Strange sightings in Essex

I suspect some readers might be too cool for this lovely book, partly because, despite its gothic horror set-up, it sets out unashamedly to lift the spirits; and partly because historical novels are sometimes derided as escapist, as if they’re only a fallback for authors who can’t keep up with, say, immigration or the internet.

It takes place over a single year in the 1890s, in an Essex village where — if the rumours are to be believed — a monstrous sea creature skulks in the estuary, blamed for horrors from disembowelled livestock to a man’s corpse washing up on the marsh, his neck snapped.

Up from London amid this panic is Cora, a wealthy amateur naturalist, liberated by the death of her abusive husband. When friends introduce her to the local vicar, Ransome, their jousts over God and geology turn to will-they-won’t-they ardour, observed by his wife (whose dodgy-sounding cough escapes attention) and Garrett, a maverick surgeon who took a shine to Cora while treating her dying husband.

These relationships fuel the novel, together with the question of what the villagers actually see. The writing has a gorgeous lilt, and for a novel with a built-in anticlimax (unless you’re a Nessie truther), it sustains tension remarkably well. The research that can swamp this kind of enterprise is put in the service of excitement: witness the jeopardy rung from a snip-by-snip description of Garrett pioneering a heart procedure on a knifed clerk.

A plus-ça-change frisson comes from references to war in Afghanistan and a housing crisis in London. The latter most concerns Cora’s Marxist maid, Martha, who shames a rich suitor into activism when he admits that until recently he didn’t even know how many rooms there were in his house.