FICTION: Where the Serpent Lives, by Ruth Padel, Little Brown, 308pp, £12.99
ROSAMUND IS beautiful and lonely. She is estranged from her widower father. Her husband is a philandering cad, confident of his tacky charms and sure of his passive wife. Their son has become a grim teenager. What to do? Immediately wish yourself back to the Indian rainforest where the novel opens as a young female king cobra is searching for water. Poet Ruth Padel, author of the wonderful campaigning polemic and memoir Tigers in Red Weather (2005) brings to her uneasy first novel the full range of her passions including her concern for wildlife. Her brisk intelligence darts through the narrative as quickly as a serpent through the undergrowth but somehow it is not enough.
This is a novel combining a great deal of information and observation but little feeling and less conviction. Rosamund, with her vast halo of tawny hair, is caught in the twilight zone of disappointed marital love. While the ridiculous Tyler, her “aging cave man” husband beds his share of aspiring pop talent through his work as a record producer, she stays at home and wonders where it all went wrong.
Her son, Russel – named in honour of Alfred Russel Wallace – no longer communicates with his parents. He has become a person with giant feet who eats, sleeps, attends school and, otherwise, sets off to meet his pals. He does, however, communicate with an invisible snake. When the family dog, Bono, is found on the roads having been hit by a car, mother and son are united in grief. But Padel makes it all seem very difficult. The characters never seem real, they speak as if they had merely learned their lines and are responding to a director whose mind is elsewhere.
Back in the rainforest, Richard, the scientist researching snakes, has his own problems. He is working with Kellar, “a herpetology legend, an internationally renowned zoologist who forty years before had given up a Cambridge chair for field research and now advised at a snake centre in Chennai”, formerly Madras. It is astonishing how quickly Padel settles, albeit with shades of Margaret Drabble gravitas, into the world of popular fiction. “But to Richard, Kellar was father of the girl who had bewitched him twenty years ago. On his first day in the lab, Richard had seen Rosamund’s luminous beauty and fell plummetingly in love, as if he had fallen through the bottom of his own self.”
Richard is another doomed character, doomed in the sense that Padel fails to make him seem remotely convincing. Having never had a chance with Rosamund, he takes the loser’s option – he marries her best friend, Irena, an actor and a good sort, and surprise, surprise, loves her. Still, old obsessions tend to linger.
Rosamund has a souvenir mug in her kitchen. It celebrates Darwin, Padel’s great-great-grandfather, and the best sequences in the book are the ones featuring animals such as the urban foxes that have settled in Rosamund’s garden. The imagery, with its Eden and evil in Paradise themes, or Rosamund’s interest in gardening and gardens as a form of sanctuary, is often surprisingly obvious considering Padel, who held the chair of poetry at Oxford for mere days last year, is an accomplished poet. She stood down after admitting she had passed information to journalists concerning the favourite contender for the post, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, who then withdrew from the contest.
Padel's Costa Poetry finalist, Darwin: A Life in Poems(2009), a verse collection based on Darwin's letters, books and life, is infinitively superior to this novel in which at one point she describes the sea as "blue yoghurt with a silver skin". First novels do have to battle out of a scrum but Padel's is more vulnerable than most because she is already an established writer and commentator, expected to deliver. Hovering in the background of even the wildlife sequences in this novel is Tigers in Red Weatherin which her urgent, opinionated prose style captivates even when Padel is writing at her most self absorbed.
She is an egocentric writer, summoning her anger and fears, and it works. But not here. Tigers in Red Weatheris as much a personal memoir, an attempt to heal herself, as it is a polemic about the plights of endangered tigers. Her novel is caught up between her need to tell a thin story and the beliefs which insist on infiltrating the narrative. Running parallel to Rosamund's despair is the ongoing anxiety of Anka, Tyler's Croatian mistress of five years standing. She is a singer and a single mother who has frequently despatched her daughter for sleepovers in order to facilitate Tyler's flying visits. Anka's fractured English highlights her helplessness and need to grab at whatever crumbs Tyler tosses her. Into all of this tension wanders a nice guy, a dog-owning, animal-loving policeman, who befriends Russel and falls, respectfully, for Rosamund.
Many of the devices simply don’t work. Central to Tyler’s control over his young mistress is telling her that he has two children, a little girl, as well as Russel. Long before Padel explains this, the reader will have figured it out. Tyler is a cliche, yet another attractive swine. The problem is, he fails to convince. Padel stage manages many of the episodes, providing too much information.
When Rosamund travels to stay with her friend Irena when Richard is due home from India, Irena suggests that they dance. “Rosamund got up. Her hair sparkled on her shoulders. Richard stood self-consciously to face her. A ripple began at her hips and spread to her shoulders till her torso swayed like a vine.”
Ironically during this same visit Padel writes her strongest scene, an account of a vicious badger baiting in which the mother badger fights for the life of her cubs against terrier dogs and men who become crazed in their killing of her.
References to Indian mythology do grace the text. Padel responds to culture; her intellectual energy does complicate her instincts. What should be a breathtaking conclusion, the dramatic approach of a king cobra: “Suddenly the snake has a hood and is streaming over the ground towards them, longer than Dad was tall, twice as long maybe . . . How can it move like that, its head so high they can see its yellow throat and the great black hood zooming over the earth?” seems contrived.
Padel reacts to nature as both poet and naturalist. But fiction needs more than information, more than intent. We can see the pictures Padel has fashioned, the snakes, the foxes, the badgers, an owl swooping down on a hapless mole, an injured fox cub savaged by magpies, but her human characters are flat. They speak, we don’t hear them. They sob; we don’t care.
In Darwin: A Life in Poems, Padel the poet, on far more comfortable ground, takes a line from a letter written to Darwin by his pregnant and exasperated young wife: "When I talk to you face to face I cannot say/ exactly what I wish". It is rather the same with this lacklustre novel, in which the novelist and her various characters stumble tentatively for the conviction Padel has brought to her poetry and non- fiction writing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
