Novel set in Europe, Manila and Turkey

16th January 2025

Melmoth by Sarah Perry, novel set in Europe (Prague, England, Czechoslovakia), Manila and Turkey.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

OBSERVER FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018

When translator Helen Franklin encounters her friend Karel in the cobbled streets of contemporary Prague, an intriguing story of a mysterious and sinister woman unfolds. The woman is known as Melmoth.

Melmoth is a feminine folk-myth based on the legend of the wandering Jew, and concerns a biblical figure who, thanks to denying having witnessed Christ’s resurrection, is cursed and doomed to roam the earth until Christ returns. The idea may also have been borrowed from Melmoth the Wanderer, a Gothic novel by Irish novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin, published in 1820. In Perry’s version, Melmoth first appears in the pages of a document tucked in a leather case that a distraught and disturbed Karel gives to Helen with considerable relief.

After an account of how Karel happened to have the document in his possession, the reader is taken by its author first to Czechoslovakia. The document turns out to be something of a memoir, and forms the beating heart of the novel. Themes of morality and guilt, and dread and desire are explored as Helen follows the trail the memoir sets.

Perry has the balance of fiction and ideas just right in my view, but you do need to be in the right mood for a book like this and make an effort to get beyond the first section which is a little boggy with detail at times. There is a marked contrast in narrative voices in this novel, too, the Helen Franklin sections written in a clipped, gushy, almost breathless sort of voice that is quintessentially British, a voice that demands as much attention as the story being told and often gets in the way of it. Lots of detailed description of incidentals in interior spaces make the early part of the book feel a touch claustrophobic, too, at times, but later on, the geographical settings are portrayed with finesse. The sections pertaining to the document, along with the English letter, the Cairo journal and the Turkish testimony are what make this book shine.

Buy Now

Melmoth is one of those books that readers will either love or put down after ten or twenty pages with a sigh, and in my view, this comes down not to the story itself but to the style in which it has been told. I’ve called the novel upmarket women’s fiction because I believe that is the target audience, but Melmoth could just as well be thought of as a contemporary version of Victorian gothic.

Guest Review by Isobel Blackthorn

Isobel is a prolific Australian novelist. She writes both contemporary/literary, thrillers and dark fiction. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and via her website. 

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