Spiritless haunting
This follow-up to The Essex Serpent piles on the gothic so heavily that it fails to be spooky, says
Sarah Perry’s new novel sets itself up to be precisely the sort of fireside chiller you might expect from the author of the best-selling The Essex Serpent .It begins with a letter that is at once a confession, an apology and an intimation that something awful is about to happen.
“The door is open, and something is waiting there,” writes a man called J.A. Hoffman, breathlessly, before charging his correspondent, Dr Prazan, to keep safe the document tucked in with his letter. “Forgive me! She is coming!”
The Essex Serpent was a novel of ideas marinated in the gothic, set partly in a superstitious 19th-century English village terrorised by tales of a malignant serpent lurking in the estuary. Expectations are huge for Melmoth, Perry’s third novel, which is set in present-day Prague and shares its predecessor’s interest in how legends can work as a sort of viral infection, contaminating and possessing those who come into contact with them.
Here, the legend is that of Melmoth — subject of an 1820 novel by Irish writer Charles Maturin and who, in Perry’s reimagining, is a deathless, lonely woman in black, condemned to walk the earth barefoot, seeking out the guilty and the susceptible to walk forever alongside her.
We know pretty quickly who her next “victim” will be, because Perry — who is an intrusive authorial presence — tells us on page 5.
Helen Franklin is a 42-year-old translator living a self-imposed monastic existence in Prague to atone for a misdemeanour 20 years ago. She has come into contact with Hoffman’s manuscript through her acquaintance with Karel Prazan, an academic.
Prazan hasn’t slept since he began reading it and is moved to share his burden with Helen by making her read it, too.
It contains a series of testimonies: a lengthy one from Hoffman, who was a boy when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939; an account of a meeting with a religious martyr written in 1637; and a journal by a Turk who willed himself not to see the implications of his actions during the Armenian Genocide in 1916. All mention a woman with bleeding feet, who appears like a shadow on street corners and in prison cells, watching patiently.
Before long, Prazan disappears, after complaining he too is being watched. It becomes the turn of Helen to start seeing a ghostly figure in Prague’s frosted streets, and then in her mean little bedsit.
Melmoth, it becomes apparent, is a phantasm of conscience who pops up throughout history, either to witness private transgressions at historically cataclysmic moments, or to prey upon those who feel haunted by an abstract feeling of guilt. Helen is initially sceptical, yet, where The Essex Serpent explicitly examined the 19th-century intellectual battle between faith and rationalism through its heroine, a lively, Darwin-reading, amateur palaeontologist, this novel has no similar spirit of inquiry.
Partly this is because Helen is such an inert, passive central character, with scant inner life to speak of; partly because Perry’s mannered narrative style so self-consciously piles on the gothic motifs. In a novel so artfully doomy, rationalism never had a chance. Jackdaws are forever clattering against windows, “blue eyes blinking”. Icing on a cake is “gleaming pink as a wet fold of flesh”. Helen’s landlady is a spiteful old woman with a penchant for black velvet.
Reading it, I felt as if I were trapped in some exquisite, oppressively rendered Dutch still life, full of skulls and decaying fruit, where everything portends something else, at the expense of simply being itself.
At the same time, Perry alerts us to the artifice of what we are reading. Prague — whose fairytale turrets and streets are obsessively detailed, is early on described as a “stage set, contrived by ropes and pulleys”.
Perry persistently impels her readers to “look!” at the scene she is describing, as though, if we don’t, it will collapse, like one of Prospero’s insubstantial pageants. But the more she commands us to see the black-robed woman who has just slipped inside the room or to gaze upon Prague’s “glittering . . . treacherous” cobbles, the harder it is to do so, because the author’s pointing finger gets in the way.
The novel ought to work as its own form of curse. We ought to feel, by virtue of reading it, as if Melmoth is watching us, too. Quite simply, it ought to frighten us. But it doesn’t. The eerie power of Perry’s previous novel lay in the fact that it was easy to imagine a monster lurking in the Essex estuary. It’s never once possible to imagine Melmoth.
In the end, Perry’s gifts as a storyteller are best served not by her gothic imagination but by the more realist set pieces.
Hoffman’s account of his treachery during World War II is a gripping piece of testimony. The scenes in a Manila hospital, where Helen commits her first, more forgivable, crime, have a feverish, hallucinatory power. Yet Perry’s theme — that we cannot live a life free from personal reckoning, that we must stand up and bear witness — is made small by being bundled up in a lifeless, spooky conceit
Reading it, I felt as if I were trapped in some exquisite, oppressively rendered Dutch still life, full of skulls and decaying fruit.