'Melmoth', by Sarah Perry (Serpent's Tail, 2018)

My friend Dr Spooner at Lancaster has in the past encouraged me to read Charles Maturin's first-wave Gothic door-stopper Melmoth the Wanderer, but I have failed so far. Instead I took away on holiday with me Sarah Perry's novel from a couple of years ago which took its inspiration from that book. Like her best-seller The Essex Serpent it's not a hard read, but although everybody described that story as Gothic because it had a Victorian setting, a surgeon as a character, and a weird East Anglian legend as a frame, it was a gentle and modest book with a happy and muted ending. Melmoth is also humane and warm at heart, and while central characters die, they do so only when it's time to go; but it has much more Gothic hysteria embedded in it and if you don't like that, you won't swallow it at all.

Melmoth is the witness. Cursed, so the legend goes, to walk the earth eternally as punishment for denying the Resurrection - for refusing to be a witness - she appears whenever there is great sin and sorrow, and offers comfort to the guilty, if only they will join her in despair, take her hand in her utter loneliness. English translator in Gothic Prague, Helen Franklin, comes across stories of Melmoth left by a dead man in a university library: the Witness appears as smoke, as black drapes and hair, as a squawking crowd of jackdaws. She is always just out of sight, until the moment comes when a soul is ready and then she is all too obvious. She moves through 17th-century England, the Armenian Massacre, the Holocaust, and Helen's own past, and present.

Secrets and stories and pain are the currency of the Gothic tradition, but what Mrs Perry does very deftly is to use it to explore guilt, complicity, suffering, and finding the courage to go on: to refuse, in the grammar of the novel, to take Melmoth's hand. It takes great skill and imagination to add a new room to the great haunted house of the Gothic, but, like Sadako in Ring or the House of Leaves, that's what Melmoth is. We're all sinners, after all, and despair may not be far away, like a black figure half-seen in the corner of the eye, like the sound of a jackdaw taking wing. And, given that Serpent's Tail publishes the book, I can't help imagining the Witness as looking a bit like Diamanda Galás.