Supernatural cities: enchantment, anxiety and spectrality

an Admiralty transport ship, wrecked at Ilfracombe in 1796. Some of the bodies of the drowned were carried up to the churchyard, others were left on the beach and buried on the beach near Rapparee Cove. What caused controversy locally, even two hundred years after the event, was the status of those who died. The London was carrying prisoners taken from the fighting at St Lucia, which included individuals enslaved by the French. Abolition was more than a decade away, and with money still to be made in the slave trade, there is no way of knowing what the plans of the London’s captain were for his living cargo. When it was made public that many of the drowned might have been slaves, Ilfracombe was in uproar, and many insisted on naming them only as prisoners of war. Memory, in this case, is painful, sensitive, and political. Unfortunately, These Silent Mansions lacks any reference list for the book as a whole, although this is somewhat mitigated by a good selection of notes for each chapter. Admittedly this is not an academic book, and consistent footnoting would have broken apart the poetic mood which is the book’s main selling point. But a second, more significant issue is the real lack of purpose to the book as a whole. There are traces, senses of themes – memory, loss, transience, the landscape, solitude – but no core argument or purpose to hang onto. This makes it a difficult read; there is an unfortunate hollowness if one squints in the wrong way. Perhaps, though, purpose is not the point. These Silent Mansions is a meditative book, and a meditation is the observance, without judgement, of thoughts as they arise. Perhaps it is, ultimately, churlish, to complain about a lack of purpose in this wandering, evocative prose poem which is, ultimately, about the paradoxically pointless importance of our striving.