{"id":943,"date":"2020-01-01T09:41:24","date_gmt":"2020-01-01T09:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=943"},"modified":"2020-01-01T09:41:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-01T09:41:34","slug":"the-silent-companions-by-laura-purcell-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hebulstrode.co.uk\/?p=943","title":{"rendered":"The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Laura Purcell\u2019s The Silent Companions<\/a><\/em> is without doubt the stuff of gothic nightmare, with its settings ranging from a Victorian asylum and match factory, to a Jacobean country house with something sinister lurking in its sealed-off garret. There is a whiff of witchcraft about the place, and the locals shun it. As one would expect with such a novel, the boundary between sanity and the supernatural is a fuzzy one, and the reader is frequently left questioning what is real and what is not. What is clear though, is that some malevolent and murderous force is at play, but the wellspring of this energy is, ultimately, left open to interpretation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of structure, the narrative is circular, opening\nnear to the end before diving back into first the recent, and then the distant\npast. In the main, this can be said to work, but there is much toing and froing\nbetween the three different timeframes, leading to a somewhat disjointed\nreading experience. That said, Purcell\u2019s prose is often a delight, and for me\nshe appeared at her most effective when deftly recreating the world of the\nmid-1860s at Bridge House, although there was the occasional jarring lapse into\nmillennial idiomatic speech, such as the use of the \u2018go + infinitive\u2019 construction\nthat some younger folk have taken to using of late; it slips uncomfortably from\nthe lips of a mid-Victorian lady. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the \u2018companions\u2019 themselves, they are an interesting feature, and I have seen one such creepy creation dating from a century later; moreover, there is a pair of figures referred to as the \u2018Good Companions\u2019 in Lytes Cary Manor in Somerset, although these are fashioned from leather rather than wood, which prompted the writing of an earlier ghost story \u2013 Old Crotchet<\/a><\/em>. The companions are, of course, central to the plot of Purcell\u2019s novel, but whereas the presence of a small number of these oddities seemed essential to the story\u2019s writing, their later multiplication into a veritable horde of zombie-like wooden entities for me broke any sense of suspense during the last sixty or so pages of the book. All sense of restraint seemed lost, and the action became overwrought, with the companions crowding about and closing in on the protagonist as if she were in some deranged video game, but without a gun to confront her assailants. For readers belonging to a younger demographic, this might appeal, but it left me cold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of its setting and theme, The Silent Companions<\/em> <\/a>possesses a certain overlap with Alison Littlewood\u2019s The Crow Garden<\/a><\/em>, which although commercially less successful, struck me as a more satisfying piece of writing. Littlewood\u2019s excursion into the Victorian Gothic, however, was focused primarily upon the world of the insane asylum, offering up an enchanted brew of mesmerism, madness and the parting of the veil, rather than being a ghost story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, The Silent Companions<\/em> <\/a>was an engaging, albeit flawed, read. <\/p>\n

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