A serpent lives in the heart of the jungle and the abyss of the mind; that is also where author Ruth Padel rears her story. The novel Where the Serpent Lives (Little Brown Books, Rs 595) by the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin progresses by creating reflections of the human emotions in nature. It is a tricky formula that works for Padel in some places but leaves her exposed in most others.
Where the Serpent Lives opens in the nest of a King Cobra as field zoologist Richard observes a snake secure its eggs. From this rainforest in Karnataka, the story makes a fine leap to a house on Primrose Hill, London, where Rosamund, who could once make heads turn like sunflowers, is trying to deal with the jungle in her mind. She is in a state of emotional paralysis, caught as she is between a profligate husband, Tyler, and an increasingly reclusive teenaged son, Russel. Even though she knows Tyler would “romance a rhinoceros if there was nothing else on offer”, Rosamund is unable to get herself to do anything about it. Killburn in London is another frequented address in the story. Here an aspiring singer and unwed mother, Anka, leads a tenuous life shuffling between her young daughter and an unreliable boyfriend.
The death of Rosamund’s dog pushes Russel towards an emotional crash and estranges the couple. Rosamund’s long-time friend Irene, who is married to Richard, advises her to visit India. Richard, though true to his wife, has
been in love with Rosamund and struggles to rid himself of the obsession. The story reaches its climax when bombs go off at London tube stations while Rosamund is still in India — she must find love, make peace with her father
and reclaim her son.
Padel has an undeniable eye for detail, particularly colours, but she fails to trim her story. She mediates beautifully between man and animals but gets distracted and doesn’t pursue her ideas till the end. For instance, she describes local foxes keeping a watch on Rosamund’s family, but pulls at this thread only in jerks and abandons it too soon. In the human realm too, Padel is constantly distracted as she uses precious words to trace the complex story of each of her characters. She makes an effort to season the connection between Rosamund and Anka with suspense, but with early clues like same endearments repeated to the two women by a man, renders herself predictable and weak.
Since a significant part of the action takes place in India, the author tries to draw on Indian symbols and folklore relating to snakes. But she seems to have picked the first pantheist chord that came her way: Shiva and the folk tale Nagamadala, made immortal by Girish Karnad. Padel is at her imaginative best when she sees glimpses of the wild in humans and their emotions: the morals of a black mamba, “Tyler’s jaw, wide like a bull frog’s, gobbling Daisy’s lips”... She is also terrific at writing love scenes, but they get repetitive and boring.
Padel explores the far recesses of the human mind with a creative yet scientific flourish. Characters have a parallel animal alter ego indicative of their state of mind. Rosamund associates herself with a Rusty Spotted Cat “which slips through the undergrowth, trying not to be seen by larger predators”. Her son Russel, on the other hand, is Kaa, an Indian Rock Python. Tyler is associated with a tiger though that fails to account for the strong streak of deceit in him. Betrayal is a constant subject in Padel’s novel — it reappears in Rosamund’s relationship with her father and Anka’s with her mother.
Most of the characters in the book are tied to nature by profession or by instinct and time and again they are set off to explore the jungles where the narrative adopts a Discovery channel-like tone, describing the habits and habitat of snakes, badgers and owls. Padel is known for her nature poetry and the mastery with which she creates the sounds and music of the rainforest cannot be denied. But the melody turns into a cacophony as her characters clamour to “detoxify” their lives of betrayal.
Padel engages nature to give her ordinary story a unique colour. In that, she succeeds. She fails, however, to use that colour to her advantage. Nature remains a mere appendage to the story and rarely enjoys the writer’s full commitment as she flits from one subject to the other. Perhaps, in line with the theme of the novel, Padel herself betrays nature she so dearly loves.