loss

Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

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Subtitled In Search of a Haunted Country, this unusual book combines travelogue, literary review, and memoir. England is that country, home to nearly all of the ghost stories I grew up on and to the legends that fired my imagination as a child. Parnell sets out to revisit the ghost stories that have been meaningful to him throughout his life, and actually go to the places where they are set or were written.

I felt as though I were making this journey with him. As he takes us to these places, he shares not only their sometimes beautiful, sometimes eerie atmosphere, but also his own memories of visiting them as a child with his family or later on birding expeditions with his brother Chris. He introduces us to the writer associated with the place and one or two of their stories. This is no dry, academic tome, but rather a genial, engaging story, as though we were in a pub somewhere listening to a fascinating storyteller.

Hard as it was to put down, I spent most of December reading this book because I kept stopping to find and read stories and books that Parnell discusses. Many of the authors, stories and places are old friends of mine. Some were new to me, all or in part. For example, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling had written ghost stories. I loved being introduced to The Children of Green Knowe, and returning to old haunts in the fen country and Arthurian-haunted Cornwall and Dorset.

Most of all, I enjoyed revisiting W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a formative book for me, and similar in some ways to this book, being also a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of curious information. Parnell refers to a particular scene which

. . . cuts to the heart of Sebald’s work and his exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, come to forget (or at least suppress) the losses we have suffered, the memories of people and events that once came to us to us with such clarity, and the atrocities to which we are in some part complicit.

With this book, though, we are doing just the opposite: exploring the memories that haunt us. I was most moved by a story new to me: “Pirates,” by E. F. Benson, in which a fifty-six-year-old, successful business man comes across his childhood home, now abandoned and beginning to decay. The man becomes obsessed with buying and restoring it, recreating the happy home of his youth, returning even the furniture and other items now in his London home. The story gave me a jolt of recognition for I often dream that I’ve discovered my own beloved childhood home, miraculously not destroyed after all, and that I can buy it and, indeed, return these items from my current home to their rightful places. Then I wake up.

There is something about this time of year that makes me turn to ghost stories. Of course, traditionally the solstice and Christmas Eve are moments when the veil between the living and the dead thins, and perhaps disappears. And there’s something about ghost stories and England. Parnell mentions the Happisburgh footprints discovered in 2013 in Norfolk, England. Dating to the end of the Early Pleistocene, they are the oldest known hominid footprints discovered outside of Africa.

Although only in his late thirties, Parnell has suffered great losses: the deaths of both parents and Chris, his only sibling, leaving him—as one of my friends said of herself—the Last of the Mohicans. He talks about the period during and after the Great War, with its huge loss of life, when those desperate to see again their lost loved ones embraced Spiritualism. One of the themes that lends power to this story is the question of how best to heal from grief. Can we really sense something of them lingering around us? Do we hold onto our dead or let them go?

And of course there are the attendant themes around memory: what we hold onto and what we suppress, why these particular memories stay with us, even though at the time the incidents may have seemed inconsequential. As the year dies, I think about death and welcome my ghosts. I believe this is a book I will return to every December.

Who or what haunts you?

AfterMath, by Emily Barth Isler

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In this middle-grade novel, twelve-year-old Lucy starts at a new school in a new town, carrying a secret burden: she’s mourning the death of her younger brother Theo from congenital heart disease and the loss of the family environment she’s known all her life. Mired in their own grief, her parents pretend all is well, yet move to another state in hopes of a fresh start.

In a misguided attempt to place Lucy in a school that will help her deal with her grief, they enroll her in a school that suffered a mass shooting four years earlier and in the very class that suffered that trauma. As the first new member of the class since the shooting, Lucy faces a solid block of young people who have made their traumatic journey together, helped by therapists and hurt by public perception.

All except one girl, Avery, who is ostracized by the entire class. At lunch on Lucy’s first day, she can’t find an empty seat, so she sits at a table that is completely empty aside from Avery. Gradually Lucy begins to learn about this withdrawn girl, particularly through an after-school mime class.

As is obvious from this summary, the story tackles themes of grief, family, friendship, and mental health, and it does so in a sensitive way. The author’s extensive research underpins the story without loading it down. Of course, the experiences of Lucy and her classmates make for heavy reading– emotionally, that is; the prose flows well and the story unfolds naturally.

I especially enjoyed Lucy as a character. She likes math, its concrete answers that are either right or wrong, though she’s troubled by the concept of infinity. Each chapter is introduced by a math joke, which is fun. Lucy finds them in her room and wonders where they come from.

What kind of angle should you never argue with?
A 90-degree angle. They’re ALWAYS right.

Some readers may find these jokes and Lucy’s way of using math to understand the world intrusive or boring. I loved them, though, both for their welcome lightness and for the way they reflect her need for structure and certainty in a world where such things can be hard to find. I also loved seeing a girl who likes math and logic: such a rarity in stories, though not in real life.

In the mime class—which may appeal to readers who are more interested in the arts than in math—Lucy and her classmates find another way to interact. Communicating without words, trying something new together, putting on a show at the end—these are all effective tools for opening emotionally to each other. Or in other words, for becoming friends. We all could use a friend.

There are a few issues with the book, such as that, after the school where the shooting had occurred had been torn down and new one built, such a class would have been split up rather than kept together in isolation. Also, the school’s lack of interest in dealing with Avery’s extreme situation seemed unlikely.

Still, I highly recommend this novel for adults and—with care—for young readers. Grownups get a chance to experience these devasting attacks and their long tail of trauma from the students’ point of view. Young people can see their fears or their own experience reflected—and not resolved so much as coped with—in a story. Which is, after all, one of the great gifts bestowed by sharing stories.

Have you read a middle-grade story that impressed you?