美国国家公共电台 NPR Confronting The Possibility Of Monsters In 'The Essex Serpent'

 

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

In books and movies, a monster is often more than just a monster. Maybe it represents anxiety or corruption¹ or the id. Those themes slither under the surface of Sarah Perry's new book, "The Essex Serpent." Her novel is set in England at the end of the 19th century.

SARAH PERRY: And it's about the return of a mythical² beast that's menacing the local villagers. An atheist³, Darwinist, progressive widow comes down to the Blackwater Estuary⁴ determined⁵ to find out what this monster is. And while she's there, she meets a man of the cloth who is determined to protect his flock from the hysteria and the terror that has begun to surround them.

SHAPIRO: I'd like to ask about something that comes at the very end of the book. And this is not a spoiler. But in the author's note, you say there really were pamphlets warning villagers of an Essex serpent.

PERRY: Yes. My husband and I are both from Essex, and one thing that American listeners may not know about Essex is that it's the butt⁶ of jokes in the U.K. So it is considered to be the most unglamorous, foolish, vulgar of places. And Essex actually has a lot of history and a lot of ancient myth and legend in it.

And my husband told me as we were driving through the Essex countryside that a serpent, a great beast had been seen in 1669 near the village of Henham on the Mount. And that immediately struck off the idea for the book. It was like someone lighting⁷ a match in a dark room, and then suddenly you can see all these pictures on the walls. My imagination went into overdrive.

SHAPIRO: In the book, this serpent that was believed to have been sighted in 1669 is brought back, people believe, by an earthquake in the 1890s...

PERRY: Yes.

SHAPIRO: ...Which is when you're novel is set.

PERRY: That's right, yep, yep. So I said, what if it came back when ideas around the fossil record and paleontology and the debate between science and religion and superstition⁸ and rationality were really kind of the common currency and it was something that people talked about a lot?

SHAPIRO: In this period in the late 19th century, there was a lot of Gothic horror. "Dracula" was published in 1897. But the big difference between those books and yours is that for most of your book "The Essex Serpent," we the readers don't know whether or not the monster is real. Why did you decide to structure the book that way?

PERRY: So I'm really interested in what I think of as being the Gothic sensation. And by that, I don't mean sensationalism as in a great, horrifying⁹ spectacle but actually the feelings that are aroused in the reader. And I really feel quite strongly that when you watch horror movies or you read gothic novels, the bit that's really effective is when it's left to your own imagination, for you to kind of encode this monster with your own transgression¹⁰ and your own desires and your own fears.

As soon as it becomes solid, then you have the writer imposing¹¹ on you their idea of what a monster is. So I wanted to keep that tension through as much of the book as possible and allow the reader to kind of create a monster of their own imagination and to experience it the way the villagers do, which is to not know what's there or if there's anything there at all.

SHAPIRO: Will you read from a section of the book that captures some of what you're describing here?

PERRY: Certainly. (Reading) There is nothing to be afraid of, said Cora, except ignorance. What seems frightening is just waiting for you to shine a light on it. Think how a pile of clothes on the floor of your bedroom can seem to creep up on you until you open the curtains and see it's just the things you took off the night before. I don't know if there's anything else in the Blackwater, but what I do know is this. If it came up on the banks and let us see it, we wouldn't see a monster but an animal as solid and real as you and me. The girl in the yellow dress, plainly preferring to be afraid than to be instructed, yawned delicately into the palm of her hand.

SHAPIRO: I love that idea of preferring to be afraid rather than be instructed.

PERRY: Yes.

SHAPIRO: I feel like that could be applied¹² to so many aspects of the present day.

PERRY: (Laughter) I agree. And I think it's a really innate¹³ human failing that we nourish and nurture¹⁴ 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. And obviously increasingly since the book was published, that has seemed more and more relevant I think.

SHAPIRO: There's a common theme in horror books and movies that the things humans do to one another can be worse than any supernatural creature. And that seems true in your book as well.

PERRY: Yes. And I think I wanted to invite people to think about that and to think about, you know, what is the serpent here? You know, Cora Seaborne, the lead character, is a very admirable woman, but she's a bit of a snake in the grass (laughter) in some senses because she wounds people without meaning to. And...

SHAPIRO: She's a widow who is in a way relieved to be widowed because her husband was abusive. And there's a wonderful line in a letter that a friend writes to her. The friend says, to live at all is to be bruised¹⁵.

PERRY: Yes. I think that sums up some of the feeling about the book, that actually, we go blundering about often very meaningfully and in a very well-meaning fashion. But we can't guard ourselves against bruising¹⁶, and we can't guard ourselves against the kind of terror that comes upon these people. The trick is not to never be bruised, but it's how you deal with it and to avoid doing what so many of these characters do, which is to visit more pain and distress¹⁷ on each other than the monster ever does.

SHAPIRO: As we watch these characters do harm to one another, even as the village is terrified of a monster that may or may not be in the water, it raises the question, are there monsters that you are afraid of? Are there monsters that you think we in 2017 ought to be afraid of instead of maybe the monsters that we're preoccupied¹⁸ with?

PERRY: Oh, my God, yes. I mean I find myself now a different writer from the one who wrote "The Essex Serpent." I'm more afraid now than I've ever been because, you know, the state of politics recently - you know, what's happened in the U.K., what's happened elsewhere - has shown me that my tendency to be a benevolent¹⁹ humanist and think the best of my fellow men has perhaps been misplaced and actually that there has been a fermenting²⁰ of ill will and a fermenting of willful ignorance that was maybe going on the whole time, and I didn't notice. So I had my eye fixed²¹ on other monsters. And the whole time, there was something waiting in the water. And it sort of burst out.

And it's been quite chastening actually, you know, to be the person that wrote "The Essex Serpent," which ultimately I think is a relatively²² hopeful book and to have been confronted with the possibility that there are monsters that can't be vanquished²³, not by 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, which sounds really pessimistic. But you know, we live in a different world now from the one 18 months ago, and it's going to require a change of approach I think in some ways.

SHAPIRO: Well, that's a very dark note to end on.

PERRY: Yes, I'm sorry. That was rather hopeless of me, but...

(LAUGHTER)

SHAPIRO: Sarah Perry, thank you very much. It's been wonderful talking with you.

PERRY: Thank you.

SHAPIRO: Her new novel is called "The Essex Serpent."

(SOUNDBITE OF STRFKR SONG, "GOLDEN LIGHT")

1 corruption   

n.腐败，堕落，贪污

参考例句：

• The people asked the government to hit out against corruption and theft.人民要求政府严惩贪污盗窃。
• The old man reviled against corruption.那老人痛斥了贪污舞弊。

2 mythical   

adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的

参考例句：

• Undeniably,he is a man of mythical status.不可否认，他是一个神话般的人物。
• Their wealth is merely mythical.他们的财富完全是虚构的。

3 atheist   

n.无神论者

参考例句：

• She was an atheist but now she says she's seen the light.她本来是个无神论者，可是现在她说自己的信仰改变了。
• He is admittedly an atheist.他被公认是位无神论者。

4 estuary   

n.河口，江口

参考例句：

• We live near the Thames estuary.我们的住处靠近泰晤士河入海口。
• The ship has touched bottom.The estuary must be shallower than we thought.船搁浅了。这河口的水比我们想像的要浅。

5 determined   

adj.坚定的；有决心的

参考例句：

• I have determined on going to Tibet after graduation.我已决定毕业后去西藏。
• He determined to view the rooms behind the office.他决定查看一下办公室后面的房间。

6 butt   

n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶

参考例句：

• The water butt catches the overflow from this pipe.大水桶盛接管子里流出的东西。
• He was the butt of their jokes.他是他们的笑柄。

7 lighting   

n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光

参考例句：

• The gas lamp gradually lost ground to electric lighting.煤气灯逐渐为电灯所代替。
• The lighting in that restaurant is soft and romantic.那个餐馆照明柔和而且浪漫。

8 superstition   

n.迷信，迷信行为

参考例句：

• It's a common superstition that black cats are unlucky.认为黑猫不吉祥是一种很普遍的迷信。
• Superstition results from ignorance.迷信产生于无知。

9 horrifying   

a.令人震惊的，使人毛骨悚然的

参考例句：

• He went to great pains to show how horrifying the war was. 他极力指出战争是多么的恐怖。
• The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate. 战争的可能性太可怕了，真不堪细想。

10 transgression   

n.违背；犯规；罪过

参考例句：

• The price can make an action look more like a transaction than a transgression.罚款让一个行为看起来更像是一笔交易而不是一次违法行为。
• The areas of transgression are indicated by wide spacing of the thickness contours.那幢摩天大楼高耸入云。

11 imposing   

adj.使人难忘的，壮丽的，堂皇的，雄伟的

参考例句：

• The fortress is an imposing building.这座城堡是一座宏伟的建筑。
• He has lost his imposing appearance.他已失去堂堂仪表。

12 applied   

adj.应用的；v.应用，适用

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• This cream is best applied to the face at night.这种乳霜最好晚上擦脸用。

13 innate   

adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的

参考例句：

• You obviously have an innate talent for music.你显然有天生的音乐才能。
• Correct ideas are not innate in the mind.人的正确思想不是自己头脑中固有的。

14 nurture   

n.养育，照顾，教育；滋养，营养品；vt.养育，给与营养物，教养，扶持

参考例句：

• The tree grows well in his nurture.在他的培育下这棵树长得很好。
• The two sisters had received very different nurture.这俩个姊妹接受过极不同的教育。

15 bruised   

[医]青肿的，瘀紫的

参考例句：

• his bruised and bloodied nose 他沾满血的青肿的鼻子
• She had slipped and badly bruised her face. 她滑了一跤，摔得鼻青脸肿。

16 bruising   

adj.殊死的；十分激烈的v.擦伤(bruise的现在分词形式)

参考例句：

• He suffered cracked ribs and bruising. 他断了肋骨还有挫伤。
• He slipped and fell, badly bruising an elbow. 他滑倒了，一只胳膊肘严重擦伤。 来自辞典例句

17 distress   

n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛

参考例句：

• Nothing could alleviate his distress.什么都不能减轻他的痛苦。
• Please don't distress yourself.请你不要忧愁了。

18 preoccupied   

adj.全神贯注的，入神的；被抢先占有的；心事重重的v.占据（某人）思想，使对…全神贯注，使专心于( preoccupy的过去式)

参考例句：

• He was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to notice anything wrong. 他只顾想着心事，没注意到有什么不对。
• The question of going to the Mount Tai preoccupied his mind. 去游泰山的问题盘踞在他心头。 来自《简明英汉词典》

19 benevolent   

adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的

参考例句：

• His benevolent nature prevented him from refusing any beggar who accosted him.他乐善好施的本性使他不会拒绝走上前向他行乞的任何一个乞丐。
• He was a benevolent old man and he wouldn't hurt a fly.他是一个仁慈的老人，连只苍蝇都不愿伤害。

20 fermenting   

v.（使）发酵( ferment的现在分词 )；（使）激动；骚动；骚扰

参考例句：

• The fermenting wine has bubbled up and over the top. 发酵的葡萄酒已经冒泡，溢了出来。 来自辞典例句
• It must be processed through methods like boiling, grinding or fermenting. 它必须通过煮沸、研磨、或者发酵等方法加工。 来自互联网

21 fixed   

adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的

参考例句：

• Have you two fixed on a date for the wedding yet?你们俩选定婚期了吗？
• Once the aim is fixed,we should not change it arbitrarily.目标一旦确定，我们就不应该随意改变。

22 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

23 vanquished   

v.征服( vanquish的过去式和过去分词 )；战胜；克服；抑制

参考例句：

• She had fought many battles, vanquished many foes. 她身经百战，挫败过很多对手。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• I vanquished her coldness with my assiduity. 我对她关心照顾从而消除了她的冷淡。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》