Gradually we understand her asceticism as a response to a fateful past she has sealed away in a box under her bed. One is Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman living in Prague, so ordinary-seeming that you wouldn’t notice her in the street, though if you saw the bare mattress and unshaded bulb in her room you might start to wonder. Two central characters concern us throughout. The effort is laudable, though the result is a lesser book. Perry has tried to do much more, ethically and philosophically, in this novel. The many astute details in Melmoth, by contrast, tend to be lost in its armoury of omens and catalogue of horrors. It’s a pleasure to remember the sharp-wittedness and warmth of her writing there: the noble and gutsy characters giving their love in unexpected ways the concerns of the present pitched against history the descriptions of fossils and unfolding ferns, the lights shining over the marshes. Sarah Perry had a phenomenal success in 2016 with The Essex Serpent.
T his is a novel about witnessing, so we must look it firmly in the eye but it’s a dark, difficult, ambitious and problematic book.
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