Rating: 3/5
Review:
Rather unsatisfying
In the end I struggled quite badly with The Essex Serpent,
and thought that there was a good deal less to it than meets the eye.
Set in 1892, the story is of Cora, an intelligent but
oppressed woman released by the death of her husband whose curiosity about the
natural world leads her to investigate The Essex Serpent. This is a possibly mythical creature (not
unlike the Loch Ness Monster) which she hopes may be a "living
fossil". It's a slow tale, with lots
of local atmosphere and weather, but whose characters seem to be straight out
of Creative Writing's Victorian Central Casting and whose intellectual content is
much thinner than it seems to think. The
story is used to explore the conflict at the time between Darwinism and the prevailing
Christian belief in Creation and also social reform, but it lacks much in the
way of originality or new insight.
Characters take up entrenched
(and rather over-modern) positions and then preach at each other, so little of
the genuine spiritual and intellectual struggle many people experienced at the
time (as reflected in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, for example) is
evident. All of this was done far, far
better in Elizabeth Gilbert's brilliant The Signature Of All Things.
I also found the style quite hard to take. The curiously mannered modern language of the
narration ("would've" "might've"
etc. etc) and unsubtle attitudes of the characters began to grate badly and found
myself plodding on but not looking forward to reading more.
The book is not actively bad, and some bits of it are pretty
good (the description of an experimental surgical procedure, for example) but I
had trouble wringing any real enjoyment or intellectual insight out of it. Plainly, a lot of people have enjoyed this
far more than I did, but I can't really recommend it.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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