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Summary
Summary
One of Washington Post's Best Books of 2019
"The Snakes is many things--a parable and an ancient drama where a father's greed devours his children, a police procedural, an avid take on tabloid venality, and a bitter comedy, superbly observed, where behind a woman's eyes she is 'all movement inside herself, like a wasp in a glass.' I admit that I'm still shaken by parts of this novel. Sadie Jones writes with pitiless aplomb and corrosive intelligence."
--Louise Erdrich
A chilling page-turner and impossible to put down, THE SNAKES is Sadie Jones at her best: breathtakingly powerful, brilliantly incisive, and utterly devastating.
Recently married, psychologist Bea and Dan, a mixed-race artist, rent out their tiny flat to escape London for a few precious months. Driving through France they visit Bea's dropout brother Alex at the hotel he runs in Burgundy. Disturbingly, they find him all alone and the ramshackle hotel deserted, apart from the nest of snakes in the attic.
When Alex and Bea's parents make a surprise visit, Dan can't understand why Bea is so appalled, or why she's never wanted him to know them; Liv and Griff Adamson are charming and rich. They are the richest people he has ever met. Maybe Bea's ashamed of him, or maybe she regrets the secrets she's been keeping.
Tragedy strikes suddenly, brutally, and in its aftermath the family is stripped back to its heart, and then its rotten core, and even Bea with all her strength and goodness can't escape.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Jones's propulsive yet thoughtful fifth novel (after Fallout) grips readers from the first page. Bea Adamson is a 30-year-old psychotherapist living in a modest one-bedroom in London with her real estate agent husband, Dan Durrant, despite her moneyed background. Dan, who is of a much humbler background, dreams of becoming an artist. When Bea and Dan take three months off to travel, their first stop is France, where Bea's older brother, Alex, runs a hotel. When they arrive, they're greeted by a hotel devoid of guests other than the snake infestation in the attic and an erratic, newly sober Alex. When Alex and Bea's extremely wealthy parents, Griff and Liv, unexpectedly arrive at the hotel, Bea, who has long cut financial and personal ties with her severe father and cloying mother, resigns herself to making nice. And with Griff and Liv's arrival, Dan begins to understand just how well-off Bea is, no matter how much she wants to forsake her upbringing. However, when Alex goes out one night and doesn't return, the Adamson family is upturned, and their secrets and twisted relationships with each other are brought to light. The campy ending doesn't quite live up to the rest of the book-but what precedes is a tightly crafted, deeply moving, and thrilling story about how money corrupts and all the myriad ways members of a family can ruin each other. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, the Gernert Company. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Snakes as temptation, snakes as untrustworthy people, snakes as dangerous reptilesall present and accounted for in this suspenseful drama of an ultrarich, dysfunctional British family.After growing up among private jets and criminally narcissistic parents, Bea Adamson has cut herself off from her family and their money and has never been open with her biracial husband, Dan, who has only been introduced once, about the extent of their wealth. The couple lives close to the bone in London off their earnings as a psychotherapist and real estate agent. When they decide to take a break and drive an old Peugeot around the continent, their first stop is to see Bea's ne'er-do-well brother, Alex, who has been set up by their father with a hotel outside Beaune, a town not far from the Swiss border. When they arrive at the Hotel Paligny, they are surprised to find a defunct operation which hasn't seen guests in quite some time. "There are loads of snakes," Alex warns when taking them up to the attic. "Mostly they're just grass snakes. They're sort of company....It's the vipers I don't like." Soon after, the hotel gates swing open and more snakes arriveAdamson pre et mre. As horrified as she is by the appearance of Griff and Liv, Bea has no idea how bad things can get. The most impressive accomplishment of Jones' (Fallout, 2014, etc.) fifth novelher first with a contemporary settingis the seemingly straightforward, actually rather complicated nature of the relationship between Bea and Dan. The depiction of the frustrations of dealing with the French bureaucracy is also on the money. However, the rich parents are two-dimensional in their utter repulsiveness, and the violent closing section of the book does not quite fulfill the potential of what precedes it.A well-executed, character-driven cross between domestic drama and crime thriller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
All families are dysfunctional in some way, but some, like Bea's family, ratchet dysfunction to dizzying heights. Bea rejected her parents' lifestyle of obscene wealth years ago, but maintains a relationship with her brother Alex. Restless in their London work-a-day lives, Bea and her husband, Dan, decide to take a sabbatical, even though it means pinching pennies and spending their ""cushion."" They set off first to see shiftless Alex in rural France. The hotel he's supposedly running is, in fact, a guestless, crumbling wreck, and there are snakes in the attic. The distance Bea had long kept between Dan and her parents is soon breached with Alex's sudden death. Bea's father impresses Dan with his wealth and self-possession; Bea's mother dazzles, but in time, Dan sees the writhing underbelly of their lives and understands what drove Bea away. Dan doesn't even know the worst of it, because Bea keeps the secret of Alex's abuse unspoken. Jones (Fallout, 2014) unfurls an understated, yet page-turning story. The last chapters, however, reveal a graphic and jarring ending.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Like theatrical villains who arrive a couple of scenes into the play, Liv and Griff Adamson slither into view in "The Snakes" preceded by their reputations. At first, it's hard to see what all the preamble-d fuss is about. They seem bad, sure, but only ordinarily so - tone-deaf and mean - when we encounter them on a trip to France to visit their son and daughter. They gripe about the ghastliness of the journey and the inadequacies of their offspring. Griff fails to take into account the mixed-income company at lunch when he complains about the annoyances of private jet ownership. Liv is weird and out of it and skeevily attached to her son. On the other hand, the couple appear eager to shower their vast fortune on their children as well as on Dan, their son-in-law. Maybe their boorishness is an inevitable side effect of great wealth, we can almost hear him thinking - something like the way walking around with butter-stained clothes is a side effect of eating lobster. This is the fifth novel by the nimble, versatile British author Sadie Jones, who is equally at home in a class-bound Edwardian country house filled with visitors ("The Uninvited Guests") as she is in a repressed London suburb harboring secrets after World War II ("The Outcast"). Set in present-day London and Burgundy, "The Snakes" is a creepy, scary novel about the corrosive effects of money and power and parenthood. If you can judge people by the way their behavior affects their children, the Adamsons have failed in every category. Alex, their younger son, is a recovering drug addict who has been unable to renovate or even clean up the crumbling hotel his father bought for him (out of guilt; out of a compulsion to control; out of a worse reason that we will learn later) in France. He lives there in squalor and isolation, making up in wine what he has forgone in drugs. His sister, Bea, lives in an Ikea-furnished flat in London, refusing to accept even a penny from her father. (A third sibling lives offstage in Hong Kong, oddly unscathed.) That she and Dan, a mixed-race artist toiling at a soul-sucking real estate firm, have a few thousand pounds in the bank is a source of great pride to her but anxiety and bitterness to him. What will happen to his principled love for Bea when her family fortune is dangled before him? We will soon find out. Jones writes with cool, crisp prose about cruelty of many kinds; about class and race and power; and about regular people caught up in complicated situations that veer far out of control. She has an Ian McEwan-esque ability to provoke tension and anxiety. Like the fog in "Bleak House," dread permeates the first half of "The Snakes," right from the opening paragraph, when Bea has a bad dream on the eve of her longedfor trip to Europe with Dan. ("She thought how strange it was to have a nightmare when they had such plans, and she was so happy," Jones writes. She has no idea.) Dread follows the couple across the Channel and stalks them at Alex's deteriorating horror-fest of a hotel. There is a serious dearth of guests. Dan and Bea seem to be the only visitors, unless you count the rats decomposing in the attic and the snakes coiling and skittering around the property. ("They're sort of company," Alex says, creepily. "They've got nice round eyes.") As bad as it might be that the hotel rooms are named after the seven deadly sins - Dan and Bea are awarded Hubris - there is far worse to come. What's going on with the hotel guest book? Why do the neighbors seem like escapees from "Deliverance"? Is Alex really getting anything out of his online Narcotics Anonymous meetings? When Griff and Liv drop in to complete the tableau of family dysfunction, the book becomes less like "The Shining" and more like Edward St. Aubyn's Melrose novels, with their lacerating descriptions of how cruelty courses like poison through the veins of a family. In this closed, stifling environment, we're also reminded of the Danish movie "The Celebration," in which the children of a distinguished financier announce to the guests at his 60th-birthday banquet exactly what it is that he did to them. "Someone should have helped him," Jones writes, as Bea berates herself about Alex's childhood. "She tried to. But fear was bigger. She didn't know what chance there was that he could save himself." On its own, this seems an ambitious enough plan for a novel. But along the way Jones shifts gears, and then shifts them again, and then turbocharges the engine, so it can feel almost as if you are reading two (or three) different books. The effect is like walking into what you think is an upscale seafood restaurant and being served not just sole meuniere but also eggplant parmigiana, chicken pad thai, beef souvlakia and a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Everything is beautifully prepared, but you are overwhelmed by the sensory overload and the branding confusion. The tension diffuses and reconstitutes, and we're not sure how to reorient our thinking. Is "The Snakes" a portrait of a messed-up family? A cautionary tale about the evil that money does? A murder mystery involving a malign and racist foreign police force? A "Simple Plan"-style thriller about greed and wads of cash? I would walk a long distance to procure one of Jones's daring, interesting, beautifully written, atmospheric books. Readers will find this novel provocative and propulsive even when they suspect the author of over-egging the pudding. But it is at its best when it homes in close rather than venturing far afield. Bea and Alex originally seem a study in contrasting approaches to childhood trauma - do you remain inside a compromised system, or do you try to escape by rejecting it and cauterizing the wounds? But Bea's parental-avoidance program turns out to be just as precarious as the prison of obligation Alex has built for himself. One by one, the cards in her paper house fall. Snakes are everywhere here: slithering unseen in the walls of the house; looming with unblinking eyes and lipless mouths in the garden; leaving their old skins behind as false promises that change is possible. But nothing could be as malign or coldblooded as the human reptiles in this family. 'The Snakes' is a creepy, scary novel about the corrosive effects of money and power and parenthood. ŠARAH LYALL is a writer at large for The Times, working for a variety of desks including sports, culture, media and international. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the culture and metro desks.
Library Journal Review
Bea and Dan, young married Londoners, are taking a three-month break from their work lives. While Bea loves her job as a psychotherapist, she's supportive of would-be artist Dan, who's been miserable working in real estate. En route to Spain and Italy, they detour through Burgundy to visit Bea's brother, Alex, who is supposed to be renovating a derelict hotel. Purchased by their wealthy parents as a postrehab project for Alex, the hotel has no staff or guests. Snakes are only the beginning of what's rotten about the place. Intending only a short stopover, Bea and Dan are delayed at first by a needy Alex and then by the arrival of the parents from whom Bea has long been estranged. Corrosive secrets are slowly revealed as the story comes to a heart-pounding conclusion. VERDICT Don't be misled by this book's title. Although a few creepy reptiles make an appearance, the real snakes in this twisty story are human ones. Another memorable novel from the versatile Jones (The Uninvited Guests). [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
