W.G. Sebald

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?

All the Devils Are Here, by David Seabrook

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seabrook

This is a strange book. Seabrook creates a portrait of Kent, though not the popular “Garden of England” image and not the sort of portrait you’d expect. It is a form sometimes called a psycho-geography or an odd sort of travel memoir, where we are drawn into his mind, the odd things that interest him, the associations they carry with them. It’s like listening to a chatty passenger in the seat next to you whose inescapable monologue takes you to unexpected places, places you perhaps would never go, sometimes leaving you floundering as you try to figure out how he got from here to there.

Seabrook explores a number of coastal towns, down on their luck now that the boom for such seaside resorts has passed. Margate became England’s first bathing resort in the early eighteenth century with other fishing villages following suit. That time is over now, and Seabrook is drawn to the seamier side of what remains.

Margate is where Eliot wrote “The Wasteland” after World War I as he recuperated from a nervous breakdown. Seabrook says “Margate plays a deeper game” than putting up a blue plaque to mark the connection. He describes the poem as being unlike “a war poem in the accepted sense of the words,” instead “highlighting what was lost by describing what was left.”

This is a good description of the book as a whole. In Rochester and Chatham, Seabrook draws a tenuous link between the painter Richard Dadd who murdered his father and the last, unfinished novel of Charles Dickens. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is of course our first association with Broadstairs but Seabrook also introduces us to a pre-World War II fascist network based at Naldera, the holiday home built for Lord Curzon whose daughter married Sir Oswald Mosley. “We still don’t know what’s buried there,” he says.

A later section find him in Deal, where he unearths anecdotes about disgraced English comedians, Robin Maugham (jealous nephew of William), the Stripper murders, and tales of several gay writers, actors and athletes.

I was drawn to the book because the summary on the back cover reminded me of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a fascinating book of a walking tour in Suffolk where places and people bring scraps of history, literature, art, and philosophy to the author’s mind. We learn little about the author himself except through his choice of material and meditations stimulated by them.

Both are first person monologues, both are journeys into a singular mind, one that is on the verge of a nervous breakdown—explicit in Sebald, implied in Seabrook. Both are assemblages of tesserae that resist forming a recognisable mosaic, pushing the reader to explore their own imagination and ability to find connections.

I found Sebald’s fragments far more interesting, but what is intriguing here is the way Seabrook’s bits and pieces lead you ever deeper into seedy and shocking stories. You’d think starting with a murder, the book could only go up, but you’d be wrong. We learn almost nothing about the author except his note early on that his fiancé has just died of cancer, yet we know him intimately from the juddering rhythms of his mind, the peculiar trail of associations that he follows. And still he surprises us.

Some people love this book; some hate it. If you are curious about the peculiar way one mind can work or about what goes on beyond the pretty postcards of Kentish oast houses, check out this book. But I warn you: abandon all preconceptions you who enter here.

Have you read a book that baffled you but you couldn’t stop thinking about it?