu 16 Jun ‘16 02.30 EDT Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17 05.34 EST
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  In Sarah Perry’s second novel, 1890s London is mad about the sciences, 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. New 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, she leaves the capital for the wilds of Essex. There, “never sure of the difference between thinking and believing”, she hears of the Essex Serpent, a folktale apparently come to life and terrorising the Blackwater estuary; and meets its spiritual adversary, the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, with whom she is soon entangled in a relationship of voluble opposition and unspoken attraction.

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  Perry’s excellent debut, After Me Comes the Flood, was short and strange, 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, the effect being of something not fully told, yet fully present; not quite visible, yet producing a troubled enchantment. The Essex Serpent, by contrast, is fully acted out. Fertile, open, vocal about its own origins and passions, crammed with incident, characters and plot, it weighs in at a sturdy 441 pages. It is a novel of ideas, though its sensibility is firmly, consciously, even a little cheekily, gothic. The dreamy delivery of the previous book becomes, in this one, outright story. Narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading, very difficult to avoid being dragged into Aldwinter’s dark and sometimes darkly comic waters.

  Since the discovery after new year celebrations of a drowned man, “naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his eyes”, the village has felt itself “under judgment”. Why has the serpent – which last terrorised the locality with its leathery wings and snapping beak in 1669 – returned? What have the villagers done wrong? They’re a simple, pagan lot, stringing up dead animals to scare it off, hanging horseshoes in the branches of a tree known as Traitor’s Oak. Even the children are performing rituals, down by the water. With Cora’s arrival, everything ramps up, and an outbreak of madness at the school leads to a disastrous attempt to hypnotise the rector’s daughter. A winged leviathan “with eyes like a sheep”, which causes men to lose their reason and never find it again: the author’s glee at all this hugger-mugger is barely hidden.

  Perry artfully exploits her monster’s symbolic potential, leaving the reader to sort the many subtexts from the good red herrings, displaying both with a collectorly enthusiasm, on equal terms. It’s a trick of the light, a tale told to frighten children, a story sold to tourists; it’s an upwelling of individual or collective guilt, a blatant sexual symbol hauling itself like Bram Stoker’s White Worm out of the Blackwater estuary in convulsions of Victorian anxiety. It’s an Aesculapian metaphor and a cheerful pastiche of “eerie England”. In some lights and on some days, according to whose point of view Perry is inhabiting at the time, it represents nothing less than the Essex landscape – its coils being the Blackwater’s moods and weathers, the skilfully depicted serpentine passage of its year. For Cora, a woman who wants more from life than choosing a skirt to wear at the Savoy, it is less a serpent than the possibility of a genuine Palaeozoic survival, a living ichthyosaur – a taste of the surprise, the delight, the opening-out of the world promised by feminism and the death of her husband. For the rector of Aldwinter, it is a nuisance.

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  Sarah Perry. Photograph: Jamie Drew
  In reducing the certainties of his parishioners, William believes, science has left them deep in explanatory failure. People need the security of religion, or they begin to invent demons. Besides, he says, geology and evolution are only today’s intellectual fads; tomorrow, something else will come along, and then something else again, theory replacing theory and nothing settled. We need God, he believes, if we are to remain rational. Cora’s modernity, meanwhile, confuses him further. She is rich and attractive, but dresses like a bag lady and so energetically breaks stones in search of specimens that the air around her reeks of cordite. She hasn’t so much lost her faith, as willingly given it up in exchange for the freedom to think. There are “no fewer miracles,” she tells him, “in the microscope than in the gospels”. They already agree on this, in a way: their oppositions so obviously stem from a shared immersion in the Victorian sublime, the fall into the “miracle” of the natural world.

  But, of course, there is more to folie à deux than a sense of wonder, and intellectual attraction can cover a multitude of sins. Eventually they strike sparks off each other once too often, as we knew they would. The consequences ripple away to perturb their circle of friends: Luke Garrett, London’s finest young surgeon, whose hands are so clever he can sew up a pericardial sac, desperately in love with Cora since page one; George Spencer, a rich man trying to approach socialism through his doomed admiration for Cora’s companion; the rector’s beautiful wife Stella, racked with consumption, who writes in her diary, “HE sent the serpent into Eden’s beflowered garden/and he sends it now and the penance must be paid … ”; Charles and Katherine Ambrose, high-ranking conservatives with hearts of gold, who, safe and secure, will always do their generous best to pick up the pieces nearest, dearest or most familiar to them. Inadvertent emotional damage is the novel’s other major theme. “What use,” Francis the autistic child asks at one point, crawling out from under the table, “to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.”

  This volatility infects the politics of the novel: the narrative, moving restlessly between the city and the marshes, concerns itself increasingly with “the problem of London”, the relationship between governance, business and poverty summed up in slum renting, slum life – the endless, insoluble matter of how privilege can be persuaded to act outside its own interests, or even see beyond its own limits. In the tenement dwellers of Bethnal Green, Charles Ambrose – otherwise, we are led to believe, a decent man – sees “not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race”. From this distance it seems impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perry extends her considerable generosity not just to her characters but to the whole late Victorian period, with its fears for the present and curious faith in the future; at the same time she is asking clearly, how do we do better than that? Life is an excitable medium. Every thoughtless act knocks on. How do we forgive, mend, give ourselves space to breathe, move forward?

  • M John Harrison’s latest novel is Empty Space (Gollancz). To order The Essex Serpent for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-essex-serpent-by-sarah-perry-book-review-a-thing-of-beauty-inside-and-out-a7072981.html
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  The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry - book review: A thing of beauty inside and out
  For only a second novel it’s a stunning achievement, one worthy of prize nominations galore, from the Wellcome to the Man Booker

  Lucy Scholes Thursday 9 June 2016 15:13 BST2 comments

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  Serpent’s Tail
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  Sarah Perry’s new novel The Essex Serpent is a thing of beauty inside and out. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned a book’s cover in a review before, but Peter Dyer’s William Morris-inspired design is stunning, a tantalizing taste of the equally sumptuous prose that lies within.

  Set at the very end of the nineteenth century, the Essex marshes become Perry’s Dover Beach, the setting for a three-way clash between science, religion and superstition, three serpents entwined: the snake of Asclepius coiling round its staff, that from the Garden of Eden, and a mythical terrible beast, “a monstrous serpent with eyes like a sheep, come out of the Essex waters and up to the birch woods and commons,” claiming human and animal lives alike.

  The Essex Estuary abounds with fearful rumours of the latter, but Cora Seabourne – a young widow and aspiring Mary Anning, recently arrived from London – is convinced it’s a previously undiscovered “living fossil.” Meanwhile, William Ransome, the local vicar – a man whose faith is one of “enlightenment and clarity,” not blood, brimstone and darkness – is unconvinced by either explanation.

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  When it comes to historical fiction, Perry’s achieved the near impossible; she’s created a novel and within it a world that seems to have sprung complete and fully formed directly from the period in question – a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic classic – but her characters are as enticingly modern as they are of their period.

  Cora is about as far from a stereotypical Victorian wife as one can imagine – unconcerned with looking pretty and in possession of exceptional (“masculine”) intelligence – William as questioning as he is devout, and the host of other characters with which they are surrounded are pushing for welfare reforms and medical advances.

  Each of whom is beautifully rendered – their desires real and raw, and their pleasures and pains deeply felt. In terms of contemporary comparisons, I was reminded of Sarah Moss’s Victorian-set novels Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children: the two authors linked by period and a concern with medicine, but also a similar masterful but understated command of their subject.

  Perry also showcases the most beguiling evocations of landscape. “Colchester. Colchester! What is there at Colchester? A ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud,” someone asks Cora. So much more, Perry goes on to prove! For only a second novel it’s a stunning achievement, one for which I predict prize nominations galore, from the Wellcome to the Man Booker.

• Christian Science Monitor
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  Word count: 1036

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  'The Essex Serpent' pits nature against faith in a fabulous summer read
  A Loch Ness-like monster last seen in the late 1600s rears its head again in this delightful novel set in the Victorian era.

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  JUNE 19, 2017 —A young woman sets off to find a dragon in Sarah Perry’s enchanting new novel.

  The Essex Serpent, which won the British Book Awards' book of the year prize, is one of the most satisfying Victorian-set novels I’ve read in years. If “Middlemarch” heroine Dorothea Brooke had heard of dinosaurs, she might have gone tromping through the salt marshes with Cora Seaborne.

  Cora was a budding naturalist before she was married off to a much older man as a teenager. “On her nineteenth birthday she exchanged birdsong for feathered fans, crickets in the long grass for a jacket dotted with beetles’ wings; she was bound by whalebone, pierced with ivory, pinned by the hair with tortoiseshell,” Perry writes.

  Now, her inventively cruel husband is dead, and Cora is ready to come down from her display case and live. Intrigued by reports of a mysterious sea beast in Essex, she dreams that an ichthyosaur somehow survived to the Victorian age and that she will get the opportunity to go paleontologist Mary Anning and her dog one better than a bunch of bones. Cora, her son, Francis, who is autistic in a time that didn’t have the word for it, and her companion Martha, set up among "a ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud."

  Locals in the village of Aldwinter, meanwhile, could be more properly be described as aghast at the reported return of the serpent, which was first spotted swooping down on sheep in 1669. “I daresay you’ve heard tell of the Essex Serpent, which once was the terror of Henham and Wormingford, and has been seen again?” a local asks an entranced Cora and skeptical Martha.

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  The rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, is at a loss to comfort his flock without feeding their superstition, which his religious study tells him cannot be real. “[W]hat comfort could he offer which would not also affirm their sudden fear? He could not do it, any more than he could say to John, who so often woke at night, you and I will go together at midnight and slay the creature that lives under your bed.”

  Perry sets up a nice juxtaposition: The man of faith is the one reluctant to believe in superstition, while the woman of science is eager to have the old wives’ tale made flesh. The two form a debating society of two, but their verbal sparring and deep attraction face a beautiful, if delicate, impediment: Will’s wife, Stella, whom he loves and who Cora adores as a friend.

  The novel is full of characters with impossible longings: There is Luke, the brilliant but poor doctor who tended the late Mr. Seaborne while becoming smitten with his widow. Luke’s wealthy friend Charles Spencer, who leaves money on the floor where his absentminded friend might find it and longs to be useful, is smitten with Martha, a labor rights firebrand who stuck by Cora through her horrific marriage.

  Will is not one for dry and dusty sermons. If anything, he loves the natural world as much as Cora. “His was not the kind of religion lived only in rule or rubric, as if he were a civil servant and God the permanent secretary of a celestial government department. He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars: when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out.”

  He explains sin to Francis by teaching him how to skip stones. “That’s all it is,” said Will. “To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time – and so we try again.”

  Cora, meanwhile could not be more gleeful outside the confines of London society (or oblivious to her legion of admirers). She ditches her corset, trades slippers for boots, and writes to Luke, “you know I’ve always thought beauty a curse and am more than happy to dispense with it completely. Sometimes I forget that I’m a woman – at least I forget to THINK OF MYSELF AS A WOMAN.”

  Instead, she regales the local schoolchildren with “the tale of a woman who’d once found a sea-dragon encased in mud; and how all the earth was a graveyard with gods and monsters under their feet, waiting for weather or a hammer and brush to bring them up to a new kind of life.”

  While the serpent itself proves a slippery beast, Perry brilliantly describes how fear can slither through a population, mesmerizing as it goes. Cora thinks of dinosaurs the way tweens today regard unicorns. But, like Will, she comes to believe that Aldwinter has more to fear from its own terror than any creature from the deep. “I think the whole village is haunted. Only – I think they’re haunting themselves,” she says.

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  The nature of faith and faith in nature intertwine throughout Perry’s novel, which has an abiding respect for friendship and a deep humanity. A man Luke saves with an experimental operation tells Martha, not without bitterness, “they tell me I’m a miracle, or whatever does for miracles these days.”

  “There are no ordinary lives,” Martha tells him. And in Perry’s marshy world of the saltings and science, that’s true enough.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/19/the-essex-serpent-review-victorian-gothic-compelling
  Word count: 259

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  The Observer
  The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry review – love, faith and geology
  The author’s blend of historical romance and gothic mystery is pure pleasure

  Sarah Perry, whose debut nobel has a ‘wonderful freshness’.
  Sarah Perry, whose novel has a ‘wonderful freshness’. Photograph: Jamie Drew
  Stephanie Cross

  Sun 19 Jun ‘16 04.59 EDT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 11.33 EST
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  Just what is the Essex serpent? Foul beast of legend, divine judgment or, as widowed young amateur geologist Cora suspects, a living fossil that somehow eluded extinction in the inscrutable depths of the Blackwater estuary? Curiosity piqued, she decamps to briny Aldwinter, where her friendship with local vicar Will blossoms, and faith and reason – indeed faith and freedom - tussle.

  A Victorian-era gothic with a Dickensian focus on societal ills, Perry’s second novel surprises in its wonderful freshness. There’s a sense of Llareggub about close-knit Aldwinter, its flint church, historic oak and ribby shipwreck instantly present, while the tapestry of voices that results from the use of letters amplifies the Under Milk Wood echo. Perry’s singular characters are drawn with a fondness that is both palpable and contagious, and the beautifully observed changing seasons permitted space to breathe, all making for pure pleasure.

  The Essex Serpent is published by Profile (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99

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• Newsday
  https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/the-essex-serpent-review-sarah-perry-s-novel-of-19th-century-england-tackles-big-ideas-plus-a-mythical-monster-1.13668022
  Word count: 883

  ENTERTAINMENT
  ‘The Essex Serpent’ review: Sarah Perry’s novel of 19th century England tackles big ideas, plus a mythical monster
  Sarah Perry, author of
  Sarah Perry, author of "The Essex Serpent." Photo Credit: Jamie Drew

  By Katherine A. Powers
  Special to Newsday
  Updated May 29, 2017 6:00 AM
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  THE ESSEX SERPENT, by Sarah Perry. Custom House/William Morrow, 416 pp., $26.99.

  Sarah Perry’s second novel, “The Essex Serpent,” which has won some major awards in Britain where it was published last year, begins with a glimpse of the creature of its title: “something vast, hunched, grimly covered over with rough and lapping scales.” It is New Year’s Eve 1891, near the little Essex village of Aldwinter off the Blackwater estuary. The man who spots this apparition is, in fact, far gone in his cups, but the region has been abuzz with rumors that an ancient dragon has returned. Strange and awful happenings continue to be reported: a baby snatched, a sheep gutted, a man gone mad, another found dead in the marshes, “naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his wide-open eyes.” Perhaps the beast was released from its lair by the terrible earthquake of eight years ago; perhaps it has been sent by an angry God as punishment for the villagers’ sins.

  Into this drama and perturbation steps Cora Seaborne, a recently widowed Londoner, now released from a marriage that was cruel and degrading on a Brontëan scale. She is a student of Darwin’s theory of evolution and devoted to paleontology and has come to the region having read of great fossil finds. News of the supposed serpent in the Blackwater estuary sends her off to Aldwinter in a great ferment. She hopes to the point of belief that it is a survivor from millions of years ago and “evidence,” as she explains to a friend, “that it’s an ancient world we live in, that our debt is to natural progression, not some divinity.”

  Cora is accompanied by her son, Francis, an odd, affectless 11-year-old boy, and his nanny, Martha, a confirmed and vocal socialist. The cast of characters grows to include the rector of Aldwinter, William Ransome, a man of rational religion, his consumptive wife, Stella, and their children, one of whom, Joanna, is given to self-styled pagan rituals. William detests all this serpent talk, which has resulted in terror, superstitious practices and religious mania. Though he and Cora form a close — too close — friendship, he doesn’t care for her Darwinism either. He believes it’s a fad and worse: a symptom of orthodox religion’s loosening bonds which, as the hysteria over this monster shows, have led people into “folly and darkness.”

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  The coastal setting that Perry conjures so beautifully allows these sentiments to flourish. To the superstitious, the Blackwater estuary’s willful tides, deceptions of light and aura of the primeval suggest the existence of a beast, “implacable, monstrous, born in water”; to Cora, who longs to see a creature from the primordial past, the same effects are exhilarating.

  Meanwhile, back in London, further plot lines are developing apace. Luke Garrett, a brilliant surgeon who fell in love with Cora while attending her husband in his last illness, is galled by her letters, which are filled with reports on her friend the vicar. Some reprieve from Luke’s misery comes when the opportunity arises to perform pathbreaking cardiac surgery on a stabbing victim, Edward Burton. The operation, one of Perry’s several fine period vignettes, is simply enthralling — capturing the weirdness of inner organs laid bare, the techniques of 19th-century surgery and the excruciating tension of performing a delicate, unprecedented procedure.

  Edward Burton’s story now laces itself into the weave as, during his recuperation, he and Martha, who comes to visit him, grow close, both sharing views on the wretched state of the London poor. Martha has another admirer in the shape of the wealthy George Spencer whom she finds odious on class lines — though she does, opportunistically, draw him (and his money) into her schemes for housing reform. Subplots proliferate, ideas do battle and cases of unrequited love continue to multiply.

  As “The Essex Serpent” is a novel in which ideas play a big part, some of the characters are more posited than convincing. Still, Cora, especially, is a full human. Her experience of marriage to a virtuoso of subtle, undermining cruelty is briefly, but powerfully described. With her husband’s death she is freed and becomes for a time the sort of lead woman one finds in pretty much every historical novel these days: independent-minded, physically vigorous and contemptuous of fashion. But Perry does not leave it at that. A couple of crucial events allow the admirable Cora to see that she has been blundering along, complacent about herself and, in fact, guilty of selfishness and cruelty. These reversals and sharp darts of psychological insight combined with a sense of the substance and feeling of late 19th-century ideas in bloom — make this a fine novel, both historical and otherwise.

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/the-essex-serpent-sarah-perry.html
  Word count: 538

  A Mythological Beast Haunts a Village in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent
  By Bridey Heing | June 9, 2017 | 2:00pm
  BOOKS REVIEWS SARAH PERRY
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  A Mythological Beast Haunts a Village in Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent
  Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent was one of the most beloved and acclaimed books of 2016 in the UK, and it has finally reached U.S. shores this week. The story of a woman who finds herself swept up in a village myth is as engrossing as its reputation would suggest, evoking a time when fact and fantasy blended—and when monsters could still be real.

  When Cora Seaborne’s husband passes away in 1893, she takes her son Francis and her companion Martha to hunt for fossils in rural Essex. Soon after arriving, she is introduced to William Ransome, a vicar in the village of Aldwinter, and his wife Stella, a fairy-like woman with a knack for gossip and an unshakeable flu. Along with two medical students with whom Cora became acquainted during her husband’s illness—the “impish” Luke Garrett and the wealthy George Spencer—and the well-connected Ambrose family, Cora carves out an eccentric life for herself surrounded by “everyone who’s ever loved [her] and everyone [she’s] ever loved.”

  1essexserpentcover.jpgBut the Essex Serpent, a winged sea dragon accused of killing sheep and causing inexplicable drownings, supposedly haunts Aldwinter. It’s not the first time the serpent has terrified the town, but as science encroaches on legend, it becomes unclear how to deal with a creature believed to be a sign of God’s judgment. William and Cora, the former a man of faith and the latter a woman of science, are bonded by rumors of the beast. But friction results as William wants to lay the rumors to rest and Cora wants to prove them. Another monster haunts Cora as well: the memory of a cruel husband whose physical and psychological abuse lingers.

  Perry brilliantly weaves together multiple characters’ narratives, from the unconventional Cora to the socialist Martha to the darkly curious Luke. They appear to circle one another, drawn together by unlikely circumstances and sharing a sense of camaraderie that is truly charming. But as book’s tension grows and jarring incidents take place with more frequency, the line between reality and mystery blurs. If all it takes is an idea to cause a mental or physical reaction, what does that mean for the nature of truth?

  Throughout The Essex Serpent, Perry’s command of language as a tool to evoke time and place proves remarkable. One can feel the Victorian push-and-pull between scientific understanding and long-held pagan fears, as children cast spells and men hang animals for protection. The threat of a prehistoric beast feels real—until a wry joke from Cora or William clips its wings. This, combined with the emotional depth between characters, creates something wholly unique. Intimacy and humor coexist alongside anxiety and fear, forging a narrative that is compelling and chilling by turns.

  Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.

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  Word count: 904

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  An eerie tale set in the Essex marshes on the cusp of the modern age
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  Review by Alex Preston

  JUNE 3, 2016 1
  Sarah Perry’s dark and evocative first novel, After Me Comes the Flood (2014), merged gothic phantasmagoria with a country-house mystery in one of the most strange and unsettling debuts of recent years. It had reviewers reaching for comparisons from Kafka to Sebald, although it was, to Perry’s credit, not all that much like either, but instead a thrillingly original novel that summoned an almost physical sense of unease in the reader. It was memorable for a distant, haunted first-person voice and for the dreamlike rendering of a drought-scorched Norfolk landscape.

  In her engaging second novel, Perry has once again drawn on her ability to conjure the eerie and uncanny — she wrote her PhD thesis on the gothic in Iris Murdoch. The Essex Serpent is the story of the brilliant, damaged, independent-minded Cora Seaborne, recently widowed wife of a brutal politician husband. While Cora is a compelling enough character, it is in the supporting cast that the novel really finds its life. Cora is attended by idealistic proto-Communist Martha; spars with talented young surgeon Luke Garrett; and finds herself patronised by one of her late husband’s colleagues, the genial and gluttonous Charles Ambrose. There’s also Cora’s creepily distant son, Francis, who hardly seems to notice the death of his father and obsessively collects trinkets that he imbues with secret significance.

  The late 19th-century Essex of this book is trapped in a winter that never bursts into spring. Everything is cold, damp and rimy when Cora, freed from her husband’s malevolent influence, comes to Colchester in search of fossils and freedom. Colchester isn’t up to much — “a ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud” — and so she makes her way to the fictional village of Aldwinter, out on the marshes. The vicar there, William Ransome, is an Oxford man trapped between the Bible and Darwin, choosing to bring his family out to the wetlands as a way of avoiding the inevitable collision between his faith and the modern world.

  The serpent of the title is a monster “with eyes like a sheep, come out of the Essex waters and up to the birch woods and commons”. There is a serpent carved on one of the pews of Ransome’s church, and he finds himself fighting a losing battle against the shadow that the beast, which is thought to lurk in the misty half-light of the marshes, casts over his flock. Ransome’s wife Stella is a sickly woman, prone to visions, and encourages their children to believe in the myth of the serpent. I was reminded of the dragon in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant — the serpent here seems to be the spirit of some terrible wrong, reaching out of the black waters to seize livestock, children, hope from the land. “It was all because of something they’d done and forgotten and never repented,” one of the characters says of the beast.

  What this wrong might be slowly becomes clear as Martha sets about improving the lives of the working poor in London. The Victorian bourgeoisie is presented as violent and immoral, building its fortune on the corpses of the poor: “Rooms were sublet, and sublet again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.” The monstrous modern age will reach even as far as Aldwinter, the novel is saying, and the people can smell its rancid breath.

  On the book’s cover, John Burnside compares The Essex Serpent to Dickens and Stoker. But it was one of my favourite novels, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), that kept coming back to me. The narrator of Gray’s novel says that her tale “positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth”; Perry takes apart our preconceptions of prim Victorian mores with similar gusto.

  The Essex Serpent is a historical novel with an entirely modern consciousness, and is every bit as gripping and unusual as its predecessor.

  Alex Preston is the author of ‘Love and War’ (Faber)

  The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry, Serpent’s Tail, RRP£14.99, 432 pages

• New York Journal of Books
  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/essex-serpent
  Word count: 1056

  The Essex Serpent: A Novel
  Image of The Essex Serpent: A Novel
  Author(s):
  Sarah Perry
  Release Date:
  June 5, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Custom House
  Pages:
  432
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  D. R. Meredith
  “The Essex Serpent is a masterpiece of a novel . . . Sarah Perry has written a multifaceted novel with universal appeal.”

  Lush descriptive narrative, complex plotting, well-defined characters, and a setting both realistic and fantastical combine to create a stunning historical novel that explores the feminist identity, as well as the dichotomy of science versus faith. Sarah Perry has succeeded on many different levels with The Essex Serpent, British Book Awards Book of the year. At last, a prize-winning novel that is also compelling reading.

  When Cora Seaborne’s respected and controlling husband dies, she follows the unwritten but well-understood Victorian conventions of widowhood: black bonnet with veil and black plumes; black dress whose neckline reveals the scar on her collarbone; and black fabric-covered buttons that don’t quite meet at the cuffs, as Cora’s grief doesn’t quite meet Society’s demands.

  “The sensation was decently suppressed, but all the same she could name it: it was not happiness, precisely, nor even contentment, but relief. There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he’d been by the end, he’d formed her, at least in part—and what good ever came of self-loathing?”

  Perry’s subtle way of conveying Cora’s husband’s abusive nature through the scar on Cora’s collarbone that just so happens to match the engraving on a silver candlestick is masterful understatement evokes the image of a domestic beast being branded.

  Also very subtle is Cora’s realization that part of her personality is the result of her dead husband’s manipulation. “On her nineteenth birthday she exchanged birdsong for feathered fans, crickets in the long grass for a jacket dotted with beetles’ wings; she was bound by whalebone, pierced with ivory, pinned by the hair with tortoiseshell.”

  But all that is past and Cora begins to revert to her previous form, a curious mind with a bent for scientific inquiry, and the determination to never let another person tell her how to think or what to do. When she hears of the reappearance of the Essex Serpent, a supposed sea monster that has haunted the Backwater, the marshes of Essex for more than three hundred years, Cora takes up residence on the Essex coast with her odd, obsessive 11-year-old son Francis, and Martha, his nanny and Cora’s loyal friend.

  Cora’s friends, especially Dr. Luke Garrett, who is in love with Cora nearly as much as he is in love with the idea of performing surgery on the human heart, are unbelieving that a resident of London, a widow of a socially prominent man, can be happy in rural Essex.

  Cora, while she sees the drawbacks of the Essex town of Colchester, enjoys her opportunity to be untidy, mud-splattered, and free of Society’s demands. “. . . removed from London’s gaze had abandoned her dutiful mourning and receded ten years to a merrier self.”

  At the urging of her friends Cora becomes acquainted with a country vicar, William Ransome, who is the polar opposite of Cora, a man dependent on his religious faith who views the Essex Serpent as imaginary. “In the year past, with the coming of the Essex Serpent (which he took to calling “the Trouble,” reluctant to christen a rumor), claims on his time had grown steadily greater.”

  The tiny parish of Aldwinter is certain the Essex Serpent is a judgement from God on its residents, which Will Ransome views with impatience. His growing impatience is increased with the coming of Cora, who believes the serpent is some as-yet-undiscovered sea creature, a surviving dinosaur.

  As might be expected, Cora’s and Will’s opposing views on not only the serpent, but on religion and science, lead to heated debate. Unspoken and unadmitted is the growing love between the two, a love that must be suppressed as Will is not only married, but his wife Stella is dying of tuberculosis.

  The secondary characters are so well developed that they might be considered major characters in a novel less well-plotted and well-written. Luke Garrett with his obsession on heart surgery, not approved during Victorian times; George Spenser, Garrett’s friend—in fact, his only friend—is in love with Martha, Francis’s nanny and Cora’s friend. Martha, on the other hand, is in love with socialism to the exclusion of human affection except for Cora.

  The most interesting minor character is Francis, Cora’s son. With knowledge of mental disorders almost nonexistent, Francis is dismissed as an odd child, uncomfortable to be around with his obsessive counting and collecting of objects. Autism is an unrecognized condition in Victorian times, so Francis’s inability to experience appropriate emotional responses and his dislike of being physically touched are just other examples of his oddness. What surprises Cora and Martha is the affinity between Francis and Will’s wife, Stella. As Stella nears death she also becomes obsessive, collecting any object that is blue.

  In one respect Francis’s inability to feel appropriate human emotion mirrors Cora’s and Will’s deliberate suppression of emotion, just as Martha’s love of a political agenda leads indirectly to the wounding and crippling of Luke Garrett. Marth’s love for the masses rather than her love for the individual, excepting for Cora, is akin to Francis’s detachment from emotion.

  The Essex Serpent is a masterpiece of a novel that can be read on several different levels: a story of one woman’s determinism to be free of convention, a testimonial to feminism, a political statement, an exploration of one man’s faith and one woman’s denial of such faith. Sarah Perry has written a multifaceted novel with universal appeal.

  D. R. Meredith is the author of fifteen mystery novels, two historical sagas, a TV novelization, several short stories, and innumerable book reviews.

• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-essex-serpent-by-sarah-perry-review-an-engrossing-mystery-1.2689110
  Word count: 1021

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  The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry review: an engrossing mystery
  The language is exquisite and the characters memorable in this distinctive historical novel

  Sarah Perry: sustains a convincing atmosphere
  Sarah Perry: sustains a convincing atmosphere

  Sinead Gleeson

  Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 01:39

  First published:
  Sat, Jun 18, 2016, 01:39

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  The Essex Serpent

  ISBN-13:
  9781781255445

  Author:
  Sarah Perry

  Publisher:
  Serpent's Tail

  Guideline Price:
  £14.99

  Sarah Perry’s 2015 novel After Me Comes the Flood was a hugely impressive debut: taut, claustrophobic and original. The story of a man who embarks on a journey to live with strangers, it was expertly told. Its sense of mystery and strangeness was magnified by a tone that was both consistent and confident. Tone can be a tricky thing to get right, to create and sustain a convincing atmosphere. It’s a necessary kind of scaffolding, but character and story must be able to stand up by themselves.

  This ability, and Perry’s distinctive grasp of language are in evidence once more in The Essex Serpent. Due to its 1890s setting, it may be reductively labelled as historical fiction – and Perry fully inhabits many of the concerns and stylistic elements of the 19th century novel – but its interests are still contemporary ones: desire, fulfilment and questioning the world.

  Perry introduces us to Cora Seaborne, a woman who has borne marriage like a hod of bricks. As her late, abusive husband lay dying, he was attended by a doctor called Luke Garrett, who sets his eyes on the imminent widow. Cora – curious, independent, interested in nature – decamps to coastal Aldwinter in Essex.

  David Hayden: author of the acclaimed short story collection, Darker with the Lights On. Photograph: Gabriel HaydenTwo very short stories by David Hayden
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  Musicians play a traditional Irish tune at the unveiling of John Montague’s gravestone a year after his death.John Montague’s gravestone unveiled after first anniversary Mass
  Kevin Barry on CarrowkeelThe view from a pagan place by Kevin Barry
  Anatoli Kaplin, right, the first ambassador of the USSR, inspects a guard of honour at Áras an Uachtaráin in 1974. Photograph: Eddie KellyCzarist crown jewels, a red scare and UN veto: Ireland and the USSR
  Accompanied by her withdrawn son (who is possibly on the spectrum), and Martha, her maid, she meets Will Ransome, the local vicar and his tubercular wife Stella. All three are charmed by each other, and Cora’s fears of parochialism and lack of inquiry are banished. There are walks and meetings, conversation and debate, and soon Cora and William’s regard for each other becomes more than platonic, causing anguish for both.

  Dr Garrett is not about to give up on his chance of Cora, or of marriage: “Luke diagnosed himself to be in love, and sought no cure for the disease”, which complicates the story further. There are criss-crossing correspondences in the novel, and while the epistolary form isn’t always successful, here it feels both authentic and revelatory.

  The book’s title refers to a mythical creature that once roamed the marshes and rivers of Essex, and has recently reappeared, causing fear and suspicion among the locals. Cora has convinced herself that it is a fossil, but the townsfolk believe it has returned as retribution.

  The 19th century may have been the century of medicine and scientific progression, but superstition and religion still dominate the discourse. Cora is a rationalist, while William is a man of God, but Perry is too deft a storyteller to reduce the narrative to a Science versus Religion rumble. This is novel of ideas, and flexes its muscles in addressing multiple concerns of the period: slum living, medical breakthroughs amid poor hygiene, societal expectations according to class, means and gender. Martha, the sharp-tongued maid campaigns for housing on behalf of the poor, and is an avowed liberal in favour of women’s rights.

  There’s something else at work though: while these various strands play out across the pages, the sense of menace grows. Children disappear, a man washes up with his head twisted 180 degrees, and the spectre of the mysterious serpent infuses each chapter with atmospheric gloom.

  While I raced through pages wanting to know if the creature existed (I can’t tell you) and what it looked like (ditto), the titular serpent is more of a diversion from the dual central story: the burgeoning regard and passion that develops between Cora and William, and Cora’s own awakening. Autonomy for women was a rarity in Victorian times, especially for the non-affluent. But Cora is neither a wife nor widow trope: she demands an intellectual vigour in others that she espouses herself. Nor is she a wan, hanky-dabbing naïf: “I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful. And I was never more happy.”

  The novel probes at both private emotion and public concerns, and is engrossing and immersive. The grime of London is only surpassed by the murk of Aldwinter. Cora makes for an indelible heroine: uncompromising, funny and smart, and not unlike Alma Whittaker (who wants to be a botanist in 19th century America) in Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things.

  There will also be whispers of Dickens or a gamut of 19th century novels of similar size and scale, but Perry’s voice and story are her own. Her language is exquisite, her characterisation finely tuned. Based on The Essex Serpent and its predecessor, it’s clear that Perry is a gifted writer of immense ability.

  Sinéad Gleeson presents The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21402-sarah-perry-essex-serpent#.WjvTMt-nEdU
  Word count: 334

  Web Exclusive – June 06, 2017

  THE ESSEX SERPENT
  Roiling in 19th-century myth
  BookPage review by Leslie Hinson

  Sarah Perry presents a comprehensively intelligent story in gorgeous, sprawling prose in The Essex Serpent. With a convincing tone that’s suggestive of the damp grayness of Victorian-era coastal England, Perry’s American debut (and her second novel) builds and unfolds with never-hurried pacing. Because of its density and care, it is not a page-turner, but more a slow burn to be savored and carefully pondered.

  Following the death of her abusive husband, the young widow Cora Seaborne retreats with her son and nanny from London to Colchester, where the soil is ripe with fossils. The tale of a bloodthirsty sea creature has haunted the town of Colchester for centuries; its legacy is even etched into the ancient wood of the church pews. A recent earthquake is thought to have dislodged it and set loose its wrath upon the community.

  Cora is a budding naturalist, which is common among housewives of her class and era. Cora, however, possesses exceptional intelligence and a newly unbridled passion for living. As she overturns the soil, collecting whatever she can carry, she hopes to discover glimpses of herself now that her husband is gone.

  Cora befriends the local vicar, William Ransome, and his ailing wife, Stella. William and Cora have a stirring intellectual connection, one that both intrigues and infuriates them as they challenge each other’s respective beliefs. Cora believes the Colchester serpent is real and is enthralled by the opportunity to discover a new species. William believes the serpent to be a metaphor for the evils that dwell within everyone, a terror that can be dampened by faith.

  The novel deftly leaps from character to character, including extremely well-written and complex children. While Perry writes a convincing romance, the romantic subplot deflates what could’ve been a feminist anthem of self-discovery and deep platonic intimacy.

• SF Gate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Essex-Serpent-by-Sarah-Perry-11284775.php
  Word count: 1073

  ‘The Essex Serpent,’ by Sarah Perry
  By Anthony Domestico Updated 7:34 pm, Friday, July 14, 2017

  "The Essex Serpent" Photo: Harper
  Photo: Harper
  IMAGE 1 OF 3 "The Essex Serpent"
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  “The Essex Serpent,” Sarah Perry’s second novel, is a dazzling and intellectually nimble work of Gothic fiction. By this I don’t mean that the novel trades in monstrous creatures and dreadful atmospherics, although it does. Indeed, its title refers to a legendary creature, “more dragon than serpent, as content on land as in water,” that was supposedly first sighted in 1669 in the boglands of Essex. In the narrative present of 1893, the serpent seems to have returned, and it may or may not be picking off the county’s human residents, along with the occasional sheep. Its supposed return has led villagers to feel “that in the estuary something was biding its time,” and to take this biding as a sign of God’s displeasure.

  All the stock elements of the Gothic novel are here: an abandoned building complete with a yarn-spinning beggar set up out front and “a pale fungus that resembled many fingerless hands” growing inside; an apocalypse-obsessed villager; a vicar’s wife suffering from consumption and prone to visions. Yet “The Essex Serpent” is most powerfully Gothic not in its skillful deployment of such tropes but in its use of these tropes to explore fundamental philosophical questions. When can we trust what we see, and when can’t we? What is the nature of belief? When does it make our vision more acute? When does it blind us? In Perry’s hands, the Gothic is both darkly entertaining and epistemologically curious.

  It’s a sign of Perry’s narrative elegance that she’s able to weave into her story’s Gothic frame two very different aspects of 19th century cultural life: the burgeoning field of natural science, with Darwin’s evolutionary theory spurring interest in paleontology and geology; and the fraught arena of Christian belief, which seemed challenged by such scientific developments.

  “The Essex Serpent” is a remarkably good novel of ideas. It’s also remarkably well written, with fine descriptions of both the natural world and the human body, as in this crystallization of stunted marital intimacy: “she did not recall having ever seen (her husband’s body) in its entirety, only in small and sometimes panicked glimpses of very white flesh laid thinly over beautiful bones.”

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  I’ve ignored plot and character so far. That’s a shame, as Perry is as good a plotter as she is a stylist. The novel’s two main characters are William Ransome, a happily married vicar, and Cora Seaborne, a happily widowed amateur naturalist. (Cora’s departed husband, publicly civil and privately vicious, saw her as “a kind of clearing-house for cruelties deserved elsewhere.”) Both characters are exuberantly alive, living full intellectual and physical lives. Will “keeps odd books for a vicar,” including Marx and Darwin, while Cora tramps through the mud in search of fossils, discussing theology (she’s a skeptic) and evolution (she’s a believer) with equal skill.

  Will and Cora both find themselves in Essex, Will as the village vicar and Cora as an increasingly regular visitor, and both find themselves confronting, in different ways, the Essex serpent. For Will, the rumored serpent — or, more precisely, the villagers’ fearful fascination with it — represents a betrayal of his own measured, decidedly modern faith. As he puts it, “Our God is a god of reason and order, not of visitations in the night.” For Cora, the serpent represents a chance for scientific discovery: She hopes that the creature might be a “living fossil” — a living example of an otherwise extinct species.

  Some of the novel’s most charming passages stage conversations between Cora and Will about reason and religion that are both playful and deadly serious. We sense that she and Will are arguing their way to love before they do. (Think Darcy and Elizabeth in “Pride and Prejudice.”)

  Will is married, though, and still very much in love with his ill wife, Stella. We might expect that this will turn into a novel about tortured Victorian obligation: Should Will stay true to his marriage or to this new, free love? Surprisingly and refreshingly, Perry questions this kind of thinking. As he tends lovingly to Stella in her sickbed and dreams of Cora, Will thinks, “It was not that he was there in part, and in part in the gray house across the common; he was wholly present in both.” Love, at least in this novel, isn’t really a zero-sum game.

  Neither is knowledge. In “The Essex Serpent,” no discourse has a monopoly on truth. A lesser novelist would debunk Will’s religious belief as mere superstition, or show up Cora’s materialist pretensions as ignoring the fundamental mystery of existence. Perry does neither. The more capacious our vision of the world, she suggests, the truer it is.

  At one point, Cora declares to Will, “We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light.” “The Essex Serpent,” amid its Gothic darkness, radiates with light and life.

  Anthony Domestico is the books columnist for Commonweal. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  The Essex Serpent

  By Sarah Perry

  (Custom House/William Morrow; 422 pages; $26.99)

• Wall Street Journal
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/drama-on-a-darkling-plain-1496427410
  Word count: 1280

  BOOKS BOOKSHELF
  Drama on a Darkling Plain
  A man of faith and a woman of science pursue love and (perhaps) a dinosaur in 1890s Britain. Allan Massie reviews ‘The Essex Serpent’ by Sarah Perry.
  Drama on a Darkling Plain
  PHOTO: BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
  By Allan Massie
  June 2, 2017 2:16 p.m. ET
  0 COMMENTS
  Sometimes you approach a novel with misgivings. In the case of “The Essex Serpent,” for instance, my mood was soured by blurbs classifying author Sarah Perry as “Gothic” and comparing her to Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins and Dickens. Even the idea of a strange beast emerging in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign from the waters of the Essex estuary to terrorize a village in these admittedly atmospheric flatlands seemed silly. Gothic at its most self-indulgent and tiresome, I feared.

  I was wrong. My doubts were soon dispelled, my surrender complete. “The Essex Serpent” is a very fine and intelligent novel; not only that, but a richly enjoyable one. Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply—this of a marriage, for instance: “her mother had lived long enough to be disappointed in her daughter’s failure to be disappointed.” Descriptions of the bleak watery landscape are lovingly detailed. Sternly, one might say there’s too much of it, but the descriptive passages escape the charge of self-indulgence; they are necessary to establish the moral argument at the heart of the novel.

  THE ESSEX SERPENT
  By Sarah Perry

  Custom House, 416 pages, $26.99

  The news of the strange serpent greets Cora, a rich young woman recently freed from an unhappy marriage by her husband’s death, upon her arrival in Essex, accompanied by son Francis (who is what we might now call autistic) and her friend Martha, a socialist more concerned with the wretched housing of the London poor than the hunt for the supposed serpent. Cora is modern, inspired by Darwin, an enthusiastic searcher for fossils. She is ready, even eager, to believe in the serpent. Why shouldn’t some creature from an earlier, even prehistoric, age have resurfaced? Another rich friend, Charles Ambrose, a senior civil servant, gives her an introduction to the local parson, William, and his delightful wife, Stella. After a first meeting rich in comic misunderstanding, Cora and Will find themselves engaged in intellectual battle.

  This reprises the great post-Darwin argument: Science against revealed Religion, a new faith at war with the old one. But Ms. Perry turns it cogently inside-out. It is the clergyman, adherent to a faith rooted, as Cora scornfully has it, in mysteries and miracles, who refuses to believe in the reality of the serpent that so alarms, even terrifies, his superstitious parishioners. It is the rational believer in Science, Cora, who hopes to find that the so-called serpent is a miraculous Paleozoic survivor, a genuine living ichthyosaur. Their fierce intellectual argument cannot prevent, may indeed provoke, a developing attraction between them. The ebbs and flows of their relationship, sharpened and disturbed by the realization that Stella has contracted tuberculosis, mirror the tricks of light on the estuary and the tidal surges and withdrawals of the Blackwater; all this is deftly and persuasively handled by the author.

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  There is a parallel London dimension to the novel. A brilliant innovative surgeon, Luke, misshapen and known as the Imp, pursuing and hungering for Cora, and his rich friend Spencer who is in love with Martha, a disciple of Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor. To please Martha and, he hopes, to win her, Spencer takes up her cause of housing reform and enlists the support of Charles Ambrose, who for all his benevolence sees the slum-dwellers of Bethnal Green not as “equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but as creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race.” Ms. Perry is too good a novelist to spell it out, but this is a reminder that Darwinism led, by way of Darwin’s relation Francis Galton, to the dire pseudoscience of eugenics, eagerly taken up by liberal and progressive opinion, deplored by G.K. Chesterton and other Christian apologists. Not only species, but ideas too, are subject to the laws—or chances—of evolution.

  “The Essex Serpent” is most easily discussed as a novel of ideas, and it is indeed that, and a very good one. But it has the virtues of the traditional novels, too: a strong narrative full of surprises; thoroughly imagined characters whose relationships with one another are credible and complicated; and those descriptive passages which not only paint a picture but create an atmosphere. In short, “The Essex Serpent” is a wonderfully satisfying novel.

  Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that. Sarah Perry has written a novel of a rich amplitude. Don’t, however, call it Gothic. There’s always a degree of trumpery or make-believe in Gothic fiction; none of that here.

  —Mr. Massie writes about historical fiction for the Journal.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/26/after-me-comes-flood-sarah-perry-review
  Word count: 890

  After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry review – a remarkable debut
  This atmospheric novel about a man given shelter by strangers will haunt you long after the final page
  After Me Comes the Flood illo
  Illustration: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk
  John Burnside

  Thu 26 Jun ‘14 04.00 EDT First published on Thu 26 Jun ‘14 04.00 EDT
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  Reading Sarah Perry's extraordinary debut novel, it is hard not to reach for comparisons, if only in a bemused attempt to work out just why this book is so very good. On the surface, it seems straightforward: after 35 days of drought, a man named John Cole abandons his London bookshop and sets out, purely on impulse, to visit his brother on the Norfolk coast. The heatwave has left him bewildered and irrational, however, and when his car breaks down, he wanders into the woods, where he discovers a house that seems "the most real and solid thing I'd ever seen, and at the same time only a trick of my sight in the heat". Here, he is welcomed, first by a childlike woman, then by the other members of this secluded community, several of whom seem to know him, addressing him by name and telling him they have been waiting impatiently for him to arrive.

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  It seems an odd coincidence. But then, everything about this house and its inhabitants is odd: the broken sundial that always tells "two times at once", the mysterious meat hooks hanging in the kitchen, the cryptic graffiti carved into the antiquated furniture. Meanwhile, though they are never anything less than polite, Cole is inordinately afraid of what his new housemates – a former preacher named Elijah; the beautiful pianist, Eve; the childlike Claire and her brother Alex; a man named Walker, who seems suspicious of Cole from the start; the apparently strong and trustworthy Hester – will do when they discover he is an impostor. At the same time, he is unable to leave the house, or to break the illusion that he has unwittingly fostered, though opportunities for doing so abound.

  It is as if some doleful figure from a Kafka story, a Josef K, perhaps, had wandered into the magical otherworld that Alain-Fournier created in Le Grand Meaulnes, with its enchanted house, its strangely interim landscape, its sense that clock and calendar time no longer apply and that the land itself has become a pagan limbo, differing only from its Christian counterpart in having a function. For, from the moment John Cole arrives, we know that this limbo intends something for him, something irrevocably transformative. Little should be said about the plot, other than to note in passing that John forms a protective bond with Alex, which he then comes to suspect is a mistake, while becoming infatuated, after his fashion, with the beautiful and mysterious Eve.

  Little more can be revealed, not only because the novel's suspense should not be betrayed, but also because it is so hard to paraphrase its dramatic power. Without wishing to compare it with run-of-the-mill "page-turners", I could not put this book down. However, what Perry does here is to render the suspense metaphysical, one might even say environmental: we care about her characters, as we care about the characters in a novel by Thomas Hardy, say, but it is also the case that her dramatis personae, like Hardy's, are transcended by the drama that unfolds in the land, in the air and, most of all, in the water that surrounds them.

  Is John the impostor he thinks he is? Who is playing mind games with Alex – and who or what is Eadwacer? Will the outcome of John's stay in the mysterious house be a curse or a blessing? Sometimes the possibility of redemption is glimpsed; more often, an abstract danger hovers and, all the while, there is the threat of some terrible, primeval break in the dry weather, a coming flood that seems both unlikely and imminent. As the novel reveals its battery of abstract menace, a new comparison comes to mind: Flann O'Brien of The Third Policeman or The Dalkey Archive. Perry's metaphysical burden is more gently applied, perhaps, but the same sense of inevitability prevails. By the close, however, the careful reader emerges with a sense of having encountered a unique new writing talent, already working at a level of subtlety and restraint that many more seasoned novelists lack. Some of the comparisons reached for on the way may sound rather grand, in the context, but with a book such as After Me Comes the Flood, talk of a fine debut and the promise of things to come should be set aside. What makes this novel truly remarkable is its unique vision, its skilful and sophisticated characterisations, and the creation, without unseemly effects, of an atmosphere that will haunt readers long after the final page.

  • John Burnside's latest book is I Put a Spell on You (Jonathan Cape). To order After Me Comes the Flood for £9.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

  Topics
  Fiction
  Sarah Perry

  reviews

• The Telegraph
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10958686/After-Me-Comes-the-Flood-by-Sarah-Perry-review-a-dazzling-new-talent.html
  Word count: 531

  After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry, review: 'a dazzling new talent'
  A marvellous debut novel in which Kafka meets Miss Marple
  5 out of 5 stars
  After Me Comes the Flood is Sarah Perry's impressive debut novel
  'After Me Comes the Flood' is Sarah Perry's impressive debut novel Photo: Esther Ling
  By Catherine Blyth4:00PM BST 15 Jul 2014
  The late writer W G Sebald refused to carry a mobile phone, despite his daughter’s terror that his skittish car would one day strand him in Thetford Forest. This idea might have been the seed for Sarah Perry’s dark, marvellous first novel. Set in Norfolk, it is a country-house suspense as if reimagined by Chekhov, with a nod to Kafka.

  It begins on day 35 of a heatwave that has driven the birds from the skies and people from London. Bad news for the solitary John Cole, whose orderly life suddenly feels as uncomfortable as “another man’s clothes”. So he flees for his brother’s on the coast. “There’d be a houseful of good-natured boys, and my sister-in-law who seems always to be laughing… But I could put up with all of that, I thought, for clean air and a cool wind.”

  He has forgotten map or phone, so inevitably his car breaks down in a forest where he stumbles across an extraordinary house. What seems to be a mirage is real, but the meat hooks in the kitchen and unreliable sundial in the parched garden bode ill. Strangely, its occupants are expecting him; he is led to a room full of another John’s belongings.

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  Cole keeps meaning to explain the misunderstanding and leave, yet cannot, irresistibly drawn to beautiful siblings Alex and Clare; pianist Eve; hostile Walker; Elijah, a preacher who has mislaid his faith; and motherly Hester. This black comedy of embarrassment yields to something more sinister. What tensions hold this crew together? Can John find out before his own deception is exposed? Nobody here can be trusted, it seems, least of all him.

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  Perry evokes the oppressive atmosphere in precise, elegant prose. This poise allows for sly foreshadowing, and subtly repeated imagery of floods and wrecks gather ominous force. This mesmeric quality recalls Sebald’s writing, but Gothic-smudged. When an occasional surreal detail punctures the limpid surface, the effect is as startling as if a moth truly had “paused mid-flight and turned to look at” you.

  The solution to the mystery lies in an ambiguous Old English word, “Eadwacer”. But this is less of a Miss Marple than a tale of mistaken identity and misplaced love. It is not good for a first novel, just very good full stop. So pour yourself a cool drink and bask in a dazzling new talent.

  After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry

  Serpent’s Tail, 232pp, Telegraph offer price: £10.79 + £1.95 p&p (RRP £11.99). Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk

• The Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/after-me-comes-the-flood-by-sarah-perry-book-review-9633000.html
  Word count: 482

  CultureBooksReviews
  After Me Comes The Flood, by Sarah Perry - book review

  Holly Williams Monday 28 July 2014 11:24 BST0 comments

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  The Independent Culture
  One day in an endlessly hot summer, John Cole heads to Norfolk to visit his brother; he gets lost, seeks help. At a nearby, grandly dilapidated house, he is mysteriously greeted by name: they were expecting him. There’s the ugly, maternal Hester; pale, piano-playing Eve; the former preacher Elijah, seemingly serene yet sent agoraphobic by loss of faith; red-haired twins, Alex and Clare, quivering with child-like giddiness and vulnerability; and Walker, chain-smoking, intimidating. John doesn’t know them, yet feels compelled to stay. But how do they know him? “What keeps them here, pleasure or punishment …” John – and the reader – wonders.

  Such questions are eventually answered, with psychological acuity and narrative plausibility; Sarah Perry’s debut is less wilfully quirky than such a summary sounds.

  But it is strange: ominously swollen with elusive significance. The action is unnervingly out-of-time: we might be in the future – the earth-scorching, bird-killing heat brought on by global warming – or in the past – no one has mobile phones or computers.

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  After Me is steeped in a quasi-religious atmosphere of impending doom. Perry was brought up in a religious home, deprived of pop culture in favour of “classic literature, Victorian hymns, and the King James Bible”. Her work perhaps reflects such a diet: not only literate, it also harnesses the mythic power of religious and historical texts to lend weight and wonderment. Set over seven days, its nod to the creation-myth is flagged by Perry opening a chapter “On the morning of the sixth day …”

  The Anglo-Saxon poem, “Wulf and Eadwacer”, becomes a touch-stone. There are resonances between its story and the way Perry’s characters find love to be a cage. Most significant is that “Wulf and Eadwacer” is famously hard to interpret: in that, it fits right in to a novel concerned with how nothing is what it seems.

  Although the story is largely told from John’s point-of-view, each character gets a short backstory, gradually clarifying relationships and history. Perry is adept at peeling back the skin to reveal a detailed anatomy of psychological motivation. Slowly showing how their lives interlock makes things less mysterious than they initially seem – or maybe it makes them even more so. Perry suggests that, in the end, there isn’t much that’s stranger than human love and envy, fear and desire. A gripping, memorable, impressive debut.

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