Truth and Priorities: The Serpentine Cave

Truth and Priorities: The Serpentine Cave

Peeling away assumptions

Peeling away assumptions that blind us to our true priorities is a central motif for Jill Paton Walsh in her 1997 novel, The Serpentine Cave. Honesty in business dealings… The gradual realisation that a person is not what they seem… That moment when a secret that has deeply affected someone's life is revealed… Being honest with yourself and others about your real priorities… All these intertwine in a tale centred on St Ives—a location evoked with an intensity that makes it a character in its own right.

A place where something essential occurs

Sometimes a place calls to a person and becomes the setting where something essential occurs. That is what happens with Stella, an artist who lives in St Ives through WW2. She becomes part of the artistic community there. Then suddenly, she moves away. Why? It seemed to her daughter Marian that Stella put art before everything, including herself. Consequently, when she becomes a mother, she makes the opposite choice. In a key exchange she declares to her daughter: But Alice that's what love is like. I have put you and Toby first from the moment you were born.” And Alice returns: “Didn't you ever think it might be the wrong place to put children? That it might ask too much of us? That it was hard enough, finding our own reason for living, without being yours as well.

The problem is doing what you want MOST

Was Marian right in her assumptions about Stella's priorities? When Alice contemplates the choice she has made, and its consequences, we read: …the problem in life, she saw now, was not so much doing what you wanted as doing what you wanted MOST.

Peeling off the layers to find truth

The Serpentine Cave shows us Marian's process of looking deeply at her memories of her past, peeling off the layers of her assumptions, and discovering a truth about her mother that becomes a gateway to new possibilities. We leave her with this comment: But what she wanted to see was truth naked, like the rocks in the tide… The author concludes: …It was not something that could be suddenly accomplished.