Perry's eye is so sharp, so attuned to detail and so beautiful at phrasing, that sometimes the characters are described vividly, but not always developed. The prose is so luscious, in fact, that at times it feels as though it has been worked at the expense of character and plot. One character is 'tall, and carefully thin' (how much work that 'carefully' does), another is like 'a piece of mirror hanging on a wall: empty, unless another man walked past'. Perry can sketch a character in the sort of quick accuracy that is the hallmark of her Victorian model.

In Melmoth, the prose is rich, elegant, atmospheric – the sentences carefully made, full of turns and delicate, closely observed detail. Folksongs, novels, letters and diaries are discovered, where “the witness” seems to have appeared, but these swiftly become personal, as the histories of the various characters are revealed and coalesce around Helen, who is running from the haunting guilt of an act committed years before in Manila.

Appearing at moments of stress or acute guilt, she tries to convince mortals she has witnessed committing terrible acts to join her in her wandering. Perry’s female incarnation of Maturin’s antihero, Melmoth is also reconceived as “the witness”, rather than solely “the wanderer”. Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman living in Prague, becomes heir to some documents compiled by her late friend, the university scholar Dr Karel Prazan, in which he is tracing the appearances, over time, of a dark woman, Melmoth (also Melmotte, Melmotka). The imagery is eerie (chairs left overnight in empty fields for supernatural visitors, jackdaws shattering windows with their beaks, swans encrusted in the frozen Vltava) there are discovered documents, footnotes (often matter-of-fact and quietly devastating), and compiled histories in which a black, ghostly figure moves, always watching, from 17th-century England to Prague, Egypt, and 20th-century Manila. Written 'after' Maturin's work (and dedicated in his memory), Sarah Perry's Melmoth is packed with the gothic hallmarks of its Romantic lodestar. Travelling between rural Ireland, India, London and Spain, the novel is long and odd and wonderfully weird. Maturin's novel relates the torments of its Byronic title character, Melmoth, who has made a pact with the devil in return for 150 more years of life, and is left to search the world for a victim to release him from it. Even if that's not quite true, the relative obscurity of Maturin's book is undoubtable. 'A novel', as the protagonist of Sarah Perry's latest work suggests, that 'nobody reads'. Written by an eccentric Irish curate, Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is a bizarre gothic romance.

Melmoth by sarah perry