Ghostland: In Search of A Haunted Country by Edward Parnell

Ghostland : In Search of A Haunted Country

by Edward Parnell

A book review

Always the ghosts.

At one point in his Ghostland, Edward Parnell quotes a character from a Walter de la Mare ghost story “Seaton’s Aunt”:

Why, after all, how much do we really understand of anything? We don’t even know our own histories, and not a tenth, not a tenth of the reasons.

Ghostland is unclassifiable, a book of many parts.  But it is, first and foremost, a book about histories.  And like Seaton, Parnell starts with his own history, digging deep into his memory (and in family photo albums) to piece together the story of growing up with his parents and his brother Chris.  There are happy snaps of early family holidays and bird-hunting trips. But, as Edward grows older (and as his story/history progresses) he has to face more harrowing memories of the illness, suffering and death which visit his closest and dearest.  One cannot but suspect that Parnell had suppressed many of these bleaker memories and that writing Ghostland was a way in which the ghost of these past images could be summoned and their pain exorcised.  

Perhaps it is the very intimacy of this exercise which leads the author to adopt his unusual approach to memoir.  Ghostland could easily have became a straightforward autobiography or one of those “true life books” for which there is always a hungry market.  Instead, Parnell opts to keep his own history at arm’s length and to use as “interlocutor” with his memories the ghost stories, weird tales and horror movies which he loved so much as a boy and which are still his passion (Parnell himself his written a critically acclaimed ghost novel - The Listeners). 

M.R. James (circa 1900).  James is one of the key figures
in Parnell's idiosyncratic history of the British ghost story

Parnell realizes that these works of fiction are very much shaped by their authors’ own histories and by the landscapes where they were written and set. He sets of on a pilgrimage of the British Isles whose stops are the places which inspired the great writers of ghostly fiction.    Readers who share Parnell’s enthusiasm for the genre will find much to enjoy in this regard.  M.R. James, Arthur Machen, L.P.Hartley, Charles Dickens, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, Alan Garner … these are some of the authors whose works (and lives) are discussed in the book.  But Parnell’s omnivorous love of the ghostly goes beyond the written word – he also ventures into film and tv, in sections about the folk-horror movies, the cult BBC adaptations of ghost stories at Christmas and even dark public information films from the 1970’s such as “Apaches” and “Lonely Water”.

Ghostland is subtitled “In Search of a Haunted Country” and it often has the feel of a travelogue.  Indeed, Parnell exploration of the ghostly and weird is anything but “desk-based”.  Whilst the biographical and bibliographical details are well-researched, what gives this book its idiosyncratic feel is the “sense of place” which gives a context to the works discussed.  I particularly liked, for instance, the description of Parnell’s impromptu visit to the house in Borth, Wales where William Hope Hodgson penned The House on the Borderland, and his account of revisiting the Norfolk Fens which inspired W.G. Sebald’s autofiction and which Parnell remembers as childhood haunts. 

Because, as the author himself admits, it is always the ghosts… These journeys into the uncanny inevitably and repeatedly lead back to the ghosts of Parnell’s past.  Invariably, the stations on this idiosyncratic pilgrimage spark personal memories.  And as the book nears its end, Parnell must face the terrors of the illness and death of his loved ones.  The book is poignant throughout but, in its last chapters, it is emotionally devastating. I cannot start to imagine what challenge it must have been for the author to write the final pages. As readers, we cannot but feel honoured to be allowed to share his most intimate feelings.

Hardcover, 468 pages

Published October 17th 2019 by William Collins

A photo of the Norfolk fens nabbed from the author's twitter account @edward_parnell