'The Silent Companions' by Laura Purcell

Newly married, newly widowed Elsie is sent to see out her pregnancy at her late husband's crumbling country estate, The Bridge. With her new servants resentful and the local villagers actively hostile, Elsie only has her husband's awkward cousin for company. Or so she thinks. For inside her new home lies a mysterious wooden figure - a Silent Companion - that bears an unsettling resemblance to Elsie herself...

Happy New Year!

It is a bitterly cold day and I am seated at my laptop lit by the certain slant of light that Emily Dickinson found oppressive. It is the perfect setting to review a horror story that I found so darkly compelling that I did nothing else but read it for two days.

It is very hard to write a review of this book that does not spoil it completely. This is the perfect novel to curl up with on a cold winter day - chilling and intriguingly plotted. A mixture of mystery and horror rooted firmly in the Gothic tradition focusing on the plight of Elsie Bainbridge. Her present day plight is her incarceration in a lunatic asylum, charged with murder and mutely enduring her mutilation by fire, whilst dwelling on her past journey to The Bridge

a low-slung Jacobean building with three gables on the roof, a central lantern tower and redbrick chimneys looming behind. Ivy poured out of the eaves and engulfed the turrets at either end of the house. It looked dead.

Everything was dead. Parterres lay prostrate beneath the soulless gaze of the windows, the hedges brown and riddled with holes. Vines choked the flowerbeds. Even the lawns were yellow and sparse, as if a contagion spread slowly throughout the grounds. Only the thistle thrived, its purple spikes bristling from amidst the coloured gravel.

What a wonderful description, full of images of death, sickness, and scary plants. One feels a shiver of foreboding upon encountering such an exterior. What further horrors could possibly lie inside the doors?

Once Elsie has arrived at The Bridge, she is treated with open hostility by the local villagers, who believe that the house, with its long history of strange deaths and accidents, has been cursed by a witch. The servants, Mabel and Helen, and the housekeeper Mrs Holt seem sullen and secretive. Elsie, a former factory girl who married an investor, feels out of place, especially since she has to oversee her own husband's funeral while heavily pregnant. Upon exploration of the house, which is crumbling, twisting and full of strange noises in the middle of the night, Elsie and Sarah discover a garret. Inside the garret is a diary written two hundred years previous, and a silent companion.

Purcell has chosen a subject that is deliciously creepy and indefinite. Silent companions, or dummy boards, were highly fashionable among the European elite, especially the English and the Dutch, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are life-size, flat, wooden figures painted in tromp l'oeil fashion, with bevelled edges to cast a lifelike shadow, and often displayed either attached to a chair rail or free-standing with a discreet triangular support attached to the back. The quality of early dummy boards was often quite high, "as if someone has cut out the figure from a painting and mounted it on a plank of wood". Silent companions were often placed in the corners of rooms and on stairways to surprise (uninvited) visitors. They were also known to reside in front of empty fireplaces during the summer months. Some even suggest that the figures were used to 'protect' the house when the owners were away.

Perhaps because of their slightly uncanny presence, a number of myths sprang up about what they were for, including - rather touchingly - warding off loneliness. Yet, despite seeming good intentions, what ought to be innocent and kind becomes an instrument of pure, unadulterated evil. 

The problem with the silent companions is that they seem to be constantly watching the human inhabitants of the house. They also seem to multiply, popping up out of nowhere at a frightening rate, and start looking increasingly terrifying. Purcell writes these apparitions in such a wonderful, descriptive way into making the reader wonder whether witchcraft is at work or whether Elsie, under increasing stress, is slowly losing her mind.

What I really enjoyed about this novel is that we have a strong woman as our protagonist. Elsie rebels against Victorian restrictions towards women, openly telling off the servants and treating Sarah in begrudging fashion. As the plot continues, Purcell reveals more and more details of Elsie's past and her secrets. Another strong female character is Anne Bainbridge, the lady of the house in 1635, who dabbled in white magic. Both women are very active in fighting back against the evil influences upon their lives and protecting the ones that they love. I enjoyed the emphasis that Purcell has given to female characters.

Another trope I liked in this novel is that of loneliness. A lot of the characters have suffered mistreatment and thus isolated themselves. The house, of course itself a character (this is a Gothic novel after all), stands desolate amongst a landscape riddled with pathetic fallacy. In fact, the themes of loneliness, prejudice, death, fire, communication, silence, and rebellion all contribute towards turning this book into a fiction you absolutely should not read before going to bed.

I really hope that those of you who enjoy the sinister and the atmospheric will enjoy this haunting, claustrophobic novel. I already have another book on my shelf by Purcell ('The Corset'), and if it's anything like 'The Silent Companions', I can't wait to start reading.