“…as your Bible has taught you, that a company of women came to Jesus’s tomb, and found it empty… among them was one who later denied that she had ever seen the resurrected Christ. Because of it she is cursed to wander the earth without home or respite, until Christ comes again…”This is Melmoth, Melmoth the Witness. Who must, without rest, with her feet bleeding, walk the ends of the earth, searching out the sins of others and bearing witness to their wickedness. In the hope that by doing so, she may find redemption.
In 1820, English writer Charles Maturin wrote a book that was to go on to become a cult classic of Gothic romance: Melmoth the Wanderer was about a man who makes a pact with the Devil, selling his soul in exchange for near-immortality—and finding himself doomed to wander the world, trying to somehow foist that long life onto someone else.
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth bears a fleeting resemblance to Maturin’s character, in that this too is a person doomed to wander a world full of evil and depravity and selfishness, but that is where the resemblance ends. Because this latter-day Melmoth is a woman (she who denied the resurrection of Christ) and the story is told, not from her perspective, but that of people who have been haunted by her.
The ‘Nameless’, a beggar in Cairo, with a murky past. Josef Hoffman, a German living in Prague, who saw—and in his own way, participated in—the Jewish Holocaust. And, most importantly, the protagonist, Helen Franklin, 42 years old, who lives in Prague and lives a life of extreme self-discipline, a penance for a long-ago sin. When fragments of a manuscript come into her hands, all of them about Melmoth, Helen too begins to see that mysterious figure, both malevolent and desirable, following Helen around, stretching out a hand, pleading to have Helen share in her loneliness…
On its surface, Melmoth is a solid, extremely engrossing horror story. Perry’s weaving in of stories from around the world and from different periods, each bound by the common thread of injustice and crime and Melmoth, works brilliantly to conjure up an image of a restless, lonely spirit forever wandering the world in search of those as evil as herself. The ‘real’ horrors of our times—the pogroms, the witch-hunts, the genocides—lend the story a very real twist, and take it a few layers deeper.
Which of us, after all, does not live with guilt of some form? How far does our guilt take us, how long does it haunt us? Will those we wrong forgive us, and will that forgiveness be enough? Or are we our own worst critics, unforgiving towards our own sins?
A horror story, yes, but also a thought-provoking one, which makes one look at one’s own life, one’s own motivations and deeds—and wonder what awaits us for all that we’ve done, or not done.
Melmoth
By: Sarah Perry
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 271
Price: `699