Right...you might need a pot of tea for this one because I'm not interested in reading Melmoth at all am I.
Not one bit.
The social media hype for the book has been relentless for six months, we've definitely all known 'Melmoth is coming'. In fact I wonder about the impact of that on an author these days, I would be worrying myself sick about the burden of expectation unless I was Dame Hilary. As a reader I have to confess to some weariness in the waiting.
Can hype cancel itself out I wonder....
Gothic horror? No, not my bag, not really...
Some lacklustre reviews just cemented this pre-conditioned avoidance in my head and now I wonder about that too...
Do those sort of reviews deter or encourage a reader?
However I was weakening and then I read Sarah Perry's piece in the Guardian Review...
'Melmoth is not an opium novel but it is certainly on opioid one, and a gabapentin one, and a diazepam one. After writing it I have come to understand literary drug culture as being more properly a culture of pain...'
Sarah Perry goes on to describe her own experiences of pain and torment, the result of a ruptured spinal disc eventually alleviated by surgery and through it all the envisioning and writing of Melmoth. It all necessitated a shift in the author's long-held opinions about 'the cult of the drug-addled artist', previously held in contempt...
'I was in some respects a prig, I suppose, and prided myself on my priggishness, and the pride preceded a fall; for what I have on my hands now is a novel that was written while high.'
Well I felt a very slight affinity because the scribbles here were born as a result of a period of acute and excruciating pain almost thirteen years ago now. The community nurse's perk, some sort of mysterious stray virus that had lodged as a neuritis in my brachial plexus, and you might as well have been drilling through my upper arms with a Black and Decker, which would have been infinitely preferable. I was off work for months, reading like a demon in my drug-fuelled state (War & Peace through sleepless nights, the endless Battle of Borodino a welcome and happy release) and began writing here for something to keep my mind occupied, just for a few weeks you understand. It was the gabapentin that caught my attention because I was away with the fairies on it too and had to stop taking it.
And so, I was dithering about Melmoth until I woke up on publication day, Tuesday October 2nd, ordered a copy online to collect from Waterstones in Plymouth, announced to dear long-suffering Bookhound that I really needed this book today, and off we went on the forty-two mile round trip.
I started reading it in the shop.
Helen Franklin is a translator living in Prague. She is quiet, self-contained, reclusive, anti-social and not averse to some self-denial in her pursuit of an ordinary uneventful life. It is clear that Helen is atoning for something, the question is what.
'What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk onto the river...'
Prague, at times, becomes something of a hinterland and with as powerful a sense of place as I have ever read. I've never visited but now feel as if I have.
'Look! It is winter in Prague: night is rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. Look down at the darkness around your feet, in all the lanes and alleys as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom; look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridge, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk.'
People various, both past and present, walk onto the Melmoth stage with stories to be told, fates to be revealed...
Thea and Karel Prazan, the academic couple who befriend Helen...
Josef Hoffman, the enigmatic old man in the university library...
His wartime childhood neighbours, Franz and Freddie Bayer...
Sir David Ellerby and his testament of 1637 about Alice Benet...
Albina Horakova. The landlady, malicious, unkind and malevolent, the complete obverse of her name, a sort of living jackdaw in her black dresses, the visible tangible presence of the macabre that builds as do the mysterious birds..
And, through the stories within stories, both victims and perpetrators of past evil and horrors are accompanied by the spectre of Melmoth: the woman who, having denied any sighting of the risen Christ after the resurrection is consigned to a life of barefoot wandering and eternal witness to the evils and pain of the world.
'So she was cursed not with death, but with deathlessness: to wander the earth until Christ returns - one hoped for her sake, in a forgiving frame of mind - condemned always to appear where all's most cheerless, dark and deadly.'
Sarah Perry chooses her pivotal moments of evil in world history with care, introducing Melmoth as a sort of peripatetic conscience, to bear witness and haunt those who find their sins have caught up with them. Melmoth perches on the shoulders of the guilty begging them to walk with her, jackdaws are ever-present, and therein doth madness lie. Helen Franklin will be no exception, yet when her past is revealed...well the reader must make up their own mind, but may also ask themselves 'what might I have done?'
Incidentally my search for the Perfect Bookmark led me straight to Janis Goodman's etching (please don't tell me they are actually crows) and worryingly I have now been noticing jackdaws everywhere since I turned the final page.
Melmoth had me pinned to my chair for two days, with the final chapters gripping to the very last page and the final twists cunningly concealed that had me turning back to the first page to start the book again with this newly-granted vision. It all reminded me of the total-immersion reading experience that was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell years ago (don't be put off if that book wasn't to your liking, it's the similarity of experience I am trying to describe not a comparison of the titles) and it worked on many levels. On the surface post-modern gothic horror of The-Woman-in-Black genre, with imagination running riot and fear rippling through the pages (hairs - nape of neck etc.) though I have to admit to not feeling overly spooked or scared because, drilling beneath all that, Melmoth became a book about so much more. And I think this 'so much more' might be different for each reader.
For me this was about evil, about being punished, about shrugging it off, about acting on and living with it, about mercy and redemption but above all, for me, this was a book about guilt.
Sarah Perry says this in her article...
'The problem with describing pain, of course, is that you can no more know what I mean by torment than I can know what you mean by love...'
And it could be argued likewise about guilt and perhaps shame, both of which are writ large here. Melmoth made me think about so much more than was on the page and to ask questions of myself and try, sometimes in vain, to answer them, and in a world that can seem increasingly unconscionable and cruel. It extended to thoughts about the lesser part played in the greater evil, the complicity of silence, of guilt by association, of turning a blind eye. It seemed, at times, as if this is exactly what a reader was meant to do...to be allowed to get to know the characters on the page only so much before turning the spotlight on themselves.
It is no good telling a guilt-ridden person that they have nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt is as relevant and personal as pain and love, and living with the consequences can be equally hard. My starting point for thinking about guilt (and as a health visitor you can have no idea how much of my day was spent counselling young mothers who felt guilty about everything) has long been the premise that everyone did the best they could with the knowledge, information and skills at their disposal at the time. As Paul Gilbert elaborates in his book The Compassionate Mind...
'The American psychologist Martin Hoffman sees guilt as related to sympathy and empathy. Adult guilt, therefore is linked to compassion and a desire to care for others. If we don't care about others, why would we be bothered with guilt?'
We live in a world where every heartbeat seems to pump guilt our way if we are susceptible to it; it could and does bring vulnerable souls down given a foot in the door, and to watch Helen Franklin's self-imposed imprisonment is testament to this.
Melmoth is arguably a book that will mean different things to different readers, surely the sign of a great book. Much might depend on a reader's life view and experiences, the place where they are now. Some may find it chilling and disturbing, others may find it revealing of greater depths, but one thing is for sure, you will be thinking about it long after you have finished it because it is a book that continues to unwrap its layers.
Oh and maybe something else for sure...you will see jackdaws everywhere when you might not have noticed them before, but small price to pay for reading what I thought might be a 'fail' for me, but which has been transformed into another of my best reads of 2018.
And yes, before you ask, I will now give The Essex Serpent another chance (wrong moment, wrong reader, maybe right book) as well as seeking out her first novel After Me Comes the Flood because, as Susan Hill suggests, 'Sarah Perry is the real deal.'
If you have read any or all by Sarah Perry I would love to know your thoughts...
And does hype weary you to the point of deterrent...
And likewise, what about lacklustre book reviews... do they put you off or make you want to read a book to find out for yourself...
For anyone near Cambridge for the forthcoming Literary Festival, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss will be in conversation with Alex Clark on November 25th at 4pm. I can't think of a more dazzling, fascinating pairing or a better chair, so if anyone is going please do report back for us.
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