She is also fascinated by the local vicar, (Tom Hiddleston, still my true love), who is married to the perfect wife and mother and friend Stella (Clémence Poésy). Cora is fascinated by recent rumors of the Essex Serpent. She gathers up her son and her companion, Martha, played by Hayley Squires, and makes for the Blackwater Estuary of Essex, a place of tidal mudflats and marshes and channels that lead to open sea. Cora, played by Claire Danes, positively glows with bliss once her tormentor is dead. Our story begins with the death of a horrible man, the abusive husband of Cora Seaborne. But if you aren’t, I get it, because this is terribly slow paced stuff, and worse, it lacks chemistry. My idea of pure happiness on this earthly plane is Claire Danes digging fossils out of cliffs while wearing trousers and a floppy hat, accompanied by Tom Hiddleston in a sweater, so I was down with this for the most part. Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.The Essex Serpent is slow, pretty, slightly creepy, and sexy in that “I can’t have you so I’ll stare at you with my brooding, metaphorically piercing eyes instead of having sex” sort of way that some people despise and other people adore. Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart. But Will sees his parishioners’ agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith.
Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species.
They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora is a London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar.
Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890s, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way. 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.
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