Melmoth by Sarah Perry

times literary supplement 6 October 2018

Sarah Perry has followed her Victorian debut The Essex Serpent with Melmoth, which begins in near-contemporary Prague. It is easy to forget that the setting is 2016, however, not least because our heroine, forty-two-year-old Helen Franklin, has no interest in present-day pleasures. She views the Prague that tourists enjoy as “a stage set, contrived by ropes and pulleys”. In fact, she has no interest in pleasure of any kind and is governed by self-denial. Perry is skilled at suggesting a whole life in a phrase – Helen is introduced to us with “her neat coat belted, as colourless as she is, nine years worn”. Her landlady is “ninety years old, malicious, unkind, devoted to sentimental opera and Turkish Delight”. Helen is a translator from Essex who has to disappoint a new acquaintance when they ask if she is working on “‘Schiller? Peter Stamm? A new edition of Sebald?’” by explaining that instead, she is translating “An instruction manual for operating Bosch power tools”. She is in self-imposed exile, serving penance for a crime she believes she committed twenty years previously – but she is jury and judge here. Having to witness her “rituals of discomfort” without knowing the motivation behind them might be one of the reasons why Helen’s masochism is so frustrating.

The novel takes inspiration from Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin. For all its Gothic trappings, this is a book about guilt and the ways in which human beings attempt to outrun it. Maturin was an Irish priest and the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, who used the surname Melmoth when he lived in exile in France after he was released from Reading Gaol. In Maturin’s original, the character of Melmoth sold his soul to the devil in exchange for extending his life by 150 years. He spends the rest of the book, however, looking for a person wretched enough to exchange places with him. In Perry’s version Melmoth is a woman who has been condemned to walk the earth for eternity. Her crime was to falsely deny that she saw Christ after the resurrection. She is now forced to bear witness to humanity’s failings but, wretchedly lonely, she attempts to lure benighted individuals to walk the earth with her. The temptation of taking her hand is that her companionship offers a flight from the hell of solitary guilt, and Perry is excellent on the human desire to escape pain. Another character later reflects “I discovered then that pain could obliterate everything that made me human and reduce me to something lower than an animal”.

Helen is handed a manuscript containing testimonies of those who have seen Melmoth. The first of these stories within the story is the most compelling: Josef Hoffman is a lonely and unlikeable boy in late 1930s Czechoslovakia but a warm Jewish family, the Bayers, attempt to befriend him. Even as he walks past the shop they own and hears them play music on their radio, “Confusion and desire and envy lodged low and heavy in my stomach. I knew it did me harm. I didn’t care”. We know things will not end well for the Bayers before we are told – Hoffman, even at ninety-four, is unable to forgive himself for his hand in this.

Perry has talked about the moral imperative behind this novel: “I felt a moral duty to look. That is what the book is about – bearing witness”. This means that the horrors she depicts – a Protestant is slowly burnt to death in seventeenth-century England and he watches the fat drip out of his arm after his hand has perished – have been thoroughly researched. She is also at pains to write about types of barbarity which have not traditionally been the subject of fiction in English, not least the under-reported Armenian Genocide. As Perry has said, “the novel draws on historical atrocities which are either denied or rarely written about”. Her desire to write accurate accounts of heinous, lesser-known crimes is noble, but that doesn’t make scenes of hideous cruelty and suffering any more palatable for the reader.

The political anger behind the novel is evident. The brothers who, as Turkish bureaucrats, sign off the annihilation of Armenian families, are perfect material for government machinery: “soft enough to be pliable, hard enough not to break”. Perry tackles important questions about culpability and transgression and it is a brave writer who is prepared to explore the worst of humanity. It is questionable, however, whether this is a novel that will foment outrage or whether, like Helen, the reader will merely feel ground down.

There is scant light relief (which is, no doubt, the point): Helen is befriended by a gentle academic and his charismatic wife. The wife’s vivacity is all but extinguished by a stroke, however, and the marriage wrecked. One longs for Helen to rebel against “every discomfort, every hard thing” instead of enduring them as her just reward. She refuses even a plate of small pink cakes, although “the scent of sugar, of moist and half-baked dough, rises from the chipped plate, and Helen’s stomach contracts”. Helen’s narrow life is echoed in the despairing loneliness of Melmoth and it is the latter’s humanity that, at times, will horrify the reader. Melmoth is a monster but she is not without pathos.

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement