Ocean Fiction II: The Essex Serpent

After writing last week about the new novel Manhattan Beach, I got to thinking about other fiction where the ocean is not just scenery but a character itself, for good or ill.   

Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel The Essex Serpent practically reeks of the sea.  Its setting is a small coastal town on the Blackwater Estuary in 1890’s Essex, England and its titular mystery is whether there is a large sea serpent in the marsh’s literally black water, killing sheep and children.  Some fear it’s divine punishment, but for what?   Others recall that strange skeletons have been found in that region, named by their discoverers ichthyorsaurs, ocean dinosaurs.  Is the past still present?

Even the main character’s name is marine:  Cora Seaborne.  Born of the sea?  Borne by the sea?  She is indeed born anew when her abusive husband dies and she can leave gritty sooty London for the town Colchester and then a small fictional swampy town on the water.  She is curious about fossils and makes interesting new friends as she roams the countryside, free of convention and expectation.

But this is no Rosamunde Pilcher Shell Seekers seaside romance novel.  Perry wrote her PhD thesis on the Gothic in Iris Murdoch novels, so we can expect tragedy and mystery.  Indeed I was drawn to the book after hearing NPR’s review, which began, “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.”

The main character of the ocean novel I wrote about last week, Manhattan Beach, was a diver, and the dark ocean depths seemed to represent her path to freedom and to recover what she had lost.   The Essex Serpent is a novel full of ambiguity and challenging boundaries, and the landscape of permeable estuaries and fens seems to mirror this ambiguity as land and sea dangerously meet.  As Cora befriends the rector, spirited children, rich and poor, a doctor who is challenging medical convention, she takes part in all kinds of conversations and adventures that push back traditional distinctions (there’s a lot on science and religion), and she too is “borne by the sea” to new possibilities.

I was reminded of what another nature writer, John Murray, wrote in his introduction to The Seacoast Reader, “There are all manner of coasts.  Every person born in this world has a coast, an edge, a boundary, a transitional zone between themselves and the world.”  Cora’s coastal explorations are as much about herself and her future as they are about fossils and the mysteries of the past. 

Murray’s coastal metaphor of human psychology, that some people are like hard rocky shores, others more sunny and open, helped me understand Cora’s fearless walking day and night on these fens, and her ultimate discovery of the real story of the serpent.  Hers is a more ambiguous marshy personality, neither wet nor dry, but both.  It’s not that she is wishy washy (Washy? Wet?) but that she refuses to accept conventional boxes for her future, or, for that matter for various causes she is involved in, like the interesting parallel plot lines about urban poverty and new forms of surgery.

We call areas like the Blackwater Estuary “wetlands,” wet – lands, low, fetid and fertile meetings of land and sea.  There we find danger, confusion, boundary, the sucking mud and the lurking beast beneath the waters.

The Essex Serpent is a novel of ideas as well as a cracking good tale.  Perry mercifully does not wrap everything up neatly or solve the various love triangles, but it is still a novel of hope and possibility.  The borders are messy but permeable; they are not walls designed to keep things apart but life enhancing wet-lands.

Reading The Essex Serpent makes me want to go back to Norwich and East Anglia and see those mysterious waters and fens.  Or to reread some regional fiction like Phillip Pullman’s His Darker Materials with the rebel communities living on houseboats in East Anglia’s canals.  Or WG Sebald’s moving ruminations about walking in that area in his The Rings of Saturn. 

I think I’ll spend the summer reading ocean fiction.  Suggestions welcome.

 Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter