Book of the daySadie Jones This article is more than 5 years oldReviewThe Snakes by Sadie Jones review – the abusive power of money
This article is more than 5 years oldThis propulsive novel about venomous parenting is a serious investigation of avarice and justice, wrapped in the rhythms of a thrillerSadie Jones’s fourth novel revisits the themes of isolation, shame and estrangement that we’ve come to look for in the work of this provocative and astute writer. Her characters often inhabit a kind of hell: in 2008’s The Outcast it was the hell of repressed mid-century suburbia, in 2009’s Small Wars the institutionalised hell of 1950s army life. The Snakes brings us hell in the form of the family – with the added twist of a contemporary setting, a new departure for Jones.
Meet the Adamsons. They are rich: the sort of rich that commandeers a private jet, has a duplex in New York, a manor house in Hampshire and an art gallery or two. Griff Adamson, the Trump-style paterfamilias, is a retired London-based property developer who made his money as a 60s slum landlord, and has continued to increase it through crooked schemes that are hinted at, but not revealed until the book’s terrifying ending. His wife Liv is a stiletto-thin socialite whose entire existence is built on appearances: “Everything about her was polished to a point.” She is also a lethal narcissist whose treatment of her son Alex has propelled him into a drug-fuelled adulthood.
Beatrice, the youngest Adamson child, has managed to escape this snake pit by cutting herself off from her parents and their fortune. She earns a pittance as a therapist, living contentedly enough with her husband Dan in a one-bedroom flat in north London. Dan – equally poorly paid but significantly less contented – works as an estate agent while knowing that he has mortgaged his dream of being an artist to the devil. His own background couldn’t be more different from Bea’s: the son of a black single mother and an absent white father, he is a descendant of the Windrush generation Griff Adamson built his empire exploiting: “He was in deficit to his life, paying out and getting nothing back. It all seemed tied together, his life, and the lives of others, the mob greed and unhappiness.”
Dan has only the vaguest idea of the extent of his in-laws’ wealth, but that changes when he and Bea decide to take a break from their cramped existence by travelling around Europe for a few months.
Their first stop is an ill-advised call on Alex, Bea’s “waster” brother, now supposedly clean and running a provincial French hotel bought for him by Griff. When they get there they find him alone, drinking heavily. The run-down Hotel Paligny is deserted and the garden overgrown. It’s a rotten Eden in which the bedrooms (named Hubris, Greed, Lust, Envy and so on, after the seven deadly sins) are damp, the entries in the guest book all fake. Even more creepily, the attic is infested with snakes, for which Alex lays ineffectual traps. He collects the skins – later Bea will find one, as brittle and insubstantial as he is, pinned to his bedroom wall. There is worse to come. No sooner have Bea and Dan settled in than Alex announces in a panic that the Adamson parents are on their way for a visit. The real snakes are about to arrive, and they bring tragedy with them.
The Snakes asks serious questions about human nature, avarice and justice, wrapped in the fast-paced rhythms of a thriller. It is written with Jones’s trademark economy and a fierce attention to the nuances of familial cruelty. Bea, determined to throw off her parents’ legacy and redeem herself through meaningful private action, is the moral centre of the novel, reflected in her father’s sardonic nickname for her, St Beatrice. Jones even gives her “a small tattoo of a flame on the back of her neck”, acquired on her 18th birthday, “for Dante’s Beatrice”. Dan sees Bea as “his guiding light”, destined to lead him to a better life. But can she? Alex has already tried and failed to shed his old skin. And once Griff slithers into Paligny he proves to be a powerful tempter, making Bea doubt the whole foundation of her marriage to a man who is suddenly curious about her trust fund. “Are you seriously kidding yourself that he doesn’t think about your money?” asks Griff. Bea has to admit that “she had always known she wasn’t strong enough to fight wealth. It was bigger and more beautiful, and it was fierce.”
Be warned: having teased us with such puzzles, this book shifts ruthlessly, in its final pages, into concentrated terror. It’s not so much a change of focus as the brutal eruption of a truth that has been implicit all along: that evil always wears human dress, and that the good are invariably powerless to save those they love, or themselves. Sometimes the writing in this section is so pared back as to seem flat, and some readers may object to what seems like a shocking switch of genres. But I finished The Snakes with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears.
Elizabeth Lowry’s novel Dark Water is published by Riverrun. The Snakes is published by Chatto (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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