Melmoth the Wanderer

"This is my favourite book and I can never find anyone who’s read it. When I do I just want to embrace them. It was published in 1820, and it was written by Charles Maturin, an impoverished Irish vicar. To me, it is the embodiment of Gothic fiction. It does everything that a Gothic novel should do. It is darkly funny, it has a grim gallows humour, it is utterly terrifying. I’ve made a habit of reading quite a lot of scary and horrific books, but there are places in Melmoth the Wanderer where, when I read it, I actually have to put my hand over the page because I cannot look at the words. There is no Stephen King book, no James Herbert book that can touch Melmoth the Wanderer for horror. It’s atrocious. It has an extraordinary villain, Melmoth, who is a supernatural being who has evidently entered into some kind of Faustian pact. He’s damned to wander the earth for hundreds of years. He tries to find people who will exchange places with him. On his wanderings, he encounters people at the lowest ebb of life and experience, because only if you are at the nadir of your life would you exchange places with a damned soul. So this incredibly clever structure enables Maturin to have episodes of storytelling in scenes of wartime, in the Spanish Inquisition, in lunatic asylums. It has a fantastic love story as well. Melmoth is fabulously sexy, and rather tragic, and falls madly in love, and has sex with a lightning storm! It has a narrative complexity that I find thrilling, with layers of embedded narratives and fragments. Like Frankenstein , it’s a permission-giver. It shows a novelist not to be modest, not to say, ‘This is a coincidence too far, this plot is too daft, nobody would believe it for a minute.’ Well, actually, what we do when we read novels is suspend our disbelief as high as it will go and you can get away with enormous amounts. Charles Maturin died in poverty. It’s extraordinary that he could have written this amazing book, that’s so influential, I don’t think he ever knew the impact it would have. Interestingly, Oscar Wilde was one of his descendants, and when Wilde signed himself into hotels, he would sign himself ‘Melmoth’, which I find really exciting. There’s a really interesting bit of narrative theory around this. Tzvetan Todorov, the critic, said that there are three layers of narrative in the Gothic. There is the layer of the ‘fantastic’, which is the outright supernatural, and Melmoth is the ‘fantastic’ because it’s evident Melmoth is a supernatural being. He has a telescope that enables him to view things all over the world, he’s lived for 150 years, and so on. Then there’s the ‘marvellous’, which is stuff that seems to be supernatural, but it’s pretty clear by the end of the book that it’s actually in your mind. Ann Radcliffe’ s work fits into this category. She tends to chicken out at the last minute and you realise there’s nothing supernatural going on. But then suspended in the middle is the ‘uncanny’, and that’s where I think some of the best Gothic fiction lives, where you never really know whether something supernatural has happened and there is a ghost or a ghoul or the devil, or whether everybody’s mad. The Turn of the Screw is the peerless example of this. You cannot tell whether it’s supernatural, or in her head. That’s the space I have tried to inhabit, and am trying to with the book I’m working on at the moment: to leave the reader in a state of confusion where they’re not sure whether they’ve encountered demons, or whether the characters are absolutely off their heads. The later books I’ve chosen fall in the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘marvellous’, rather than the ‘fantastic’. I’ve tried to choose a range of books that show the Gothic can be all of those things: a ghost story, or a story about madness."