I read and enjoyed Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent when it came out a couple of years ago. But I’ve now had the chance to read her other two novels: After Me Comes the Flood, her first novel which came out in 2014; and Melmoth, the most recent novel, which came out in 2018. And as a result, I think I was maybe looking at the wrong things in The Essex Serpent.
No, not the wrong things; but there was an awful lot of stuff going on in that book, and I was distracted by the surface story of an independent woman just at that point when Victorian society was starting to see the modern coming at it. That is a good and important part of the book, but it disguised the underpinning that ties it to these other two novels.
Yes, she is recreating the Gothic, and yes, her own upbringing makes the religious aspects stand out. But it is the way these two things are put together that is what I find interesting, and that ties these three otherwise very different novels together.
Take After Me Comes the Flood, a journeyman effort with a structure that isn’t entirely successful. It is the story of a lonely, middle-aged man who, in the depth of a heat wave, shuts up his shop and drives away to visit his brother. But along the way his car breaks down and he approaches an isolated country house only to find that the disparate group of people staying there seem to be expecting him. It turns out to be a coincidence (Perry likes coincidences in her plotting, Melmoth is full of them), they are waiting for someone with a very similar name that none of them have met before, but for a week the protagonist assumes a different personality. I have often said that first novels can often display, crudely and obviously, themes that will be developed more subtly in later works, and that is the case here. People going somewhere they are unknown in order to be someone else, even if only temporarily, crops up in both of Perry’s later novels.
The inhabitants of the house turn out to be people displaced from a local asylum when it closed down, and the family members and friends who look after them. In true Gothic mode, it is not always clear which is which. But the setting and the people turn out to be healing, at least for the protagonist.
But the most interesting character in the house is Elijah, a one-time priest who lost his faith. Now he is unable to go outside: because there is no God, there is no one to hold up the sky, and therefore if he ever ventures out he is terrified that the sky will fall on him. This is not madness so much as an extreme doubt, and despite this he is the most humane and sensible person in the house. He is also a complete innocent, who sees instantly that the visitor is not who everyone else takes him to be, but doesn’t see the need to say anything about it. He is, in other words, the most charming and engaging character in the book.
He also seems to me to be pivotal to what Perry is doing here. Despite what we know of her biography, it is not religion per se that matters in these books: it is belief. It does not matter what Elijah’s religion was before he lost his faith, what matters is the way that belief shapes his world regardless of where those beliefs came from. He stands helpless in the middle of a world that is only partly physical, and it is the other part, the unseen and unseeable that most affects his behaviour. Belief is crippling; religion is just a framework we construct to restrain those beliefs, but do away with the framework and belief floods back in its raw form. Read The Essex Serpent with this pattern in mind, and the figure of the rural vicar and the intrusion of the supernatural acquires a different aspect. Belief is the darkness that makes these novels Gothic.
Similarly, in Melmoth, the idea of the witness, the lonely, black-clad woman always there at the edge of your sight who knows your sins and is waiting to take you away on her immortal journey, is a part of the unseeable that has a greater effect on behaviour than anything physical. She is a belief system cut loose from any religious affiliation: she is there among the people of Manila, among the Turks and Armenians at the time of the massacres, among the Jews of Nazi Europe, among the scientific rationalists of modern day Prague. She is a mental disease (more properly, a dis-ease) whose vector is childhood stories and faded documents; she is guilt personified as a shadow on a chair, a shape in the distance, a bird at the window.
The central character is Helen, an English translator living in Prague. Twenty years before she committed a crime and ever since then she has tormented herself with guilt, denying herself pleasures, friendships and ease. She lives an austere, hair-shirt existence. Inevitably, the structure of the novel demands that the revelation of this crime should come at the climax of the book; but Perry ignores that structural demand, so we find out what Helen did at about the three-quarter mark. Unsurprisingly, the guilt is worse than the crime.
Then someone hands her a file of documents about Melmoth (the novel references Charles Maturin, but changing the sex of the wanderer is the least of Perry’s changes in the character). Helen is ready to believe, and suddenly she conjures the woman in black and her attendant jackdaws wherever she turns, though she fails to notice that those who have passed on the documents have emerged undamaged from their own awareness of Melmoth. She is a story, but you don’t have to listen to stories; she is a belief, but you don’t have to believe. Melmoth is what is seen, not necessarily what is there.
Perry is an interesting writer. I think Melmoth goes as far beyond The Essex Serpent as that novel went beyond After Me Comes the Flood. So I wonder what she will do next. Though I also wonder how far she can follow this particular Gothic belief system.
Let me try and explain. Case Histories is a crime story, how could it not be with a detective as the central character; multiple crimes form the thread from which the novel depends, and the progression towards a resolution of these stories is what keeps us turning the page. But crime and detection are not central to the novel, but rather stands at an oblique angle to the intersecting lives and fascinating characters caught in the drama. It is a novel that steps willingly and knowingly into genre (she does not cheat, she does not belittle, she does not treat genre disdainfully as something that she doesn’t have to treat seriously), but it is also a novel of character, a novel of social satire, a mainstream novel. Both the genre story and the mainstream perspectives are complex and satisfying, but in different ways; it treads the divide between the two with a confidence that gives full measure to both.
Life After Life is not science fiction. But the demands of story mean that she can only tell the story using a science fictional device, which she does with the same confidence and seriousness that she treated the crime genre in the Jackson Brodie novels.
And the same is true of Transcription. It is a spy story, that is the line upon which everything in the novel hangs. And it gives full worth as a spy story, with secrets and betrayals, and half-understood hints, and a twist at the end that I did not see coming but that is perfectly in keeping with everything we have read to that point. And yet our attention is firmly upon characters who are deftly and vividly drawn, and glimpses of life in wartime London and at the postwar BBC that are startlingly effective. You read for the spy story and get social realism as a bonus, or you read for the social realism and get a gripping spy story to hold your attention. It is the way her fiction operates as both genre and non-genre writing at exactly the same time that is the central joy in reading her work.
I grew up with folk-rock, that curious hybrid which took (so-called) traditional tunes and added rock instrumentation. For a decade or more throughout the 1970s, the most-played record I owned was Basket of Light by Pentangle, one of the first folk-rock outfits (though I’ve never been convinced that the term rightly applies to them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee certainly came from the folk tradition, but what Danny Thompson and Terry Cox brought to the mix was more a jazz infusion than a rock sound). And then there 
was Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention, which certainly was folk rock, and Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, which always sounded to me like an outfit that wasn’t really convinced by what they were doing and thought the rock stuff was a little infra dig. Anyway, by the time they got to All Around My Hat and the abysmal Rocket Cottage, they had pretty much given up on being anything but a pop group.
I had grown up on the Beatles, (I was 11 when I watched their first ever appearance on British television), and my musical taste continued to be informed by what were then known as beat groups. So I never had any particular interest in or liking for the old finger-in-the-ear traditional singer, but when the folk song and the rock music merged, suddenly my ears pricked up. For a while my record collection held some real oddities (anyone remember Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Amazing Blondel? No, me neither, not any longer.) but as the folk-rock wave of the 70s began to recede, my tastes began to shift back to the rockier side of things. Though with some variations: the astonishing and idiosyncratic songs on Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens and Sandy, certainly had a folk heritage, but they were hardly what I’d call folk songs, and the new direction they were opening up was one I was very interested in pursuing.
All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to talking about Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. I was drawn to the book because it is largely a history of British folk rock, and in so far as that is what the book is, it’s a good book. Unfortunately, Young tries to cast his net wider than that, and that bit is problematic.
The guitar, for example, was not an authentic instrument, and so it didn’t start to creep into the folk music scene until the late-50s and 60s. But the young masters of the guitar who came on the scene around this time, Renbourn and Jansch, Davy Graham, and so forth, began to change the scene. They brought a more fluid, fluent style to the traditional songs they played; they began writing their own pieces in the style of their vamped-up traditional songs; and they were listening to other popular music around at the time. After all, if guitars aren’t common in your chosen area of music, who do you listen to for techniques and ideas? The folk guitarists who came on the scene in the early-60s brought influences from jazz, from classical music, and from rock ‘n’ roll; and in time they brought in electric guitars.
We begin with the title. John Kessel has already written several stories featuring the matriarchal Society of Cousins on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men”, went on to win the James Tiptree Award. That story took its title from a book that played a significant part within the story. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that this novel-length work in the same setting (though some years later) also takes its title from a book featured within the story.
Anway, I’ve been reading Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North in the hope that it might help to fill in some of the immense chasms in my knowledge of the subject. (I must, for example, read up more on Historicism/New Historicism, if only to see if North is correct in his interpretation.) I was, in the end, disappointed, frustrated and excited by the book.
I like the watercolours of Eric Ravilious, there is something both precise and haunting about them. So I was happy to come across Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend while we were on holiday in Wales. It purports to be a group biography of a bunch of artists who came together at the Royal College of Art just after the First World War under the inspired leadership of Sir William Rothenstein and the teaching of Paul Nash. The core group consisted of Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Enid Marx, Douglas Percy Bliss, Percy Horton, Peggy Angus and Helen Binyon, with others, notably Tirzah Garwood (who became Tirzah Ravilous), Thomas Hennell, Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn, Diana Low (with Helen Binyon, one of Ravilious’s mistresses), and of course John Nash, taking an increasingly prominent part in the narrative. But in fact it doesn’t really work as a group biography, because they weren’t really a group. They were a very talented generation of artists who came of age at roughly the same time in the fervid post-war world, and who all to some extent fell under the influence of the Nash brothers. They were also to benefit from Rothenstein’s profound belief that commercial art and design were at least as important as fine art, and also from his energetic promotion of their art, putting them forward for murals, posters, book designs and the like. In fact, come to think of it, Rothenstein was the glue that held the group together, and should in some ways have been the central figure in the story, so it is sad that he disappears for the bulk of the book. But then, others that we might expect to be important in a group biography also disappear for much of the time, notably Freedman, Bliss and Horton. Yet this is only to be expected, given that it is obvious that Friend is only really interested in Ravilious, and those who disappear from Ravilious’s immediate circle simply disappear from the narrative. Or mostly; Enid Marx hardly remained close to Ravilious, but Friend keeps switching the story back to her, as if he suspects there might be a more interesting life to pursue here, if only he knew how to do it.
