I read and enjoyed Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent when it came out a couple of years ago. But I’ve now had the chance to read her other two novels: After Me Comes the Flood, her first novel which came out in 2014; and Melmoth, the most recent novel, which came out in 2018. And as a result, I think I was maybe looking at the wrong things in The Essex Serpent.
No, not the wrong things; but there was an awful lot of stuff going on in that book, and I was distracted by the surface story of an independent woman just at that point when Victorian society was starting to see the modern coming at it. That is a good and important part of the book, but it disguised the underpinning that ties it to these other two novels.
Yes, she is recreating the Gothic, and yes, her own upbringing makes the religious aspects stand out. But it is the way these two things are put together that is what I find interesting, and that ties these three otherwise very different novels together.
Take After Me Comes the Flood, a journeyman effort with a structure that isn’t entirely successful. It is the story of a lonely, middle-aged man who, in the depth of a heat wave, shuts up his shop and drives away to visit his brother. But along the way his car breaks down and he approaches an isolated country house only to find that the disparate group of people staying there seem to be expecting him. It turns out to be a coincidence (Perry likes coincidences in her plotting, Melmoth is full of them), they are waiting for someone with a very similar name that none of them have met before, but for a week the protagonist assumes a different personality. I have often said that first novels can often display, crudely and obviously, themes that will be developed more subtly in later works, and that is the case here. People going somewhere they are unknown in order to be someone else, even if only temporarily, crops up in both of Perry’s later novels.
The inhabitants of the house turn out to be people displaced from a local asylum when it closed down, and the family members and friends who look after them. In true Gothic mode, it is not always clear which is which. But the setting and the people turn out to be healing, at least for the protagonist.
But the most interesting character in the house is Elijah, a one-time priest who lost his faith. Now he is unable to go outside: because there is no God, there is no one to hold up the sky, and therefore if he ever ventures out he is terrified that the sky will fall on him. This is not madness so much as an extreme doubt, and despite this he is the most humane and sensible person in the house. He is also a complete innocent, who sees instantly that the visitor is not who everyone else takes him to be, but doesn’t see the need to say anything about it. He is, in other words, the most charming and engaging character in the book.
He also seems to me to be pivotal to what Perry is doing here. Despite what we know of her biography, it is not religion per se that matters in these books: it is belief. It does not matter what Elijah’s religion was before he lost his faith, what matters is the way that belief shapes his world regardless of where those beliefs came from. He stands helpless in the middle of a world that is only partly physical, and it is the other part, the unseen and unseeable that most affects his behaviour. Belief is crippling; religion is just a framework we construct to restrain those beliefs, but do away with the framework and belief floods back in its raw form. Read The Essex Serpent with this pattern in mind, and the figure of the rural vicar and the intrusion of the supernatural acquires a different aspect. Belief is the darkness that makes these novels Gothic.
Similarly, in Melmoth, the idea of the witness, the lonely, black-clad woman always there at the edge of your sight who knows your sins and is waiting to take you away on her immortal journey, is a part of the unseeable that has a greater effect on behaviour than anything physical. She is a belief system cut loose from any religious affiliation: she is there among the people of Manila, among the Turks and Armenians at the time of the massacres, among the Jews of Nazi Europe, among the scientific rationalists of modern day Prague. She is a mental disease (more properly, a dis-ease) whose vector is childhood stories and faded documents; she is guilt personified as a shadow on a chair, a shape in the distance, a bird at the window.
The central character is Helen, an English translator living in Prague. Twenty years before she committed a crime and ever since then she has tormented herself with guilt, denying herself pleasures, friendships and ease. She lives an austere, hair-shirt existence. Inevitably, the structure of the novel demands that the revelation of this crime should come at the climax of the book; but Perry ignores that structural demand, so we find out what Helen did at about the three-quarter mark. Unsurprisingly, the guilt is worse than the crime.
Then someone hands her a file of documents about Melmoth (the novel references Charles Maturin, but changing the sex of the wanderer is the least of Perry’s changes in the character). Helen is ready to believe, and suddenly she conjures the woman in black and her attendant jackdaws wherever she turns, though she fails to notice that those who have passed on the documents have emerged undamaged from their own awareness of Melmoth. She is a story, but you don’t have to listen to stories; she is a belief, but you don’t have to believe. Melmoth is what is seen, not necessarily what is there.
Perry is an interesting writer. I think Melmoth goes as far beyond The Essex Serpent as that novel went beyond After Me Comes the Flood. So I wonder what she will do next. Though I also wonder how far she can follow this particular Gothic belief system.
Let me try and explain. Case Histories is a crime story, how could it not be with a detective as the central character; multiple crimes form the thread from which the novel depends, and the progression towards a resolution of these stories is what keeps us turning the page. But crime and detection are not central to the novel, but rather stands at an oblique angle to the intersecting lives and fascinating characters caught in the drama. It is a novel that steps willingly and knowingly into genre (she does not cheat, she does not belittle, she does not treat genre disdainfully as something that she doesn’t have to treat seriously), but it is also a novel of character, a novel of social satire, a mainstream novel. Both the genre story and the mainstream perspectives are complex and satisfying, but in different ways; it treads the divide between the two with a confidence that gives full measure to both.
Life After Life is not science fiction. But the demands of story mean that she can only tell the story using a science fictional device, which she does with the same confidence and seriousness that she treated the crime genre in the Jackson Brodie novels.
And the same is true of Transcription. It is a spy story, that is the line upon which everything in the novel hangs. And it gives full worth as a spy story, with secrets and betrayals, and half-understood hints, and a twist at the end that I did not see coming but that is perfectly in keeping with everything we have read to that point. And yet our attention is firmly upon characters who are deftly and vividly drawn, and glimpses of life in wartime London and at the postwar BBC that are startlingly effective. You read for the spy story and get social realism as a bonus, or you read for the social realism and get a gripping spy story to hold your attention. It is the way her fiction operates as both genre and non-genre writing at exactly the same time that is the central joy in reading her work.
We begin with the title. John Kessel has already written several stories featuring the matriarchal Society of Cousins on the moon, one of which, “Stories for Men”, went on to win the James Tiptree Award. That story took its title from a book that played a significant part within the story. It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that this novel-length work in the same setting (though some years later) also takes its title from a book featured within the story.
Anway, I’ve been reading Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North in the hope that it might help to fill in some of the immense chasms in my knowledge of the subject. (I must, for example, read up more on Historicism/New Historicism, if only to see if North is correct in his interpretation.) I was, in the end, disappointed, frustrated and excited by the book.
When I read the opening words of David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800-1906, I found myself oddly unsettled, and it took me a long time to understand why. I remember reading a lot of histories like this when I first got interested in history back in the 1960s and 70s. In those days, this patrician tone was par for the course in anything that was meant to be taken seriously as history. I’m used to this somewhat laboured style, it wasn’t unfamiliar to me. And yet it felt wrong.
The Patrick Leigh Fermor industry has been busier since his death than he ever was in his lifetime. This year alone we have had a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum devoted to Leigh Fermor, Niko Ghika and John Craxton; which was in turn accompanied by an even more wonderful book, which to my mind is a model of what a book associated with an exhibition should be like. And now Ian Collins and Olivia Stewart have produced The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover. (Personally, I could have done without the somewhat saccharine quality of that subtitle; but then I could have done without much of the account of her life that occupies rather too much of this book, particularly since so much of it is devoted to telling us, repeatedly, how devoted she was to Paddy, and by extension how wonderful Paddy was.)
Madrid, and finally in 1944 to Cairo, where she met Paddy. (It somehow confirms things I’d begun to suspect from my other reading about Leigh Fermor to see him described here not just as charming, but as “indecisive, impractical and clumsy.”) They met again, after the war, in Greece, and began the romance that, in all I’ve read, seems to subsume everything else about her.
She used, practically throughout her life, a Rolleiflex taking a square 6×6 negative. To show them at their best, the book is (almost) square, with the photographs placed in the middle of a grey page. It is a presentation that I find benefits the photographs while at the same time being frustrating to the viewer. I’ll come to the frustrations in a moment, but first let me just extol the pictures themselves. The early ones are haunting evocations of war-damaged London: an arched gateway set within fragments of wall at Haberdasher’s Hall, with nothing else standing, and in the foreground snow piling on the rubble before the gate; a barrage balloon floating almost directly above the tower of Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s seen from the grime of Limehouse Cut. There are too few of these, then suddenly we are in Greece and the character of the photographs has changed dramatically. Some are almost abstract: square blocks of an old village standing above a winding pattern of terraces like one of Ghika’s landscapes; a small family of goats plodding wearily up a zigzag stairway clinging precariously to a cliffside. Some are touristy: the Lion Gate at Mycenae, the ruins at Delphi, archetypal orthodox churches almost disappearing into rugged landscapes. Some really are family snaps: Paddy, of course, dancing among ruins or gazing moodily into the distance; and friends like Xan Fielding and Lawrence Durrell and John Craxton. There’s a wonderful series of 
photographs of Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton performing dance exercises on the deck of a caique, using the ship’s rail as a bar; and there is a beautiful picture of Fonteyn sunbathing nude. But it is the photographs of rural life in Greece that are so wonderful: a muezzin calling out from a ramshackle wooden platform; craggy-faced shepherds in baggy pantaloons grasping crooks taller than they are; clusters of women in traditional costume; an old soldier with a long white beard and his rifle; young men clustered round a ricketty table in a crumbling kafeneion; the ribs of a boat that is being built but that looks like the skeleton of some long-dead sea monster. These are amazing glimpses of something alien and yet extraordinarily human.
When you know that about a book going in, you find yourself inevitably looking for the join, and in this case I couldn’t spot it. Or rather, there are a number of possibilities, but nothing definite. For a start this is, in any case, late Allingham, and she had by this point gone off the boil somewhat. Campion had grown older (she always set her stories in the present, rather than the past, so she couldn’t revisit early episodes in his career), by now he should be well past retirement age. The closest she comes to acknowledging this is that he is absent for a large part of the story, and the focus is on a younger surrogate, Morty Kelsey. By trying to be contemporary, she makes part of the story about Mods and Rockers, though she doesn’t really get what they were about, and anyway, even in 1968 when the book finally appeared, they must have seemed old hat. And the ending feels both clunky and rushed, as though Campion knew the secret all along, in which case there was no need for the whole fol-de-rol of the story; but then, I’ve felt pretty much the same about other lateish works that I’ve read.
And nowhere is that more true than in A Far Cry from Kensington. It is not the insult, pisseur de copie, that Spark’s substantial alter ego, Mrs Hawkins, discovers, but the relish with which she repeats it, over and over again, sometimes several times a page.