Melmoth - Sarah Perry (2018)

Having recently read Sarah Perry’s amazing The Essex Serpent, I was delighted to find out that her next book would be coming out this October. Its title seemed familiar too so I looked it up and found that there is, indeed, a novel called Melmoth the Wanderer (from now on referred to as Old Melmoth), which has been on my Want to Read list for years. We must have covered it in one of my classes way back and I must have taken an interest in it at some point if I added it to my list, so what better opportunity to read it than now, when one of my favourite new authors is about to come out with a… what exactly? Sequel? Modern day retelling? Spiritual successor? A book only vaguely „inspired by”? It wasn’t clear from the blurb so I set out to read Old Melmoth immediately, to make sure I don’t miss anything important in New Melmoth when it comes out. Then I got approved for an ARC as early as mid August and I couldn’t help myself, even though I’m still only halfway through Old Melmoth… it’s a long, very dense book but immensely enjoyable too, and I will finish it one day… but New Melmoth couldn’t wait.

First, to answer my own question as to how the two books relate to each other – in a pretty ingenious way, I thought. In Old Melmoth the central figure was an ancestor of the main character, who, although supposed to be long dead yet was somehow still alive, was a pretty solid, tangible person. Contrast that with New Melmoth where she is a universally known and acknowledged myth, an urban legend essentially – some people believe she exists, others don’t, and even those who do argue about what she actually is. One of the characters is firmly in the believer camp, and when he compiles a list of primary sources for his research, Old Melmoth is among them! So basically the book treats Maturin’s text as non-fiction – when it’s not being dismissed as „a novel no one has read”, that is, which I found pretty funny. In that regard, „spiritual successor” is probably the right term, or maybe „loving homage” - but you absolutely do not have to read Old Melmoth to understand the new one, since they have nothing in common storywise but the name of the title character.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, what did I think about the actual book? Well, I’m not sure. It’s been a few days now since I finished it and I still can’t quite make up my mind. Usually this is the point where I’m supposed to compare it to the author’s other works I’ve read, but in this case I’m not sure if I can. Almost everything I loved about The Essex Serpent is missing from here, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable in its own way. If I really had to sum it up, I would say that this book was, above all else, experimental. It took a lot of risks and I’m not sure they paid off. For starters, the main character, Helen, is intentionally dull. She’s a woman who has committed a horrible crime (or so she insists) in her youth, and has been atoning for it ever since: wearing drab clothes, not eating properly, never listening to music or even making sure her bed is comfortable. This has the makings of an interesting character if only it was paired with an actual personality, but Helen never develops beyond a woman of few words and even fewer redeeming quailities. Her friends on the page might find her subdued character charming and amusing, but in real life it can get excruciatingly boring to read about.

The book is not only about Helen, though, since most of it is made up of various letters, journals and testimonies she reads, making for a tale within a tale (within a tale) kind of narrative, same as in Old Melmoth. These documents are invariably more interesting than Helen’s own life, but they get repetitive pretty fast. Since they all concern themselves with their writers’ respective experiences meeting Melmoth, they use much the same imagery and expressions when detailing this mythical character. A vague black shape made up of shadows, looking like it’s in the distance then suddenly it’s right in front of you, hair constantly moving as if blown by a breeze… by the time you get to the last chapter, you can practically skim whole paragraphs because you’ve read it all before. These tales don’t really contribute to the overall story, instead their main role is to make Melmoth as palpable to Helen and scary for the reader as possible, and while they succeed in the first, they ultimately fail in the second, at least for me. Why is everyone so afraid of Melmoth, anyway? All she really does is make theatrical entrances and ask people with a guilty conscience to join her in her wanderings. She never really punishes or hurts anybody, usually by the time she shows up her „victims” have done all that to themselves anyway. In the end, this was my biggest problem with the book: for all its atmospheric darkness and looming sense of danger (which I very much loved – Sarah Perry is quite simply a master at making her settings and sceneries come alive as if they’re characters of their own), I never really felt there was anything actually at stake for any of the characters. Sure, delving deep into their damaged psyche and examining their guilt could have been rewarding in itself, had the book succeeded in making me care about any of them. But it didn’t, and that, ultimately, is why Melmoth fell so short of my expectations.