Through Helen, we get rapidly up to speed on the story of Melmoth. After that moment, nothing in Helen’s circumscribed world is the same. The narrator tells us that Helen is not remarkable until she first learned of Melmoth. From the very first page, where we meet protagonist Helen Franklin in Prague, every moment is weighted with heightened emotion and foreshadowing. Not only did Perry take inspiration from Melmoth the Wanderer, a nineteenth-century Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, she also adopted some of the structure and tone of those early, sensational novel. Melmoth presents us with testimony from throughout history about what people did when they were given the choice to stay or flee. In her loneliness, she may offer a way out to the tormenters or their victims, to escape with her to bear witness while wandering the earth with bare feet. She is believed to be a woman who denied what she had see at Christ’s tomb and was cursed to seek out all those terrible things that people do to each other. But in the world that Perry created for her characters, there is one being who sees all: Melmoth the Wanderer. Their victims are left to recover as best they can, if they survive at all. Many of them were never punished for their deeds. Throughout history, humans have done terrible things to each other. Sarah Perry’s haunting novel, Melmoth, revolves around two ideas: loneliness and bearing witness.
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