Ivor Powell
THE SNAKEBITE SURVIVORS’ CLUB by Jeremy Seal (Picador)
You have to acknowledge it right from the outset: a book that is not only ostensibly but also actually about people who lived to tell the tale of being bitten by the world’s four most venomous species of snake is not the most immediately engaging of literary productions.
Of course the subject has a certain visceral appeal, a thrill of danger and aversion, as well as a rich set of literary and nightmare associations. But snakebite survivors? By an author who claims to be motivated by little more than a morbid itch to scratch his own fear of all slithering creatures? Sought out over four continents?
Frankly, much as I wanted something to read, my first action on picking up the book – after looking at the distinctly forensic pictures of the world’s four most venomous serpents – was to check just how many pages I would have to wade through (348) before the relief of the bibliography and the inevitable learned notes.
That was more or less the last time I surfaced. The Snakebite Survivors’ Club, despite the eccentricity of its subject matter, is an absolute and sustained delight of a book.
One of the reasons is that author Jeremy Seal simply writes so well, with such skill in description, such lightness of evocation and metaphor and so certain a sense for the mot juste that one imagines he could make a riveting read out of the interior life of the internal combustion engine.
He is also a sure and cunning literary strategist. The way he has structured his book is to take the only really suspenseful narrative he has on offer and to spin it out in five different parts, rather like an old-time serial.
Each chapter, except the last, where the story is finally resolved, ends at a cliffhanger moment, to be returned to only after Seal has returned from another continent, tracked down another of his venomous literary prey.
You do not find out exactly what happened to Darlene Summerford Collins – who, as Seal puts it, took a bite from a diamondback rattlesnake “on a Friday evening in the fall of 1991, as people all over Alabama sat down to TV dinners, or mowed the twilit lawn for the last time till spring” – until much, much later.
You are fed only carefully measured-out scraps of the story. Darlene and her white- trash husand Glenn are members of a truly weird down-South cult of snake-handlers. An ex-con and thug, Glenn is reborn through rattlesnakes, becoming a pastor and something like a prophet in the community. Then Glenn goes bad again and, fuddled with religion and vodka, he decides his wife needs to die. He takes her out to the back where the box with the diamondback rattlers is kept …
Then Seal is off to Australia, in perversely meditative mood, all but whistling a happy literary song, on the track of the most venomous of them all – the seriously creepy taipan – to Africa in search of the lore and the reality of mambas, and to India on the trail of cobras.
Back to Darlene, her arm swelling with Glenn lecturing, sucking on a bottle of vodka and telling her that if she has done no wrong she will survive …
Well, it would be to give the game away to tell any more. I’ll say only this: that I think you’ll find it worth the while finding out what happened and where Jeremy Seal went and what he thought and found out in between.