There’s plenty of Gothic horror, but the
novel failed, for me, in its characterisation. (Review by Margaret von
Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Having thoroughly enjoyed Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, I was looking forward
to reading Melmoth. And, once again,
the writing is beautiful, and the issues Perry raises of redemption,
conscience, guilt and forgiveness are profound and serious. But somehow, the
whole thing doesn’t hang together, and the lightness of touch that made the
earlier novel such a delight is missing.
The basis for Perry’s Gothic tale is the
myth of Melmoth. According to legend, she was one of the women who went to
Christ’s tomb, but she denied that he had risen from the dead and was condemned
thereafter to walk alone through the earth for eternity, seen only by those
with sins on their conscience as she begged them to join her and ease her
loneliness.
The central character is Helen Franklin, an
Englishwoman living as invisibly as she can in Prague to atone for something,
though it takes a long while before we discover what. She is given a strange
manuscript which tells of those who, over several centuries, have been haunted
by Melmoth, and what it is they have done. And, as Helen reads, she too fears
that she is being followed and haunted by a mysterious figure. She hears
footsteps following her as she goes about wintry, evocative Prague and reads
the stories of those whose crimes have brought them to the notice of Melmoth.
The individual stories are well constructed
and told, whether we are taken back to the 16th Century in England, Cairo in
the 1930s and the earlier atrocities against Armenians living in the Ottoman
Empire or to Prague under Nazi occupation. There’s plenty of Gothic horror, but
the novel failed, for me, in its characterisation. Helen is not appealing, nor
are those about whom she reads and it becomes more and more difficult to feel
any empathy for or even connection with the characters. And in the end, the air
of prevailing gloom becomes almost too much to bear.
Melmoth by Sarah Perry is published by Serpent’s Tail. ISBN 987 1 78816 066
7 - Margaret von Klemperer
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