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Now it's time for Meet The Author. | 0:00:00 | 0:00:03 | |
Faith and reason, and the Gothic imagination, the ingredients | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
of Sarah Perry's bestselling novel, The Essex Serpent. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:10 | |
We're in the 1890s and Cora Seaborne, newly widowed, | 0:00:10 | 0:00:14 | |
leaves London for the country, where she encounters a community | 0:00:14 | 0:00:17 | |
terrified by the apparent return of a fabled monster. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
Her interest in nature leads her to believe that it's real. | 0:00:21 | 0:00:24 | |
The local vicar believes it's the product of a pagan imagination. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:28 | |
They argue a good deal. | 0:00:28 | 0:00:30 | |
They also, more or less, fall in love. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:32 | |
It's a rich tale of obsession, mystery and belief. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:37 | |
Welcome. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
I suppose it's a story, really, about fear, isn't it? | 0:00:53 | 0:00:57 | |
It is. | 0:00:57 | 0:00:58 | |
And it's a story about the way that fear affects from people | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
in different ways, according to their age, their gender, | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
their preconceived ideas about the world. | 0:01:05 | 0:01:08 | |
And how an imagined, or unimagined, monster can be very different | 0:01:08 | 0:01:12 | |
to different sets of people. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:14 | |
There's a sense in which it's a period which reflects some | 0:01:14 | 0:01:18 | |
of the obsessions of our own? | 0:01:18 | 0:01:19 | |
Very much so. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:20 | |
One of the things I wanted to do was, in perhaps | 0:01:20 | 0:01:23 | |
a slightly mischievous way, wrong-foot the reader, | 0:01:23 | 0:01:25 | |
who might feel that they're reading a Victorian novel, | 0:01:25 | 0:01:28 | |
set in the world of crinolines and fainting wives, pea-soupers, | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
and instead find themselves reading about the Trades Union Congress, | 0:01:32 | 0:01:35 | |
the London Underground, the birth of feminism, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:38 | |
scientific developments. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:40 | |
So I wanted to invite the reader to interrogate how far we've come | 0:01:40 | 0:01:44 | |
since the end of the 19th century and whether the end of the 19th | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
century was actually more modern than we ever allow | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
ourselves to think. | 0:01:50 | 0:01:51 | |
And at the heart of the story is the argument, really, | 0:01:51 | 0:01:55 | |
between two people who also then have a romantic attachment. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
The vicar, who is married, and the newly widowed woman | 0:01:59 | 0:02:04 | |
who arrives in the country. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:05 | |
Of course, they have a very different response to this apparent | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
appearance of a serpent, a monster in the midst | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
of the community. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:13 | |
She thinks it's a natural event, because she wants | 0:02:13 | 0:02:16 | |
it to be a dinosaur. | 0:02:16 | 0:02:22 | |
He says it's all got to do with a breakdown in faith. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
Yeah. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:26 | |
A very interesting collision. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:27 | |
It is. | 0:02:27 | 0:02:28 | |
I think that's another reason why the end of the 19th century | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
are so interesting for me. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:32 | |
I think debates around science and reason, the extent | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
to which faith and science are antagonists, and whether or not | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
they can support each other. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:38 | |
Or if they are? | 0:02:38 | 0:02:39 | |
Or if they are, precisely. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:40 | |
It's something that is very much part of the dialogue now | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
and is a debate that's been going on for a very long time. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:47 | |
What I wanted to do was disrupt the idea that a man of faith | 0:02:47 | 0:02:50 | |
like Will would be a man of superstition and fear. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:57 | |
Actually, he's presented as being a man of reason. | 0:02:57 | 0:02:59 | |
And that a man of science, like Cora, or a woman of science, | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
like Cora, would be the reasonable and rational one. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
Actually, she is rather given to emotional display and not | 0:03:04 | 0:03:11 | |
getting things quite right. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:12 | |
Well, indeed. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:13 | |
And the distinction is not as clear as we might first think? | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
Exactly. | 0:03:16 | 0:03:17 | |
The intriguing thing about your story is that there | 0:03:17 | 0:03:19 | |
is the excitement of how to interpret this phenomenon that | 0:03:19 | 0:03:21 | |
apparently has turned up in the community. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
But alongside it is, if you'll forgive me | 0:03:24 | 0:03:26 | |
putting it like this, in this phrase, | 0:03:26 | 0:03:27 | |
an old-fashioned love story? | 0:03:27 | 0:03:28 | |
I wanted to present a relationship that seemed to be somewhere | 0:03:28 | 0:03:31 | |
on a slightly indefinable spectrum, between an intellectual curiosity | 0:03:31 | 0:03:34 | |
and an argument that comes between intellectual opposites. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:38 | |
Emotional intimacy and romance, at what point does it switch | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
from one thing to another? | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
I think it's important to say to people that | 0:03:43 | 0:03:45 | |
haven't read the book yet, perhaps, that although you have | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
these ideas running through your head and you wanted to communicate | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
the nature of this argument to the reader, | 0:03:52 | 0:03:54 | |
in the end, it's a story. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:56 | |
I mean, it's a story about a community that is gripped | 0:03:56 | 0:03:58 | |
by fear and excitement. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:00 | |
That is what draws the reader in? | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
I hope so. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:04 | |
More than anything else, I'm a storyteller. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:06 | |
I'm a great spinner of yarns. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
I'm given to boring on at great length about anecdotes | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
around family and friends, things that have happened to myself. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:15 | |
That's what a good novel does. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
Ideally, however high the ideas, however much you want to interest | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
or educate, really it should be about a cracking story that can pass | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
the time on a wet weekend. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
But it's also true that what you display in this book, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
which is a wonderful read, enthralling read, is an affection | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
for the Gothic imagination. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
I mean, it's a kind of Gothic novel, isn't it? | 0:04:35 | 0:04:37 | |
Very much so. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:38 | |
I'm very, very interested in what he Gothic actually is. | 0:04:38 | 0:04:42 | |
Interestingly, you could lock three or four academics in a room, | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
with no bread or water for ten hours, and not let them out | 0:04:45 | 0:04:48 | |
until they have agreed on a definition of the Gothic. | 0:04:48 | 0:04:50 | |
They'll starve, because it's something that people | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
are constantly debating. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:53 | |
The Gothic is a feeling. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:56 | |
It's a sensation, is not a genre. | 0:04:56 | 0:04:57 | |
It's the feeling that there is something that we | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
don't quite understand. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:02 | |
"Am I mad, or did I just see that thing? | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
If I am mad, is that worse than a monster?" | 0:05:05 | 0:05:08 | |
We all have fears that we, to some degree, enjoy. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
I mean, we enjoy treading on the edge of an abyss, in a way, | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
in our minds, don't we? | 0:05:17 | 0:05:22 | |
That's what we all do. | 0:05:22 | 0:05:23 | |
We do. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:24 | |
I think what a really good Gothic novel does, | 0:05:24 | 0:05:26 | |
what I wanted to try to emulate, his arouse in the reader | 0:05:26 | 0:05:29 | |
similar sensations to those felt by the characters. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
So, a successful Gothic novel will leave the reader feeling | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
as unnerved and as uneasy as the characters who are | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
encountering these fears themselves. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:37 | |
So, a reader of a Gothic text like Dracula would be invited | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
to think, what is it that I desire that I ought not to desire? | 0:05:40 | 0:05:44 | |
So, you're drawn into the book like one of the characters. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:47 | |
What kind of cracking stories did you grow upon? | 0:05:47 | 0:05:53 | |
I sense that you've a love for the Victorian novel, just | 0:05:53 | 0:05:55 | |
by the way you attack this period. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
I mean, attack in a sense of being a writer | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
who immerses himself in it? | 0:06:01 | 0:06:03 | |
Yes. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:04 | |
I had a very interesting background. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:05 | |
My parents were members of a strict Baptist chapel and I was brought up | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
with very little access to popular culture. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:10 | |
So, actually, I was raised on the King James Bible, | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
which is one succession after the other of cracking yarns. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:15 | |
Well, if you want to write good English... | 0:06:15 | 0:06:17 | |
Exactly, in terms of exposure to cracking ideas, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:19 | |
extraordinary prose, but also one story after another | 0:06:19 | 0:06:22 | |
of heroism, and betrayal, and mystery, and strangeness, | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
and magic, all incorporated in this one book. | 0:06:25 | 0:06:31 | |
Because we didn't have a television and I didn't go | 0:06:31 | 0:06:33 | |
to the cinema, and all the rest of it, I immersed myself instead | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
in what was available in the house, which tended to be 19th century | 0:06:36 | 0:06:39 | |
literature, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Bunyan, and what all of these have | 0:06:39 | 0:06:42 | |
in common is storytelling. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:44 | |
Yes. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:45 | |
And so did you always know you were going to be, | 0:06:45 | 0:06:47 | |
in some form, a storyteller? | 0:06:47 | 0:06:49 | |
I did, very much so. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
In a way that I find very difficult to convey how | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
intense this feeling is. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:54 | |
The analogy I always use is that most women I know have always known | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
that they would one day be a mother. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
I have always known, in that sort of visceral, | 0:07:00 | 0:07:04 | |
"There's no point in my existing if I don't do it" kind of way, that | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
I will tell stories in some way. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:09 | |
Whatever period I would have been born into, I would have been | 0:07:09 | 0:07:12 | |
a storyteller of one kind or another. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:14 | |
What you've done in this book, of course, is to play with, | 0:07:14 | 0:07:18 | |
but also to respect, a tradition. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:20 | |
I mean, you enjoy writing a story, telling a story of the kind that | 0:07:20 | 0:07:25 | |
you grew up reading. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:27 | |
You're not interested in experiment. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:28 | |
I mean, you want to obviously do something original | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
with your characters, and have them stepping outside | 0:07:32 | 0:07:34 | |
stereotypes, of course, but you are also paying homage | 0:07:34 | 0:07:38 | |
to a storytelling tradition that you love? | 0:07:38 | 0:07:40 | |
That's right. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:42 | |
What I wanted to do simultaneously pay homage to and interrogate it. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:46 | |
For example, one of the things I did was shy away from the kind | 0:07:46 | 0:07:49 | |
of language we associate with 19th-century novels. | 0:07:49 | 0:07:52 | |
So, nobody rides in a carriage. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:53 | |
They call a cab. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:55 | |
People do not speak to Mama and Papa, they speak to Mum and Dad. | 0:07:55 | 0:07:58 | |
They go to a pub, rather than to an inn. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
In that sense, I was very much enjoying the tropes of 19th-century | 0:08:01 | 0:08:04 | |
fiction and Gothic fiction, whilst also disrupting the reader | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
and saying, you know, this is not a dusty period. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
This is not a dusty novel. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:12 | |
It's modern, its contemporary. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:14 | |
Well, I think anybody reading this book would come to the conclusion | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
that you might have been quite happy at that time. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:19 | |
Do you think you would have been? | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
Yes, I was born 100 years too late, I suspect. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:24 | |
Sarah Perry, author of the Essex Serpent, | 0:08:24 | 0:08:26 | |
thank you very much. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:27 | |
Thank you. | 0:08:27 | 0:08:32 |