#melmoth

Maturin didn't tell us a lot about his protagonist, John Melmoth, but he's not even twenty-one yet, there's not a lot to know. But Perry's protagonist, Helen Franklin, is middle-aged and Perry dangles the possibility of her having a mysterious and shameful backstory constantly. Moreover, she's living a monastic existence in penitence (like Maturin's Stanton?) But chapter after chapter goes by and nothing happens. It feels like she's tracing the ghost of a genre, being deliberately slowmoving to evoke the pre-cinema language of 19th century fiction. But we're post-cinema. We're postmodern. It's daft to pretend we can go back. I got to chapter four of ten and gave up. Frankly, I think getting almost halfway is very generous. There was no reward for my attention at any point. Maturin, by contrast, at the end of chapters 1, 2, and 3, had escalating appearances of Melmoth the Wanderer. As slow as he ostensibly seems, he wasn't wasting my time. He was telling an actual story, not just bloating a book with an aesthetic and calling it gothic. Moreover, he's from the gothic tradition of packing everything with as many emotive adjectives as he can make fit, and it feels so opulent when you're used to the world after Hemingway. The opening section is about a lad in a carriage trying not to think about the depressing stressful stuff in his life, and it's figured so deftly as being like a fight, and he bats them away. Only to realise he has nothing else to think about, so he welcomes back those dark thoughts? Incredible. He took his time explaining just that with such care and I wasn't bored reading it? 19th century people truly had a knack with the written word we've lost in the fog of modernism.

I'm grappling with the problem of writing in genres of the past, especially in what could be called a contemporary feminist rewrite. Why authors do it, what political function it serves to reimagine ancestral texts. It turns history into escapism, and potentially a safe space for women and POC and LGBTQA+, at risk of losing the actual generic intent. It's an aspect of literary theory I find fascinating, from mostly a structuralist perspective, I guess. I'm still doing battle with Stacey Halls and her happy endings and what the hell they mean for the metatext. I swear I will ask her.

I'm putting my general Perry complaints about her weak (deluded?) pacing here because I don't think it's good etiquette to review a DNF on Goodreads.

I have no intention of reading further with either, they're both very long novels - Maturin is nearly 600 pages - and I have a lot of other reading to do.

I will say, the long speech Melmoth the Wanderer gives to Stanton in the cell at the end of chapter three put me in mind of 'Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth' by Grant Morrison (1989) and I wish I had it to hand to post because it's exquisitely gothic and brutal, about how Stanton would grow used to his conditions, welcoming the sound of the screaming madmen around him like hearing a cock crow, and slowly lose his mind, and then to find out he absolutely did, searching for Melmoth the Wanderer for the rest of his life.

If I ever have cause to do a structuralist breakdown of Morrison's Arkham, I'll use Maturin as a point of reference because it's so spot on aesthetically.