Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Like the Wandering Jew, Perry's nightmarish Melmoth the Witness ranges the earth recording horrors wrought by humankind. She watches and tracks individuals (who feel hairs prick on their neck and search the shadows for visions) whose sins cannot be forgiven, upon whom she preys with flashes of magical realism, recalling the imagery in Perry's The Essex Serpent? (2017). The nonlinear time line of historical events and the nested stories involving wide-ranging and complex characters may sometimes make readers feel uneasy or even lost. But once we gain our sea legs, this stylized, postmodern work by a masterly writer compels us to see genocide, war, deportation, and even compassionate deadly crimes through new eyes that reflect the characters' perspectives. Helen Franklin is a young British woman working as a translator in Prague, where she and her new friends, Karel and Thea, discover a shocking document describing the wanderings of the mythical Melmoth. Later, after reading the unforgettable horrors detailed in the document, Helen breaks down, seemingly unable to withstand the starkly upsetting images, thrumming inevitability of remembrance, and the guilt we all share in some way. This is a sobering, disturbing, yet powerful and moving book that cannot fail to impress. The stories-within-stories and the Jewish themes recall Dara Horn's The World to Come (2006) and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (2013), although Melmoth presents different kinds of nightmares. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Melmoth
Making a brand-new myth is a tricky thing. It takes a deft storytelling hand to weave folklore where none may have existed before, along with a keen eye for little details of horror and beauty that can convince a reader that the dark tale unfolding before them is as abiding as the legends that creep around their own homelands. In Melmoth, Sarah Perry brings us a gorgeously wrought tale that feels as timeless as its title character and as real as the monster you're sure is sitting at the foot of your bed.
Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman working as a translator in Prague, has a relatively simple and quiet life, and while it's not exciting, that's exactly what she wants. Everything changes when her friend Karel reveals a letter passed on to him from an old friend—a letter claiming to reveal not only long-ago sins of history but also a mysterious figure called Melmoth, an eternal witness damned to wander the earth for all time and seek out those cursed by their own sins. Karel is troubled by the letter and the files that accompany it, and he seems consumed by it all . . . until he disappears. Left with nothing but confusion, Helen also becomes consumed by this ancient presence and what it means for her own sins.
The simple premise of a shadowy figure who stalks you and witnesses your sins, even if you're not prepared to confront them, is the driving force of Melmoth, and Perry doesn't waste a word of this lean, taut novel, effectively conveying an ever-encroaching sense of absolute dread. The story builds, unfolding layers of darkness without ever becoming garish or pretentious, until by the end you're happily trapped in its eerie embrace.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Sarah Perry for Melmoth.
This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2018 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
Haunted by past misdeeds, a self-exiled English translator encounters the uncanny in snow-covered Prague. Helen Franklin doesn't deserve joy, so she arranges her own "rituals of discomfort: the uncovered mattress, the unheated room, the bitter tea," the modern-day equivalents of wearing a hair shirt. When one of her few friends, the scholar Karel Praan, stops her on the street to share his discovery of a strange manuscript, Helen begins to suspect her past has caught up with her at last. The manuscript contains tales from many sources, and they all detail horrors in various degrees: a young Austrian boy who gets his neighbors sent to concentration camps during World War II, a 16th-century Protestant in Tudor England striving to retain her faith in the face of persecution, a 19th-century Turkish bureaucrat responsible for writing a memo used to justify the detention of Armenian families. In each of these tales lurks the spectral figure of Melmoth, a witness "cursed to wander t he earth without home or respite, until Christ comes again." But why does steady, practical Helen Franklin feel Melmoth's "cold gaze passing at the nape of her neck"—and what misdeeds from her past have pushed her to the brink of exhaustion? While Helen's friends—the sharp, wry Thea, a former barrister, the cranky landlord Albína, and the saintly Adaya—worry, the beseeching hand of Melmoth grows ever closer. In rich, lyrical prose, Perry (The Essex Serpent, 2017, etc.) weaves history and myth, human frailty and compassion, into an affecting gothic morality tale for 2018. Like David Mitchell and Sarah Waters, Perry is changing what a modern-day ghost story can look like, challenging her readers to confront the realities of worldwide suffering from which fiction is so often an escape. A chilling novel about confronting our complicity in past atrocities—and retaining the strength and moral courage to strive for the future. Copyright Kirkus 2018 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Following the internationally best-selling
Library Journal Reviews
Having summoned a squiggly, writhing creature in her critically acclaimed
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Loosely inspired by Charles Maturin's 1820 novel,