But their relationship, too, becomes food for the serpent: Will is married to a wife whom he loves, and he understands his love for Cora to be a sin.

Will loves ideas almost as much as Cora does, so when they meet, their minds meet and clash and fall in love all at once. “Our God is a God of reason and order, not of visitations in the night!” he says. Will is a man of the Enlightenment who sees no reason that science and faith may not go hand in hand, and he considers the townspeople’s belief in the serpent to be a dangerous superstition. When she hears of the Essex Serpent, she sets off at once for Colchester on the hope that she might discover an ichthyosaur, a living fossil: The serpent, she reasons, might well be a prehistoric fish that somehow managed to survive and is resurfacing in Essex.īut once she arrives, her attentions are diverted away from the serpent and toward Will, Colchester’s beleaguered rector. She wants to see her name engraved on the wall of the British Museum. She revels in her newfound freedom: dressing in mannish lumpy tweeds and boots, roaming the countryside for hours on end, and devoting herself to scientific study.Ĭora loves science for its own sake - most of Perry’s characters are inveterate knowledge seekers, which is what makes them so compelling - but she also longs for fame and recognition. Cora married young, to a monstrous husband (“What a thing it would be: to have me break you, and mend your wounds with gold,” he tells her in a flashback, before setting out to break her), and after her husband’s death by throat cancer, she is a widow.

It’s into this atmosphere that Cora, Perry’s radiantly likable main character, makes her entrance. In one particularly horrifying scene, children talking about the serpent begin to laugh and cannot stop, snapping their necks back and forth in involuntary spasms as they go into hysterics. Citizens slip notes to the town rector, urging him to preach repentance so that Colchester can be forgiven its sins and freed from the serpent. One character skins moles and hangs them around his property to scare off the serpent. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

The essex serpent book