Melmoth
by Sarah Perry
First reviewed Jan 2019
Great book. Not my favorite review: I didn’t say much at all, didn’t capture the essence of the book nor grab a reader with any sort of hook in my writing. Bland, blander, blandest, on my part.
I mentally confuse this book with Wolf Hall
I love Helen:
“‘What was I reading,’ she says! Not a wasted word. How like you. Already I feel better—how could I not? In your presence it all seems fantastic, bizarre. You are so ordinary your very existence makes the extraordinary seem impossible. I mean it as a compliment.”
She’s competent and reliable and austere to the point of absurd. But this is plating, and the brass has worn thin; every moment that she chooses to be the peahen, she is forcefully tamping down the dreamer, the coquette that is the very heart of her being. Her veneer is buffeted and eventually broken, as we must know it will be. Underneath, always, is the imperfect-avatar-but-real-person, full of hubris and error and the stuff that makes life livable: “Albína Horáková shrugs again, and Helen envies, for a moment, her majestic rudeness, her ironclad self-worth.” The type of person that doesn’t make for a clean narration but makes for a messy, exciting life.
We are treated to this truest Helen through trinkets locked away, awaiting a curious Pandora to release them again:
Helen pictures herself in an opera box, a brass eyeglass raised to the stage, trailing scraps of beaded net, and laughs. She hears, very distantly, a corresponding laugh, and this one is delighted—comes, it seems from the cardboard box beneath the bed.
This the synecdochal allusion to her past via a box of bits and wisps of memory brought me much joy in part due to its subtly, its hidden nature within the narrative.
By the time I finished the book, that rapture was lessened in the purely selfish way that a favorite obscure band entering the popular consciousness lessens your self image; not at all, but it you can’t help but want to tell people, “Yeah I knew about them back in college” (just me?):
No hope, then, thinks Helen—but she cannot believe it. There is something there—something in her, fluttering, weak, making itself felt. She thinks of the box beneath the bed, and its remnants of the time when she had lived. Then she thinks also of another box, another girl—a lid lifted, and all the world’s wickedness let loose. But something had remained then—hope, very small, very frail, like a white moth looking for a flame.
The directness of the reference—still never by name, but clear as day—brought me back to myself, made the allusion seem a bit less clever and insightful on my part but telegraphed, intended. I accept that that burden is on me alone; so self-satisfied was I with my own discovery that I didn’t realize it was low-hanging fruit, ready for the plucking.
Personal pridefulness aside, Melmoth is a book that does everything I could want; the writing drags you down missing-your-subway-stop deeply, the story moves through important topics that are also capital-i “Important” to our current day. It was a hell of a book to wrap out 2018; for me a year of wonder and change—marriage, closing out a ten-year tenure in New York City—but nationally, globally a year of sadness worthy of witness by Melmoth herself:
Watch Helen: something alters. Until this moment Melmoth has had less currency than fairy tales, for she is newly acquired. Cinderella, Bluebeard, Peter Pan: these are bred in the bones, and accepted without hesitation. Melmoth has not had this luxury, but must instead announce herself to the imagination; must rap three times upon the door.
Melmoth the Witness, denier of the resurrection of Christ, damned to walk the earth as witness to humanity’s secret sins. She is our global order in freefall: viewer of systemic evil as it crushes humanity into despair. Hers are the steps—the C.S. Lewis Inner Ring speech—that gently caress a person into becoming a monster:
“I suppose,” said Hassan, warming his hands on the silver coffee pot which his mother had been given by her mother on the morning of her wedding, “further orders might be made, to preserve the peace of the population. But after all it is not their land, is it? It is yours, and mine, and our father’s, and our father’s father’s.”
Altan Sakir, who always woke early to work, stopped the movement of his foot pedal on the sewing machine and said, “My sons, beware the pride of nations. There were those whose land this was before your ancestors were born, and there will be those who claim it when your name has passed from memory. A bird may well makes its nest in a tree and say: no other bird shall nest here, for these branches are mine alone.”
The lead-up to genocide, the end result of political dehumanization; this is the path that draws the gaze of Melmoth.
No solutions hide within these pages beyond the epigraph: Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.