What this book delivers in subtle horror and terror is incredible and showcases Perry as a raconteur at the top of her game. In my opinion Sarah Perry is one of the most impressive and important writers in the UK right now and Melmoth may be her masterpiece to offer the world a book that I feel will define and shape the face of literature for generations – children will be studying this book at school in the not too distant future alongside Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (I am probably showing my age now…do they even study Frankenstein anymore…). She is in black, this woman, many layers of it, the layers containing the detritus of a week’s meals, and the scent of sandalwood, talc, and sweat. ‘Helen? I said, is that you?’ – and there is her companion, waddling on bowed legs, the joints of her hips worn down, splayed and weak like those of a baby dependent these days on an aluminium frame, which catches against the carpet and in doing so is volubly cursed. In the dim hall she sets down her satchel. Perry’s prose throughout is delectable and as a reader and writer I couldn’t help but marvel at her craft. The horrors concealed in the pages of this book are waiting to lay their cold hands around the readers throat, once they get you they will pull you into the gloom that there is no escape from – Melmoth will consume you in the most horrific ways imaginable. Melmoth – the legendary figure “cursed to wander the earth without home or respite… always watching, always seeking out everything that’s most distressing and most wicked, in a world which is surpassingly wicked, and full of distress.”The stories of this wanderer take readers from PRague to England to Turkey, Armenia (Armenian genocide), Nazi Germany and even the Philippines.Melmoth by Sarah Perry is a beast of a novel – a great hulking monster lurking in a bleak but beautifully constructed Gothic landscape. ““No librarians yet at their post, the ranks of desks miserably empty, like sockets from which teeth had been pulled.”
The best bit for bookworms is the fact that a major setting is the wonderful National Library of the Czech Republic. Look down at the darkness around her feet, in all the lanes and alleys, as if it were a soft black dust swept there by a broom look at the stone apostles on the old Charles Bridges, and at all the blue-eyed jackdaws on the shoulders of St John of Nepomuk.
“Look! It is winter in Prague: night rising in the mother of cities and over her thousand spires. The novel is largely set in Prague and the sections that are are very interesting from a booktrail point of view: Travel Guide Discover Prague with Melmoth
0 kommentar(er)
