Where The Serpent Lives

This is a spell-binding read — dense, luminous, fantastic and true. In her debut novel, Padel weaves an intricate tapestry, encompassing contrasting settings, from London and Devon to the jungles of India.

Through laser-sharp and quirky detail she pinpoints insights into the unknown realms of herpetology (reptiles) and conservation, as well as illuminating more domestic, yet powerful, themes of isolation and the subjugation of self, the erosion of confidence, the role of friends and family and the potentially devastating consequences of indulging ourselves in our inner lives.

This is an ambitious work, full of startling contrasts between the scientific and the emotional, the familiar and the exotic, but Padel is perhaps uniquely equipped to deliver.

She is an award-winning poet (briefly Oxford’s Professor of Poetry), the great-great-grand-daughter and biographer of Charles Darwin and author of an acclaimed book on conservation in Asian forests, Tigers in Red Weather.

The novel is extravagantly packed with actors, adventurers, teenagers with demons, secretive Croatian singers, wannabes, policemen and aging lotharios.

Alongside them sit dogs, owls, snakes, foxes and badgers — both real and imagined — giving this tale a unique texture and natural energy. At the centre of it all is Rosamund, a wife and mother coming to terms with the demands of her withdrawn and troubled son and her selfish, sentimental and serially unfaithful husband and how she has allowed herself to be limited by those around her.

It is to Padel’s credit that she elicits our sympathy where we least expect it. Even minor characters develop in three dimensions.

Ultimately not one of them is consistently good, or totally adequate — and neither is any of them completely reprehensible, however they might initially appear.