‘What good is Colchester?’ asks a metropolitan character. ‘The Essex Serpent’ is set in North-East Essex, and Sarah Perry perfectly captures the feeling of this part of the county as a relative backwater in the late Victorian period. Is it a myth? A real monster, or a living fossil? Sunrise over the Blackwater estuary at Maldon, Essex.

It’s also about how they relate to reports of a mysterious riverine monster – the ‘Serpent’ of the title. The story follows the relationships of a group of Londoners, revolving around the fascinating widow Cora, and their interactions with the people and places of this part of Essex-roughly from the Stour to the Blackwater river estuaries. A TV adaptation premiered on Apple TV in 2022. ‘The Essex Serpent’ is a 2016 novel by British author Sarah Perry. But the county is a real mix of urban and, particularly in the north of the county, a rural hinterland. Not with the power of friendship, not by the power of grace - that maybe they have to be lived with for a while before we know what to do about them.Modern Essex is often thought of more in its southern urban areas adjacent to London. And it sort of burst out, and it's been quite chastening, actually, to be the person that wrote The Essex Serpent, which ultimately I think is a relatively hopeful book, and have been confronted with the possibility that there are monsters that can't be vanquished. So I had my eye fixed on other monsters, and the whole time, there was something waiting in the water.

I'm more afraid than I have ever been, because, you know, the state of politics recently - what's happened in the U.K., what's happened elsewhere - has shown me that my tendency to be a benevolent humanist and think the best of my fellow men has perhaps been misplaced, and actually that there has been a fermenting of ill will and a fermenting of willful ignorance that was maybe going on the whole time, and I didn't notice. I find myself now a different writer from the one who wrote The Essex Serpent. And obviously increasingly since the book was published, that has seemed more and more relevant, I think. I think it's a really human failing, that we nourish and nurture our fears and our prejudices, and we don't really want people to turn up with their facts and their statistics and show us that we're wrong, because our fears are ours, and we can construct them to suit our own ends. On preferring to be afraid of monsters, rather than to learn about them Book Reviews 'The Essex Serpent' Spreads Its Wings

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