Karel, his girlfriend Thea and then Helen become obsessed with what the manuscript has to say, and, as it turns out, Helen also has secrets to hide. Helen has recently been shown a mysterious manuscript by her friend Karel, and the latter got it from Josef Hoffman, a man who has died recently.

What Helen cares about is her job and…”self-punishment”. Helen is “ small, insignificant, having about her an air of sadness whose source you cannot guess at”. As with The Essex Serpent, the author also starts her book with evoking descriptions of Prague, but only then to emphasise that the main character Helen, who lives in the city, has little interest in her beautiful historic surroundings. Both the structure (such as other people’s confessions) and the theme (Melmoth/manuscripts, etc.) of Perry’s novel then reflect Maturin’s work. There is nobody watching…there is only us…And if there is only us, we must do what Melmoth would do: see what must be seen – bear witness to what must not be forgotten.” Sarah Perry drew her inspiration for this book from Charles Maturin’s book Melmoth the Wanderer. As in The Essex Serpent, Perry uses one intriguing and spooky legend here as a bait to entice her readers into picking up this “Gothic and unsettling” book only for those readers to then discover that they, instead, have been served with merely a collection of sad personal historical accounts that the author never even managed to bring convincingly together to make her final important point on history, witnessing and responsibility.

Even though there is an attempt made by the author to make this book deep and philosophical by touching upon such issues as sin, guilt, regret and atonement, these messages never get across in a compelling manner, and, overall, the book feels dull and very contrived. The obsession with the manuscript soon makes Helen confront her own past. She strikes up a friendship with one “posh” couple Karel and Thea, and it is through them that she reads a mysterious manuscript that details the confessions of certain people who allegedly had an encounter with Melmoth or Melmotka (a lonely woman who once denied the resurrection of Christ and is doomed to wander the Earth forever bearing witness to the humanity’s cruelty). In this story, Helen Franklin is a forty-something-year-old woman living in the Czech Republic in 2016 and working as a translator. Melmoth is Perry’s third book in which she focuses on the legend of Melmoth the Wanderer as it is seen through the eyes of modern-day characters living in Prague. First, I would like to say that I loved Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, its historical context, its beautiful prose, its main character, its plot – it read (almost, perhaps) like a modern classic, and it was a very enjoyable experience.

Melmoth review