One of the worst things you can do in a Gothic narrative is travel, and Sarah Perry's Melmoth features one inset narrative after another of migrants, whether from another town or (more usually) another country. As the title suggests, the novel is loosely inspired by Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and borrows its structure, with overtones of the legends of the Wandering Jew and Faust, the Pilgrim's Progress, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (Alice Benet's story is lifted from that of Rose Allin), and (perhaps) William Godwin's St. Leon (1799). Perry's Melmoth, however, is not the man who scoffed at Christ en route to Calvary, but rather a woman who saw Christ's empty tomb and "denied what she'd seen" (69). This subtle shift in the legend, which turns Melmoth into not the Wanderer but rather the "Witness," transforms its implications: in refusing to testify to the Resurrection, Melmoth equally refuses to testify to the possibilities of faith and hope; she negates her own witnessing and attempts to undermine that of her companions. Her sentence, then, is to wander eternally, witnessing all the horrors of the world but offering no "hope of comfort" (244), no action, and no alternatives. Speaking to Melmoth means confronting the result of one's sins, but without the possibility of redemption--the cross, as it were, is empty. In the terms of the Pilgrim's Progress, she is the Giant Despair, who unlike Maturin's Melmoth has no end to her journey.
Melmoth's characters are all fundamentally mediocre, to varying degrees (with perhaps the exception of the ex-barrister, Thea). Yet their sins have enormous consequences: genocide, wrongful imprisonment, torture. Moreover, these sins occur across religious, racial, and political boundaries, often against those who are in proximity yet assumed to be "other." Josef Hoffman, for example, is a German child who emigrates to Czechoslovakia with his parents, whom he resents; during the German occupation, he turns in a Jewish family to the authorities out of jealous rage, and they die in Theresienstadt. And then his own family is eventually targeted when the Germans lose. Josef, a German, is at home in Czechoslovakia, yet not at home, while the Jews attempt to rewrite their identity with "forged papers" (129) but accidentally give themselves away on the Sabbath precisely because they have begun to feel too at home. Their quest for home constantly destabilizes, with fatal results, as each tries to manipulate boundaries that have a bad habit of snapping back. When Melmoth confronts Josef on the street as he is being marched away, it is at the moment when he is faced with another moral choice: does he betray the local policeman as a fellow German, or does he allow him to continue passing as a Czech? The temptation Melmoth offers Josef is that of embracing his sinfulness and therefore refusing to act. "What is left for you but suffering?" she asks. "What is left but the just outcome of all your iniquity?" (142) His decision to refuse her, which he describes as "the sole act of courage of my life" (143), is done without hope of salvation, let alone any recognition; after all, he cannot tell if the policeman understands that Josef's brief assault on him is actually the ploy that saves his life. Melmoth's enraged question "Do you think there's enough blood in you to settle the debt?" (143) offers an economy of redemption refuted by her own existence; yet as we see near the end, in the case of the nameless man who decides that "he'd seek neither light nor grace" (242), embracing Melmoth's despair means, in effect, the nightmare life-in-death. Rejecting Melmoth, though, does not mean choosing happiness, but choosing righteous action, even though that does nothing to erase all the sins that came before. Helen Franklin's life of ascetic penance is one long failed atonement; the true breakthrough is when she finally realizes "the prospect of redemption by meeting hope with hope" (266), no matter how dim the hope might be.