She took her own spin on Melmoth the Wanderer Novel by Charles Maturin. I didn’t care for the Essex Serpent at all and worried I wouldn’t like this book, but I thought Perry did a good job with this. Helen is no vivacious heroine: It is important that she be a lonely soul “at the lowest ebb of life.” Perry’s other characters - Karel’s sickly, jilted wife Helen’s creepy, decrepit roommate - also lack color and vigor.So this was a 3.5 star read that I rounded up to 4 stars. “Melmoth” is shorter than “The Essex Serpent” and distinctly - and deliberately - more somber. Meanwhile, there lurks a dark-robed figure, “patiently watching, patiently biding its time.” She starts to hear “follower’s feet” in cobblestoned alleys, detects movement in shadows and wakes frightened in the night. But when Karel vanishes, her life turns upside down. Helen takes what she reads and learns with a pinch of salt.
Helen borrows it and reads what turns out to be the first of several testimonies recording sightings of, or contact with, Melmoth the Witness, a woman with black clothes, bleeding feet and eyes “like the slick of oil on water.” Death, she realizes, has its imprint on him, “like a watermark on empty sheets of paper.” Fighting panic and paranoia (“Is it her - has she come? Do you see her?”), Karel tells Helen a story about a man called Josef Hoffman who died in the library and left behind a strange manuscript. One snowy day after Christmas she encounters one of those friends, Dr. Small, sad and insignificant, she has few friends and many secrets, remaining tight-lipped about her past and the reasons for “her exile, her self-punishment.”
Perry’s protagonist is Helen Franklin, a translator who left England for Prague 20 years earlier. Perry’s version constitutes an ingenious rewrite: She sets events in present-day Prague, swaps macabre acts for uncanny happenings and, most significantly, transforms Maturin’s itinerant bogeyman into a bogeywoman. “Melmoth” sees Perry channeling Charles Robert Maturin’s diabolical masterpiece from 1820, “Melmoth the Wanderer.” That book’s eponymous drifter was a man who exchanged his soul for immortality in a pact with the devil and then hunted out innocents to tempt into damnation. Her eagerly awaited follow-up revolves around another fiendish legend - not the resurfaced “scarebeast” of that previous novel but the return of a tormented villain condemned to ceaselessly roam the Earth. Last year, Sarah Perry captivated readers with “The Essex Serpent,” a marvelous mock-Victorian tale about religious faith, supernatural myth and the mystery of the human heart.
0 kommentar(er)
