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It is Melmoth who is with them, as she is with Joseph and every other malefactor in the novel, including its unassuming protagonist Helen Franklin, whose guilt over a secret from her past has driven her to live a life of penance and self-deprivation. “Did you think I wouldn’t see?” she whispers as they shrink in horror from her and from what she has shown them “Did you think there was no witness?” “Brothers, didn’t you expect to find me here? Don’t you know me? Don’t you know my name? I, who saw your mother’s pain as she gave birth? Didn’t you see my shadow on the page as you went about your work? Didn’t you feel me at your shoulder as you sharpened your pens into knives?” She lifted the bundle she held and crooned to it. But here, and in every horror story Perry’s novel incorporates, there is an unrelenting witness: Later it becomes “necessary to devise a practical means of moving ten thousand Armenians into the interior, where they could do no mischief.” As the new plan unfolds, Nameless and his brother Hassan are at once willingly complicit in and willfully oblivious to the evil they do. By morning it awaited attention on desks further afield than Nameless himself had ever traveled within the week those black marks on that white paper became deeds, not words, and 235 Armenian intellectuals were deported from Constantinople to Ankara. The memorandum was drafted, and approved, and signed in triplicate it was signed by his superiors, and by his superiors’ superiors. Through the narrative of Joseph Hoffman, we see hatred, prejudice, and betrayal in Nazi-occupied Prague the account of Sir David Ellerby bears chilling witness to the evils of religious persecution in 17th-century England in her diary, a young girl in 1930s Cairo records the story of a nameless Turkish bureaucrat whose “inconsequential” paperwork has genocidal implications: While in some respects it is a deliciously fearless pastiche of Gothic novels (its title harks back to Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer, which is also constructed as a series of documents and framed narratives), it balances its more fantastical elements with sections of grimly compelling historical testimony about the worst human beings are capable of. Melmoth is that rare thing: a thoroughly entertaining novel of ideas. And if there is only us, we must do what Melmoth would do: see what must be seen–bear witness to what must not be forgotten.

No, Thea, there is no Melmoth, there is nobody watching, there is only us.

There is no Melmoth, no wanderer, no cursed soul walking for two-thousand years towards her own redemption–there is nothing to fear in the shadows on Charles Bridge, in the jackdaws on the windowsill, in the way the shadows on the wall seem sometimes blacker than they should (you are nodding–I know it–you have felt these things too!).