A penchant for black velvet

This follow-up to ‘The Essex Serpent’ piles on the gothic so heavily that it fails to be spooky, says Claire Allfree

SMELMOTH

271pp, Serpent’s Tail, £16.99, ebook £7.12

arah Perry’s new novel sets itself up to be precisely the sort of fireside chiller you might expect from the author of the bestselling 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 the 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 five. 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 that 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

TRAPPED IN A STILL LIFEMementoMori, by an unknown artist