Melmoth (Cerebus, Book 6) [Paperback]

 

 

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Sim ends what he defines as the "first half" of Cerebus with a quiet, biographical piece - a sensitive visual interpretation of the letters and telegrams written by the two remaining members of Oscar Wilde's circle who were willing to care for him as he died. It is an understated work, and one that feels thematically like an epilogue to Jaka's Story, but which could just as easily have been a standalone work. Cerebus himself appears only to provide occasional light relief, by sitting in a catatonic state outside a café a few doors down from Wilde's hotel. While these asides are often amusing, in all honesty, this book would be easier to recommend if Cerebus didn't feature at all. It is tempting to surmise that Sim wanted to do something different at this point in his career, but, working within the financial constraints of self-publishing, decided he was better off putting his side-project out under the Cerebus banner and including just enough aardvark-related material each month to get away with it. Still, it is to Sim's credit that there is sufficient thematic unity with Jaka's Story to make this an interesting diversion that sheds new light on the series as a whole, rather than a self-indulgence.

While Cerebus is effectively put on garden leave, sitting outside Dino's Café eating potatoes and engaging in monosyllabic conversations with passers-by, a few doors down from him the main narrative unfolds. Oscar Wilde has been released from Reading Gaol, and, suffering from failing health, financial destitution, ostracism from polite society and a dwindling circle of friends, retreats to the Hotel d'Alsace in Paris and sets about drinking himself to death. Our narrators, Robert Ross and Reginald Turner, care for Wilde, recount his deliriums and occasional moments of lucidity, and write to Wilde's few remaining friends in an effort to raise money for his care. Emotions are restrained, and Sim portrays Ross and Turner as frustrated men dealing with an impossible situation. Particularly touching is the portrayal of Turner - Sim fills in the spaces between the lines of his letters, showing him struggling to carry on with the difficult task of caring for a dying man, and, increasingly frustrated by Ross's absence, pleading with him to return as he vacillates between certainty that Wilde has mere hours to live, and the tentative hope that recovery might still be possible.

There is an interesting aside in the notes at the end of the book, in which Sim suggests that Ross's account of his parting from Wilde might have been exaggerated to make it appear that Wilde favoured him more than Alfred `Bosey' Douglas. This, I think, is the key to this cheerless biographical vignette. Wilde, after all, is the man who once said that "biography lends to death a new terror." We have already met a separate, entirely fictionalised Oscar Wilde within the pages of Cerebus in `Jaka's Story,' who was engaged in the writing of a decidedly unreliable biography of Jaka. Here, we are presented with an interpretation of the real Wilde's death at least twice removed from the reality. The proliferation of Oscar Wildes in Cerebus is designed to underline the essential unreliability of all biographical ventures, with `Melmoth' itself no exception. There is a thought-provoking willingness to undermine the fictional universe that the events of `Melmoth' have been incongruously relocated to - and indeed to undermine the book's own claims to authenticity. This elevates this curiously fascinating little book from being simply an `illustrated companion to the death of Oscar Wilde,' and presents an interesting new theme in the Cerebus series - one that Sim would explore further in the following `Mothers & Daughters' series.

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