Sarah Perry’s third novel Melmoth conjures the same feelings as peering into an abandoned well. There is something just beyond your perception. But and the longer you look into its depth, the darkness deepens indefinitely into that contained space.
Melmoth, by Sarah Perry, Custom House 2018
Likewise, Perry’s work is a contained space of under 300 pages. Within these, she follows the footsteps of Melmoth, the woman who witnesses, then subsequently denies, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and who is cursed to traverse the Earth until His second coming. Since then, Melmoth manifests as a dark-cloaked apparition forced to bear witness to our history’s most tragic religious and political condemnations. She attends Mary I’s persecution of protestants, Nazi Germany’s condemnation of Jews, and the Armenian genocide in the first World War. Through each tragedy, a flawed and conflicted character is surrendered to be Melmoth’s guide to each tragedy.
Finally, we arrive with Melmoth in present-day Prague, where Essex native Helen is serving her self-exile for the sins of her own past. After Helen unwittingly finds herself in possession of first-hand accounts of Melmoth the Witness, she finds out that knowing of Melmoth is inviting the Witness to harvest her own guilty conscience. The difference with Helen’s sins is they are wholly personal, and she has her companions to pull her away from Melmoth’s possession and her own penitence.
Through centuries, Perry’s Melmoth thrives on guilt. This emotion, and its consequences, becomes the novel’s underlying layer. It is the occupant in the blackness. Perceiving it, the reader is left with more questions than answers. How guilty are the agents of society’s collective crimes? Does guilt recede over time, or does it lay in wait? Does confession and forgiveness wholly absolve us of our transgressions? And how do we reconcile with the ones we cannot bring ourselves to confess? The novel asks us what we have all asked ourselves. “What might they say, if they knew?”
I scarcely sense darkness rising from pages, and it’s been many reading years since I have. Stephen King’s It, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story all possess that power. Perry’s novel joins these contemporaries transcending the “show, don’t tell” writing dogma. This novel makes us feel the fear, uncertainty, and shock every time the apparition of Melmoth surfaces.
Still, even weighed down with dread, the novel is clothed in elegant prose. In fact, Perry’s sentences shine all the more for this backdrop. Lines such as “Let them be the song, and I the dying echo,” and “Everything before it was prologue: everything after, a footnote,” are there for the reader to hold onto.
Melmoth is an heir apparent to the enchantment of the Gothic novel. Against the classics of the genre, it is more affecting than most of them. The rich historical accounts, the use of the epistolary form, and the fall into madness paint a dark masterpiece.
Thank you Sarah Perry for reminding us of reading’s magic, that hypnotizes and suspends us in the written word’s realms. I turn the last page, switch my lamp off, but still Melmoth lingers, as I peer out into the darkness.