Desperate for others to join her solitary exile, she visits those who have reached the depths of misery and holds out her hand. She was there when Christ appeared by the tomb, the teacher explains, but later denied the resurrection, for which primal sin – a failure to acknowledge what she witnessed – she was damned to eternal loneliness. Who is she? What is she? Surely you know the tale, says a teacher to a mystified German schoolboy: everyone has heard of the woman who must wander the world, her feet bloody from her travels. Gradually we understand her asceticism as a response to a fateful past she has sealed away in a box under her bed. One is Helen Franklin, an Englishwoman living in Prague, so ordinary-seeming that you wouldn’t notice her in the street, though if you saw the bare mattress and unshaded bulb in her room you might start to wonder. Two central characters concern us throughout. The effort is laudable, though the result is a lesser book.

Perry has tried to do much more, ethically and philosophically, in this novel. The many astute details in Melmoth, by contrast, tend to be lost in its armoury of omens and catalogue of horrors. It’s a pleasure to remember the sharp-wittedness and warmth of her writing there: the noble and gutsy characters giving their love in unexpected ways the concerns of the present pitched against history the descriptions of fossils and unfolding ferns, the lights shining over the marshes. Sarah Perry had a phenomenal success in 2016 with The Essex Serpent. T his is a novel about witnessing, so we must look it firmly in the eye but it’s a dark, difficult, ambitious and problematic book.

Melmoth the wanderer charles maturin