This act, in the context of Nazi-occupied Prague, has enormous moral consequences. Without wishing to give too much awayÑthis is a novel whose gears turn on the excitement of the next mysteryÑthe document is the story of a young German boy who acts on a moment of petty envy. Take, for example, “The Hoffman Document”, one of the first texts-within-the-text we come across. Any one of these stories could absorb a novel in its own right. There is an archive of human misery at the centre of this story and at times PerryÕs novel strains to bear it all. Children starve in Theresienstadt, administrators pull the strings of the Armenian genocide from afar, the victim of an acid attack in Manila begs to die, a gay man is forcibly deported in contemporary Britain. The documents in the Melmoth manuscript pull us backwards and forwards through time to witness some of the most brutal crimes of the twentieth century, as well as moments of interpersonal violence and betrayal. The results, though, are more muddy than revealing. To PerryÕs credit she attempts something innovative and ambitious within that familiar space. Its tools are the dark secret, the mysterious figure, the past that disrupts the present. The novelÕs world is an unmistakably Gothic one. What begins as a ghost story caught in a research project eventually pulls us back into HelenÕs own past. As Helen makes her way through its disparate collection of documents, an image of Melmoth comes together in memoirs, journal entries, letters, folk songs and operas. The catalyst for the novelÕs unravelling of parallel mysteries is a manuscript assembled by a friend of HelenÕs, Dr Karel Prazan. Yet MelmothÕs protagonist is not this creature but someone far more ordinary: “Helen Franklin, forty-two”, an English woman living a life of drab isolation in Prague. A pseudo-Biblical figure who denies ChristÕs resurrection, she is doomed to act as witness to the darkest moments of human life and human history.

In her reimagining, however, Melmoth has been transformed into a very different creature. Sarah PerryÕs Melmoth picks up some of these threads the malevolent wanderer and the assemblage of texts that each hold a glimpse of MelmothÕs life.

Maturin draws on the mythology of Faust and the Wandering Jew, adding the device of a manuscript, a series of texts within the text through which MelmothÕs descendent gains a picture of his life. Through those years he haunts the earth as a malevolent and watchful presence.

Melmoth by Sarah Perry Serpent’s Tail, £16.99 IN 1820 the Irish writer Charles Maturin published Melmoth the Wanderer, a Gothic novel in which a man makes a deal with the devil: his soul in exchange for another hundred and fifty years of life.

Melmoth sarah perry review