The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives

Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions – a book which proves, if nothing else, that the Victorians couldn’t leave well enough alone. If it wasn’t séances or table-tipping, it was cardboard aristocrats painted to look like Aunt Mildred, propped up in drawing rooms like the world’s most unnerving IKEA mannequins. History assures us they were ‘decorative,’ though I suspect they were mainly designed to induce coronary failure in any unsuspecting houseguest creeping down for a midnight sherry.

Purcell, with a wickedly gothic touch, takes this faintly ridiculous artefact of social pretension and wrings from it a narrative dripping with dread. The wooden ‘companions’ are silent, yes, but they’re not benign – at least not in the imagination, which, as Freud and Jung would tell you, is more than capable of populating the shadows with horrors that don’t need to be real in order to be effective. I could almost say the novel explores the terrifying capacity of the human mind to create its own poltergeists, which is why philosophers are always warning us about unexamined lives. Unexamined lives, as it turns out, come with décor that follows you from room to room.

At its marrow, this is a tale of isolation: not the cheerful “I need some me-time” sort, but the suffocating silence of drafty corridors, locked doors, and a household that feels more like an oubliette than a home. Here we find women hemmed in by expectation, superstition, and patriarchy so stiff it could be varnished, while the village outside seethes with suspicion like a small-town parish council meeting after too much communion wine. Purcell wisely leans into that great gothic paradox: the claustrophobic mansion that somehow feels infinite, as if every corridor extends into some psychic cul-de-sac of dread.

Stylistically, Purcell’s a mischievous heir to the Brontës and Shirley Jackson. There’s candlelight enough to bankrupt a monastery, dust thick enough to choke a Dickensian orphan, and that delicious ambiguity of the gothic: is this terror supernatural, or is it all just the nervous breakdown of a mind cracking beneath grief, loneliness, and the peculiar human genius for self-torment? The Victorians, you’ll recall, adored this ambiguity. They had Darwin on one shoulder, telling them man was beast, and Tennyson on the other, telling them man was angel. No wonder they kept wooden companions to make the drawing room feel less empty.

The comedy, then, is half the fun. For a book that wallows in dread, it’s oddly amusing to imagine grand English households cluttered with plywood pseudo-servants. The silent companions are, in effect, a satire on the stiff, lifeless society of their age: figures that look human but lack soul, guardians of etiquette who never blink. One suspects if Purcell were feeling especially Wildean, she might have subtitled her novel The Importance of Being Lifesize.

And so the novel stalks that delightful gothic territory where fear and farce are cousins. We may laugh at the absurdity of wooden houseguests, yet, as with all good gothic, we laugh nervously. For somewhere in the dark, just beyond the lamp’s edge, something that shouldn’t be there might be waiting.

At the psychological level, The Silent Companions is essentially a Jungian puppet show. Those painted wooden figures, stiff and expressionless, are the perfect stand-ins for the shadow self: the bits of ourselves we pretend aren’t there until they start rattling the teacups. Jung argued that when we repress fear, grief, or rage, they don’t vanish – they simply return, silent and uninvited, in the corners of our consciousness. Purcell’s companions do precisely that. They’re manifestations of the uncanny: familiar but wrong, comforting yet menacing, mirrors that do not reflect but distort.

From a philosophical standpoint, the novel wrangles with the eternal gothic tension between reason and superstition. The Victorians thought themselves modern, scientific, and terribly rational – right up until they were consulting mediums in the parlour. The novel lives in that space where Enlightenment confidence collides with primal dread: where Darwin sits in the library, but the housemaid still crosses herself at creaking floorboards. The companions mock rationality itself, for what could be more absurd than attempting to explain away something that should not exist, yet plainly does? Kierkegaard would call it the dizziness of freedom – the sheer terror of having to choose between believing in the rational or succumbing to the absurd.

And then there is the sociological and satirical undercurrent. The companions, those wooden doppelgängers of polite society, aren’t just creepy – they’re a parody of Victorian social life. These people were already living like mannequins: rigid etiquette, rehearsed politeness, eyes fixed on appearances. Purcell’s conceit’s almost Wildean in its wit: if you behave like lifeless props, why not decorate your house with lifeless props too? The companions become a grim allegory for conformity – the price of social respectability being a slow transformation into furniture.

But at the deepest, most existential layer, what makes the book unsettling isn’t the prospect of haunted plywood, but the reminder that we ourselves are prone to freezing into silence. To become our own companions: voiceless, passive, locked inside roles and expectations. Sartre, of course, would remind us that ‘hell is other people’ – though in this case, hell might also be other people rendered in two dimensions and left to loom over the parlour.

So the companions are both terror and mirror. They’re props, yes – but props that expose the hollowness of their owners. A reader can’t help but wonder: are they animated by some infernal power, or by the sheer weight of repression, guilt, and grief? And if the difference is indiscernible, does it matter? After all, as Nietzsche noted, ‘if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back’ – and sometimes the abyss has been painted onto a plank of wood and shoved in the corner of the drawing room.

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