The Little Snake

Damn you, A L Kennedy, for making me cry on the Manchester to Euston train. I snuffled away the journey behind a pair of sunglasses.

This is a beautiful jewel of a book, as sparkling as the ruby-red eyes of Lanmo, the titular hero. A modern fairytale about the power of love to transform lives, it describes the various encounters between Lanmo and Mary, a young girl living in an unnamed city, throughout her life.

The true nature of Lanmo emerges with the tale and makes his relationship with Mary more surprising, raising questions about why this seemingly ordinary girl causes such a response from the snake. This is book that challenges the values attributed to possessions - the beautiful possessions and houses of the rich people in the city are unloved whereas Mary finds wonder in the sound of a leaky pipe dripping into a bowl. The clearest expression of this comes in the recurring motif of kites, because that is where freedom and magic lies.

"She was standing looking at the kites, free in the blue, blue sky and thinking that to love something did not mean that she could own it."

The narrative voice familiar in fairytales - that omniscient third person combination of deity and parent, who hints at future events and special insight - is a comforting presence here, and that is important because the themes of the book are serious, covering war, genocide, love, death, social and wealth inequality. I also loved the use of simile, the oldest form of figurative language but perhaps seen as a sophisticated manner of expression.

"The girl also watched her breath appearing in ascending, steamy clouds, as if her body were somehow burning the dead leaves from autumn, or perhaps washing a large number of sheets and producing steam like a laundry."

It reminds me of reading epics such as The Iliad or The Odyssey where human stories have universal themes. This style is self-conscious and may be an acquired taste, and the reader needs to buy into this voice fully to enjoy the tale.

The Little Snake makes you think. One of the most telling episode describes the way in which a refugee is welcomed in a new and strange city, when a woman offers a slice of fruit expecting no payment in response. That touched me and made me reflect on what kindness looks like. In our real life world, refugees are demonised and strangers distrusted - we still fall short of the standards of life that A L Kennedy captures in this book.

I have many feelings and not enough words to actually express them after reading this. Which is kind of amazing considering it wasn’t even a full 200 pages of a story.

The story follows a girl named Mary, but also a snake named Lanmo that wanders the world and does not have a heart until one day, it beats because he realizes and understands that what he feels in him for Mary is love, but he has to continue doing what he does because that has always been his lot in life.

It doesn’t make much sense when you realize that I’m talking about an actual talking golden snake that visits an imaginative child one day in her small garden, but it also does in that death comes in a lot of different forms.

The prose is beautiful and mesmerizing, holding a consistent tone of storytelling very reminiscent of Leigh Bardugo’s style, especially The Language of Thorns. It reads very similarly and considering TLoT has been one of my favorite reads this year and I would lay down my whole heart for Leigh Bardugo’s writing, it carries weight to me when I say that this is just as beautiful and elegant and immersing.

But as well as eloquent storytelling, the actual depth of the story makes my whole heart ache. I went into this with the vague idea that it wouldn’t be entirely a story about happiness and mythical creatures, but I also didn’t expect the onslaught of emotions that came with it either. It’s a deeply emotional and moving story in a lot of ways, from the childlike innocence of Mary even as she grows older and the heartbreaking love Lanmo grows to have for Mary and the things she loves, too. It shows a lot of complex facets to humankind that are ugly when analyzed and distressing at every glance because it’s also about a city that loses its life and richness as years pass, which leaves once happy people struggling and tired and broken.

There’s a lot of elements to this story and like I said, it’s almost amazing that so much emotional depth could be fit into a story that consists of less than 200 pages, but Kennedy did it and quite effortlessly at that. It’s a beautiful and magical book that’s not only about the imagination, but also the simple cycle of life and death and all the things in between and how human it is to love and be loved.

It is absolutely worth a read and I’m very, very happy that Netgalley let me have it.

I want everyone to know that I'm writing this review through a curtain of tears, okay.

Lanmo, our polite little grim reaper, has never known love or happiness or peace; he's never known sorrow or guilt or heartache. All he's ever known is he's the most powerful being there is and as such he has a duty to travel the world and snuff out - very politely, if deserving; very menacingly, if deserving - the lives of those whose time has come. It's all he's known and so he carries out his tasks very clinically and methodically.

Then he meets Mary, a young girl whose heart bursts with hope and optimism and love and joy, she whom embraces her emotions and feelings and finds loveliness in even the saddest of moments, is able to so seamlessly embrace the bittersweet nature of life and in doing so is able to depart wisdom onto Lanmo, the wisest, most powerful snake of all.

Through their journey together, Lanmo sees the world change: he sees cities rise and fall, desolation creep across once thriving fields of verdant grass and splendid flowers, sees humans grow thin and hollow and weak. He finds his occupation needs his attentions less and less - as cities crumble, so too does the morality of man, and humans continue finding new and inventive ways to carry out his reaper business themselves.

Where once Lanmo might stare at these changes with a disinterested air - after all, it's not his business - he finds himself paying more attention. He sees beauty in the bright eyes of children, love in the dances of couples standing together 'neath a blanket of stars, hope and perseverance in the stolid flight of red kites against the backdrop of the clear, blue sky. He feels guilt and finds that he doesn't quite like it, but that he feels it so intensely because it is the result of an abundance of love.

We journey with Lanmo as he realizes all of these wonderfully divine, beautiful things - as he ponders why the humans attack each other when they could instead dance and make merry and fly kites and bake bread.

We journey with Lanmo as he realizes that love, more than anything, is the strongest force there is - a glue that binds souls together, that does not possess, that mends and nourishes and grows stronger and stronger than the most powerful reaper there ever was.

This was... a beautiful, heart-wrenching fable. I feel fuller having read it, and upon its publication I am going to order several copies for my store and keep them on my recommended shelf. The descriptive language offers an incandescent fairy-tale feeling and provokes strong visuals in the reader, making it a quick but fulfilling read. I might also recommend that several of my teacher friends' look into teaching it in their classrooms: it's an important commentary on society and culture, and one that's very relevant in today's climate, but more than that it's a timeless tale on the importance and richness of love.

The Little Snake conjures a character that undergoes a remarkable transformation. The snake, in all of his metaphorical glory, meets humans at the end of their journey. One day, a young girl, not scheduled for a meeting with this reptilian grim reaper, notices and befriends him. The snake, Lanmo, vows to protect the girl, Mary, and in the spirit of friendship, both of them look out for each other. Over Mary's life, we see how Mary's fortunes fall and Lanmo find himself with fewer readings to perform as humans take each others' lives more and more often. This bittersweet fable had me weeping by the end.