Indian snakes and ladders

Award-winning poet Ruth Padel established her prose credentials with her autobiographical travel book, Tigers in Red Weather. Journalist Aatish Taseer trawled his own past and background for his memoir, Stranger to History. Now they have produced first novels connected by both dislocation and location — India, though they deal with very different versions of the subcontinent, viewing it from opposite, culturally shaped perspectives.

Padel’s Where the Serpent Lives moves between a tangle of human relationships and an environment under threat. Writing about nature, she brings a poet’s intensity to her prose: objects, plants, and the wildlife that stalk her pages, are all fiercely observed. Her narrative spirals like a tropical plant, luxuriant with metaphor and imagery.

Set in 2005, the year of London’s suicide bombings, the novel links India, London and Devon, interweaving two troubled marriages, a father/daughter estrangement, a mother and son at odds. England forms a counterpoint to rainforest and jungle. Like the herpetologist character in her book, Padel is enthralled with snakes — king cobras, pythons, kraits, vipers. She examines her serpents with a scientist’s rigour but a spellbound eye, passionately curious about arcane, intriguing detail: the nervous system of a snake, the cobra’s lack of an external ear; the beauty of its colouring and pattern marks.

Reading the book, there were moments when I was at one with Padel’s zoologist: as a child I too saw locals offer propitiating saucers of milk to the serpent monarch, and learned to respect the speed of a cobra’s movement, the way it ‘shoots into wet grass with a liquid zigzag’ like a spreading crack.

The wildlife is not confined to India; in London we enter into the lives of foxes; Devon has the most savage episode in the book: a shockingly violent scene of badger-baiting.