LITERARY FICTION
MELMOTH by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail £16.99, 288 pp) ARGUABLY the most eagerly awaited novel of the year, Sarah Perry’s supremely assured follow-up to The Essex Serpent is a singular creature.
Based on the myth of the Wandering Jew, a figure condemned to roam the earth for all eternity, and indebted to a 19th-century Gothic novel in which the luckless central character sells his soul to the devil, it’s far darker than some fans might have bargained for — but utterly immersive.
We begin in 2016 in wintry, jack daw haunted Prague, the city to which translator Helen has fled to atone for an unidentified but unforgivable sin.
Following a skin-crawlingly creepy episode in the National Library, she comes into possession of a collection of documents detailing incidents from the darkest, most barbaric chapters of human history, all witnessed by the doomed, deathless figure of Melmoth — who, we suspect with a delicious frisson of unease, might even now be watching from the shadows.
It’s quite a trick to have produced a playful, bona fide page-turner that also looks man’s inhumanity to man in the face — yet it’s one Perry has pulled off with aplomb.
FRENCH EXIT by Patrick deWitt (Bloomsbury £16.99, 304 pp) THIS patchy ‘tragedy of manners’ is the fourth novel from Canada’s Patrick deWitt, best known for his Bookershortlisted The Sisters Brothers.
Here, it’s a mother and son who are the centre of attention: fiercely possessive widow Frances, and Malcolm, her lugubrious, lumpen manchild.
Frances, once a wealthy Upper East Side beauty, is now facing ruin having run her way through the fortune of her fantastically unscrupulous lawyer husband, Frank.
Gossip surrounds her sanity, too, as she apparently believes that Frank’s soul has commandeered the body of her cat. Not that she could give a fig — intent only on splashing the last of her cash in style, she hightails it to Paris with both son and moggy in tow.
Quite what any of this adds up to is hard to say, but deWitt succeeds in mining genuine pathos from the plight of his oddball cast of characters, while his droll, deadpan delivery somehow gets under the skin.
AFTERSHOCKS by A.N. Wilson (Atlantic £16.99, 288 pp) SET on an island that could be New Zealand, but isn’t, this is a novel that — as its disarmingly perky, twentysomething narrator Ingrid explains — could have been called The Earth Moved For Me — How About You?
So yes, it’s a love story, one that revolves around the earthquake that brings actress and student Ingrid to the realisation that the love of her life is no less than the dean of the local cathedral.
But it’s also about truth, religion and several other big ideas, although throughout the touch and tone are light: ‘I’m not tricksing you, people, really,’ the unreliable Ingrid protests at one point, having done just that.
With the exception of a couple of such asides, she’s really rather endearing — however, given her unabashed fondness for digression, a firmer editor would have been a godsend.