The perfect book for a cold Autumn night, The Silent Companions kept me up half the night with fright for all the right reasons.
We start by meeting psychiatric patient Elsie Bainbridge, hiding from a traumatic past with the threat of the hangman looming above her. She seems to harbour an irrational fear of wood, and has lost the ability to speak. With the help of a newly enthusiastic doctor, she starts her recovery by writing down her version of recent events. We are then thrown into Elsie's life a year previously, as she arrives newly widowed and newly pregnant at the ancestral home of her late husband with a spinster cousin, Sarah. The housekeeper and servants are inept, and the local villagers openly hostile - holding a grudge following a number of tragic accidents some years ago. On top of this, the house has a menacing atmosphere - with strange noises at night and the sudden appearances of sinister silent companions that seem to move from room to room.With the discovery of a diary from 200 years ago, Sarah and Elsie hope to answer the reasons behind the unnatural feel to the house - but what they discover may have been better left hidden.
There are three main timelines within the story - Elsie within the psychiatric facility, Elsie at the ancestral home a year previously, and the diary story line of 200 years prior. At times, I found the diary story line quite dull and wanted to skip it. A lot of the information provided within this timeline is rather obvious, and is repeated later on by Sarah anyway. I also didn't really warm to any of the characters. I think perhaps if more time had be spent dedicated to this story line, instead of in small chapters that interrupted the flow of the main narrative, I would have appreciated the information it offered more. The other two timelines worked well together, and the characters here were much more well developed.
Elsie is a wonderful main character - to see the change from newly widowed yet still hopeful woman, to deranged mad woman was a large task to take on - yet I feel Laura Purcell handled it well. You feel as desperate as Elsie does when no-one believes her story, and I found myself really rooting for her - even though I knew it was ultimately hopeless.. The subtle hints scattered throughout Elsie's backstory relating to her late mother, father and Jolyon were also craftily done. I like it when books sometimes don't spell everything out for the reader, and allow their own deductions to work out the mysteries.
Sarah I was less enamoured with. On multiple occasions I found Sarah's obsession with her family history grating, and her insipidness really annoyed me. I understood the reasoning behind this though, as I felt that this was how Elsie felt about Sarah at the beginning too - and indeed their relationship development was definitely a positive to the narrative, although I still thought Sarah relied too heavily on Elsie to 'solve' everything.
That said, the book itself has such a good atmospheric, creepy feel to it that I was immediately drawn into the world. There's an underlying sense of foreboding throughout - and although there's a slow build up of tension, the release at the end of the novel really packed a punch. The ending was pretty obvious,but I was still genuinely left feeling unsettled and frightened, and it will be a long time before I forget about the silent companions. Perfect for spooky nights.
- 4 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment