Tag: the silent companions

Quick book picks for October

fiendfullyreading

In this, the spookiest of months, I’ve got some historical gothic and YA horror as well as the next in the Hogarth Shakespeare series and some distinctive short books. As usual, links to longer reviews from the titles.

  • There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins – A hugely enjoyable YA horror/thriller novel with a biracial protagonist. Perfect for teens and adults wanting to relive Point Horror and similar books.
  • Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn – I have mixed feelings about Aubyn’s Hogarth Shakespeare novel (and about its source text, King Lear), but the darkly comic tone will appeal to some and it is interesting to see which elements have been kept and changed.
  • All The Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler – Raucous and blunt, the Series of Unfortunate Events author takes on the teenage boy’s mind in this short novel.
  • The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott – A character-focused novel about Irish American Catholics in New York, sure to delight fans of that kind of narrative.
  • The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell – This historical gothic tale about a widow staying in her husband’s old house is eerie and the titular silent companions will haunt you long after the final page.
  • The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler – A non-fiction treat to dip into, in which Fowler provides snappy short chapters on a range of forgotten authors, including crime, mystery, and more general works.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

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Creepy historical gothic: The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

The Silent Companions is a tense gothic novel set in the nineteenth-century, centred around a dilapidated old house and the newly widowed woman who goes to live there. Elsie’s short marriage is quickly ended by her husband’s death at the country seat he was trying to make hospitable for her, but when she moves there herself to see through her pregnancy, there is more for her to worry about than the hostile neighbours and inexperienced servants. Between her and her husband’s strange, awkward cousin Sarah, they discover the diaries of a woman who lived in the house in the seventeenth-century—a diary full of death and despair—and a strange wooden figure, a silent companion. This companion is not the only one, however, and they might be silent, but their influence scares Elsie to an ever-increasing extent.

The novel is written with different threads of narrative, with Elsie trying to recall her story in an asylum, her third person narration of the events she lived, and excerpts from the earlier diary. Through this, Purcell weaves mystery and darkness, leaving the reader wanting more with each narrative jump. There are plenty of classic gothic tropes to enjoy, with spirits, mysterious doors, noises at night, and unsettling family secrets on all sides. At times the story is genuinely unsettling, both in terms of fear and in the claustrophobic atmosphere.

The presentation of Elsie—a heroine with a tormented past and a present in which men seem to be threatening her freedom—is clever, combining sympathy with an uncertainty for what she could be potentially forgetting or misremembering. The position of women in Victorian society, particularly in relation to class, is near the forefront of the novel though not explicitly discussed, and the gothic heroine is one contained by men against her will. At the same time, the novel is populated by other women who are trapped in a position or have done bad things without realising the consequences, reflecting her plight.

The Silent Companions fits very well into the gothic genre and provides a suitably eerie and unnerving read. In atmosphere, it has similarities to Waters’ Fingersmith as well as older gothic novels, and its use of an additional seventeenth-century narrative both fulfils the trope of an older, inset narrative and gives a different aspect to the novel, showing how women could be seen as witches or as insane and hysterical depending on the century. Purcell’s novel shows that the historical gothic novel is a genre that will continue to live and continue to question female autonomy whilst providing chilling reads.