Melmoth, Sarah Perry’s third novel and the follow-up to the wildly successful The Essex Serpent, draws both theme and structure from Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer. The titular figure in the original book was a man, a kitsch mashup of Faust and the Wandering Jew, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 years more time on Earth. Perry is not the first to update the tale – Balzac wrote a novella called Melmoth Reconciled – but she has transformed Melmoth into a woman and charged the myth with Christian and folkloric resonances, presenting, like Maturin, a series of documents purporting to prove the existence of this ghastly, tormented figure.
The book’s central character is Helen Franklin, a woman in her early 40s working as a translator in Prague. She is a pitiable figure, “small, insignificant, having about her an air of sadness whose source you cannot guess at; of self-punishment, self-hatred, carried out quietly and diligently and with a minimum of fuss”. It is through a friend called Karel that Helen first comes to hear of the myth of Melmoth, or Melmotka, as she is known in Prague, a woman who wanders the Earth “until she’s weary and her feet are bleeding”, bearing witness to all humanity’s violence and cruelty.
Karel gives Helen a collection of texts that speak of a wraith-like figure who appears at times of great sorrow, beckoning “with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel”. First, we meet Josef Hoffmann, a “dour unlikable boy” growing up in wartime Czechoslovakia who sees Melmoth as he’s marched towards Theresienstadt. Later, we read a letter from the genial Sir David Ellerby to his wife, Elizabeth, telling of an encounter with a woman in an inn who has met Melmoth. There’s also a passage taken from the “Cairo Journals of Anna Marney”, which recounts the life of a Turkish beggar who oiled the bureaucratic machine that enabled the massacre of the Armenians. The facility with which Perry moves between these worlds and registers recalls Thomas Pynchon or George Saunders – the sense of a writer so completely in control of her craft that she is able to inhabit any number of different guises, each of them perfectly convincing.
It is Helen’s life that we keep coming back to, though, slowly discovering that a tale we thought provided mere architecture for the exploration of the Melmoth myth has its own dark history. Helen recounts a visit to Manila years earlier when attempting to escape her stultifying parents. There she met a young trainee doctor, Arnel, and a woman, Rosa, who’d been horribly scarred in an acid attack by her jealous boyfriend. We realise that every life contains its scenes of horror, and that at each one Melmoth is there, watching.
It’s clear that behind the figure of Melmoth sits Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin writes of his Angel, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”
Like Benjamin, Perry is asking us to consider both the importance of bearing witness and the toll it takes on those called to bear it. There’s a sense that this is a book that seeks at once to provide a blueprint for how to negotiate the legacy of the atrocities of the 20th century and a model for resistance to contemporary violence. In a powerful scene halfway through the novel Karel, in an unnamed English airport, sees a man in chains being led by two security guards. “Regarde-moi!” the man shouts, and Karel joins a group of students protesting at the man’s deportation.
The hopeful note struck by this episode of defiance in the face of power is mirrored in the book’s luminous, visionary ending, where Helen meets Melmoth in the (frayed, decaying) flesh. It’s an extraordinary conclusion to a novel that manages that vanishingly rare feat – being at once hugely readable and profoundly important. I’ve read Melmoth twice now and can’t remember a book that has managed to condense so much into so few pages, that has summoned such atmosphere, so many vistas and voices. The reader, who is repeatedly addressed over the course of the novel, is left with the feeling that, more than anything, Melmoth is a good book, one that, for all its uncanny shudders, comes from a place of decency and good faith, a beacon against the darkest times. Perry’s masterly piece of postmodern gothic is one of the great literary achievements of our young century and deserves all the prizes and praise that will be heaped upon it.
• Melmoth by Sarah Perry is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.61 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
