Reviews of Melmoth, The Essex Serpent and Here Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry.
I’ve just finished reading Melmoth by Sarah Perry, a gothic tale of a tall, slim woman, dressed in black, who haunts the guilty and the sinful.
Sarah was first published in 2014 with After Me Comes the Flood, a literary novel about a man who, one day, decides to up and leave his life and finds himself drawn to a dilapidated old house and a community that appears to have much to hide. A literary novel is publisher-speak for ‘thin on plot’, and indeed that’s as far as this story goes. Yet there was something about the flowing prose that persuaded me to buy her second, The Essex Serpent, published in 2016.
This is a clever book. And it has a plot, an entertaining journey through late 19th century London and salt marsh Essex. Cora retreats, after the death of her husband, to the countryside with her son. Being an intelligent, inquisitive woman she finds the local legend of the serpent intriguing and is determined to discover a new species. In attempting so she meets William, the local vicar. The tale is a sensuous, beautifully balanced story about a world in the midst of the religion vs science debate (Origin of the Species was published in 1859).
So, to Melmoth. Helen, our heroine, leads a monkish existence, filled with remorse for something; a something that we don’t discover until close to the end of the tale. A friend, Karel, passes to her his research on Melmoth, the biography of one of the women who opened Jesus’ tomb after he was crucified to discover that it was empty and he had risen. Melmoth later denied that this was so and as punishment was forced to wander the world in loneliness until the second coming, and attempting, in the process, to persuade other lost souls to join her. Incidentally, there is no truth to the Melmoth story, and Sarah’s book is based on a much earlier gothic tale.
There is a wide cast of characters and much backstory related to others’ encounters with ‘the wanderer’. Sarah doesn’t quite pull it off though. In effect she’s trying to graft a gothic horror story into 21st century Prague. And, in fact, I spent much of the story trying to get a handle on ‘when’ I was. As soon as I started Melmoth, however, it reminded me of The Historian, a fine book by Elizabeth Kostova who manages the modern gothic task much better. It’s well worth a read.
Also, Helen didn’t work for me. In any work sympathy for the main character is the goal of a writer, you want your reader to be rooting for them; I found her dull.
If you do want to sample Sarah Perry’s work, however, then take a look at The Essex Serpent. It’s not written quite as well as Melmoth, from a stylistic point of view, but the story is captivating and Cora and William burst from the page in HD splendour.
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