![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Her punishment is to travel through time bearing witness to the world’s untold horrors and atrocities. Melmoth, we learn, was among the women who were first to witness the resurrection, but she was the only one to deny what she saw. In the mean time, she is haunted by a sinister being, Melmoth: “Her skin is dappled as though many shadows cross it and her unblinking eyes are spheres of smoky glass.” Perry tells the story through texts within text, shuttling the reader here and there in time between the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, 16th-century Essex, and a hospital in Manila in the 1990s.Īt the centre of this patchwork narrative are the present-day streets of Prague, where Helen Franklin shoulders an unbearable memory that eventually works its way to the surface of the novel. Toughest of all, Perry poses the question of our personal complicity, and how we should respond to our guilt and shame. But this metaphysical fable tackles a disturbing human dilemma: how we endure or are broken by the world’s suffering and injustice. The delight comes from Perry’s sumptuous writing, which evokes a tangible sense of place and mood wherever she takes her story. WHETHER you are already a fan of Sarah Perry’s fiction, or are just curious to see what all the fuss is about, her latest novel, Melmoth, will delight and disturb in equal measure. ![]()
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