Christmas: A Survival Guide For The Spooky

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Verity Holloway

Every year, around September, the nightmares start. I’ve lost the ability to cook, or forgotten to buy presents, or – and I had this one last night – a completely imaginary cousin is having a breakdown over the sprouts because he can’t afford to move out of his parents’ house and what are you going to do about it, Verity?!

Wading through the syrupy supermarket ads, the money-grabbing pop songs, and all that infernal fruitcake, we’ve forgotten that midwinter was once a time for ghost stories, when our ancestors met around the fire to celebrate another year of narrowly avoiding the bloody flux. All that phoney Christmas cheer can be hard when you’re spooky by nature, so I’ve put together a list of things that might just get you through…

Printer’s Devil Court by Susan Hill

Misty winter evenings, strong drink, and Victorian medical students with too much time on their hands. It’s a pocket-size ghostly novella that can be read in one sitting, and the punchline is Susan Hill at her effortlessly chilling best.

M.R. James’ ghost stories by Nunkie Theatre

I’ve seen Robert Lloyd Parry read James’ tales of the uncanny twice, in the flesh – in a candlelit medieval leper chapel, no less. Parry’s softly-spoken delivery casts you back into an antiquarian age of fusty academics and sherry sipped alone by the fire. He is the next best thing to re-animating the author. You can buy DVDs and audio here.

Krampus

If you’ve ever worked Christmas in retail, you’ll understand the appeal of a giant Germanic goat-man dragging naughty children away in chains. Krampus has enjoyed something of a Renaissance in recent years, so it’s no longer hard to source hilariously macabre cards, ornaments, and festive jumpers bearing his grinning hairy visage. My own tree features a glass Krampus nestling amongst bat tinsel.

Christopher Lee’s heavy metal Christmas singles

Thrashing as we go
In a hearse that knows the way
To hell we go!
Crying all the way.

“It’s light-hearted, joyful and fun,” he says. Thank God for Christopher Lee. His own Christmas tradition involves wearing Vincent Price’s special festive hat.

The Haunted Looking Glass

Selected and illustrated by Edward Gorey, this is one of my favourite collections of ghost stories. Highlights include Dickens’ ‘The Signalman’, and Stoker’s ‘The Judge’s House’. Small enough to produce from your handbag during those hellish Post Office queues.

Jill Tracy – Silver Smoke, Star of Night

Because nothing fosters that festive glow in the heart like the minor chords of murky cabaret. Jill Tracy’s voice is silk and cyanide. Her Christmas album features gloomy renditions of traditional carols as well as ‘Room 19’: “Tracy’s tale about the forlorn spirit who haunts a desolate hotel room where he committed suicide Christmas Eve 1947”.

Charles Dickens’ hot gin punch

I sampled one ~~or two~~ of these at the recent London Month of The Dead, courtesy of Hendrick’s Gin and inspired by Mister Micawber…

I never saw a man so thoroughly enjoy himself amid the fragrance of lemon-peel and sugar, the odour of burning spirit, and the steam of boiling water, as Mr Micawber did that afternoon. It was wonderful to see his face shining at us out of a thin cloud of these delicate fumes, as he stirred, and mixed, and tasted, and looked as if he were making, instead of a punch, a fortune for his family down to the latest posterity.

Gin lovers disagree on the finer points, but go ahead and experiment with the basic elements: gin, Madeira, lemon juice, sugar, spices, and boiling water. For a more authentic Victorian taste, perhaps swap dry gin for the harder flavour of Dutch genever. Punch doesn’t have to be cosy; simply don a black veil and sit in a corner, a la Lady Dedlock, and brood over the intoxicating vapours.

There. Doesn’t that feel better? Merry bleedin’ Christmas. And roll on next Halloween.

Review: Silent Partners at The Fitzwilliam

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Verity Holloway

It’s been a good couple of months for writing. After getting some lovely responses over my last short story (it’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize – I got the news in the middle of the night during a bout of chronic pain, and I initially thought it was my medication playing tricks) I’ve been putting concerted effort into finishing the novella that’s been lingering about since last winter. To be annoyingly vague, it concerns the nocturnal lives of mannequins, so, for a bit of research and a break from my desk, I visited Silent Partners at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.

“Silent Partners is a ground-breaking exhibition devoted to the artist’s mannequin, that uncovers its playful, uncanny – and sometimes disturbing – history from the Renaissance to the present-day.”

The exhibition is far bigger than I anticipated. Three large rooms of artists’ lay figures, anatomists’ models, and fashion clotheshorses charting the evolution of the human simulacrum from religious devotion to arch Surrealism, along with striking photography and disembodied limbs dotted around the rest of the Fitz.

Life-sized dolls, no matter how beautifully made, are creepy, and the curators understand. From the moment you enter Silent Partners, you’re hit by the ‘uncanny valley’ effect. Viewing Walter Sickert’s life-sized wooden lay figure – laid out in a coffin, no less – I realised I was experiencing the same sensation of voyeurism I get when viewing Egyptian mummies or one of Doctor Gunther’s anonymous corpses. CT scans add to that sense of the uncanny. The mannequins once had life and purpose. Now they lie still.

To my perverse delight, the Fitz has sourced one of Thomas Edison’s horrendous talking dolls. It’s about as adorable as a vocal manifestation in a poltergeist haunting. The business went bust in the 1890s because children were understandably terrified. Dolls – blonde and smiling or otherwise – have the power to scare, whether you want them to or not.

Are you still with me after that?

Less unnerving is the lay figure’s role as studio companion. Many of the nineteenth century mannequins on display have small, faintly smiling faces and eyes that look submissively up from under the lashes as if to say, “…master?” This of course led to accusations of fetishism – a new term in fin-de-siecle psychology. After all, an artist’s lay figure is an idealised, usually female figure, posable, silent, and always there. A kind of sexless mistress, lifelike but lifeless.

Edward Burne-Jones bears the brunt of this. Comparing his Pygmalion series to the vibrant new woman of Jones’ time, one label points to Ned’s fixation with statue-serene models as a symptom of his own sexual repression. That strikes me as a bit harsh, particularly when looking at his famously fiery lover, Maria Zambaco. You don’t roll around on the cobblestones with someone if you’re not at least slightly open to the urgency of your own passions. But I see what they’re getting at: ‘I love you, but please stand still and shut up’.

The_Soul_Attains There’s a surprising amount of Pre-Raphaelite art, considering the movement was so concerned with realism. Ford Madox Brown owned five lay figures at the time of his death (including a horse), and The Last of England was completed partially with the help of these figures. Critics noticed. There’s a fun insult from the eighteenth century: “This painting stinks of the mannequin”. Millais was better at hiding his use of lay figures. The Black Brunswicker required two so that the models – Dickens’ daughter Katy and an army private not of her acquaintance – wouldn’t have to hold such an intimate pose.

The fashion segment was particularly interesting. Earlier clothes modelling mannequins have far more physical agency than the ones you’ll see in Topshop windows. These eighteenth century lifeless girls have hands that reach and gesticulate, and faces poised as if to speak. It was only in the nineteenth century that shop windows began to display disembodied hips and busts. A decline in tailoring to the individual? Or a less sinister preference for cheap mass production?

Overall, Silent Partners is an impressive undertaking and hugely interesting – and free! I’ll be returning at least once. The only downside was the lack of labels on the large photographs dotted around the other galleries, because I loved them but couldn’t find the photographer’s name. It’s probably my shortsightedness, but somebody enlighten me, please.

Photo by StuffandStories on Twitter.

Silent Partners is on at the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge until the 25th Jan 2015, and then the Musée Bourdelle in Paris from the 31st March until the 12th of July 2015.

That Damned Elusive Pearl Spiral

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Verity Holloway

You will have seen it again and again in Rossetti’s paintings of lush, isolated women – a spiral of pearls nestling in waves of red or raven hair. Once you’ve noticed it, it keeps turning up. Here it is in ‘A Christmas Carol’…

christmas-carol …and in Alexa Wilding’s hair in ‘Monna Vanna’…

dante_gabriel_rossetti_12_monna_vanna …and, naturally, adorning Jane Morris in ‘Mariana’…

Rossetti was an incorrigible collector. His Chelsea house was crammed with musical instruments he never played, mirrors he never polished, and great swathes of fabrics for the beautification of his models. He spent the evenings rummaging in junk shops for exotic jewellery and amassed quite a collection of cheap yet dramatic pieces. Some of these pieces still surface in Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic exhibitions. Unfortunately, the spiral hair pin he obviously adored was allegedly borrowed by a friend and never seen again. That probably didn’t do Rossetti’s latent paranoia any good.

While we wait for it to turn up on Antiques Roadshow, we have Kirsty Walker’s biscuit replicas to enjoy, and – at last! – beautiful handmade replicas by Joanna of Nanya Online. I don’t normally do plugs, but I won Joanna’s Tumblr competition and I’m just thrilled. It arrived today in a tiddy box adorned with ‘The Beloved’.

Isn’t it delicate? It feels like a network of tiny bones in my hand. Joanna also makes earring replicas of the spiral. Have a look at her shop.

Unlike Alexa Wilding and friends, my hair is made of ghosts, so nothing will ever stay in it. Luckily the spiral comes with another pin so it can be worn as a brooch. I’ll be wearing it on my Victorian riding jacket at Portsmouth’s Victorian Festival of Christmas where I’ll be ‘performing’ – ha! – later this month. See you there.

Terror & Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Verity Holloway

gothbl I’d like to be able to write coherently about the British Library’s Gothic exhibition, but because I’m an inveterate goth, I’m at risk of listing my moments of “Oh God, I can’t believe they’ve got the actual original [insert artefact here]”, hand to pale brow. Bear me for a moment, because–

Mervyn Peake’s handwritten Gormenghast!

Doctor Dee’s Elizabethan scrying mirror!

Thomas Chatterton’s medieval forgeries!

Letters by John Polidori!

Not since 2012’s Pre-Raphaelites at The Tate have there been so many of my favourite things in a single room. Anyone who loves Gothic will lick their chops at The British Library. From the genre’s florid beginnings with The Castle of Otranto to The Sisters of Mercy crooning at girls who wander by mistake, the exhibition is a celebration of the pleasure Gothic’s many incarnations have brought people down the centuries – and how Gothic manages never to die.

Crumbling ramparts, impenetrable forests, double lives, and lashings of gore. Gothic has always toyed with what disturbs us – the secret lives of respectable personages in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, female sexuality in Carmilla, foreign invasion in Dracula. No wonder there was pearl-clutching at the thought of sensible Victorian girls devouring Gothic novels, letting their darkest desires run free. This breathless consumption of all things dreadful left early Gothic fans open to ridicule (try reading The Castle of Otranto without laughing), but the exhibition manages to convey Gothic’s steady evolution into a self-aware, perhaps even post-modern genre, taking us through to Edward Gorey’s playful macabre and the androgynous world of post-punk goth.

The hysterical quality of Gothic is where the fun lies. Because there’s that veneer of ‘wink-wink, we know this is daft’, the genre has the opportunity to introduce genuinely scary ideas in a setting we’re already comfortable with. We sign up to the horror of Gothic while we may shy away from brutal realism. Take the alcoholism and child abuse in The Shining. We talk about the bathtub woman or the bloody lift, but what’s really chilling is Jack’s likability while he terrorises his wife and child with a croquet mallet. Gothic is something that lurks beneath the ordinary; a sense of heightened, oversaturated reality where the family secrets are literally locked in the attic, scratching with broken fingernails at all that floral Victorian wallpaper.

Terror & Wonder is on at the British Library until January 2015.

Cake or Death? Sin-eating and other morbid confectionary

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Verity Holloway

My short story, Cremating Imelda, is published in Animal Literary Magazine this month. Imelda, a modern hermit in an abandoned village on the Norfolk coast, is a woman with a morbid talent concerning food – and mortal sin.

This is an old fascination of mine: the links between death, what we eat, and why.

For centuries, sin-eating was a funerary tradition grudgingly tolerated by The Church. Usually a reviled individual on the edge of society, the sin-eater went to funerals and ate bread or cake off the coffin, absorbing the deceased’s sins and thus allowing them to speed through purgatory. Presumably, they hoped someone would do the same for them, when the time came.

Sin-eating has long fallen out of favour. But there are more recent funerary traditions involving food that still manage to make us uncomfortable. A childhood memory: a Greek holiday. I was permitted one treat; anything I chose from the bakery. This bakery was nothing like the ones in England. There wasn’t a single stodgy pink bun or unhappy gingerbread man. Every confection was a miniature ornament sprinkled with green pistachio, or shining with honey. But what I wanted was inside a glass cabinet. A dish piled with plain brown biscuits. Just flat brown rounds of dough – nothing to excite a child. Perhaps it was because they were behind glass and therefore forbidden. I knew what I wanted, and I asked for it.

“Those are not for little girls. Those are for… for…” The baker wheeled her hands, searching for the English. “The funeral.”

Get the child away from the death biscuits. This was a Greek custom, the baker told us. Sweets to eat in the presence of the dead. Looking at the mountain of biscuits, I remember thinking the locals must have been dropping like flies. I ended up with some unmemorable cake or other, and the episode went down as further proof that Verity always was ‘a grimly kid’ (to borrow Rossetti’s phrase). But the idea of funeral biscuits fascinated me. Why didn’t we do this in England?

Food has become the awkward aftermath of the funeral service. I find myself in church hall kitchenettes, spending a great deal of time nibbling dismal supermarket own-brand Jammie Dodgers because it gets me out of talking to anyone. I’ve already stipulated I want gin served at my funeral, partly because everyone secretly hates those undersized cafeteria cups of tea, and also because I think a funeral is a place for a sort of human communion. “Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

The Nourishing Death blog is a brilliant resource for anyone interested in the ways people all over the world honour their dead with food. Because food, in a ritual setting, is communication. In Funeral Festivals in America, Jacqueline S. Thursby writes of the funeral biscuit’s role in the Victorian way of death in the USA’s Pennsylvania:

…a prevailing funeral custom was that a young man and young woman would stand on either side of a path that led from the church house to the cemetery. The young woman held a tray of funeral biscuits and sweet cakes; the young man carried a tray of spirits and a cup. As mourners passed by, they received a sweet from the maiden and a sip of spirits from the cup furnished by the young man. A secular communion of sorts, these were ritual behaviors that transcended countries of origin and melded a diverse young nation with the common cords of death, mourning, and tradition. The funeral biscuit served as part of a code representing understood messages of mourning, honor, and remembrance.

Screen Shot 2014-09-26 at 13.25.49 In England, packaged up in paper and sealed with a blob of black wax, funeral biscuits came in many different flavours and shapes. Sometimes the packages bore morbid little poems, practically gallows ballads. One of these is in the Pitt Rivers museum. Biscuits for the funeral of Mrs Oliver, died November 7th 1828, aged 52:

Thee we adore, eternal Name,
And humbly own to thee,
How feeble is our mortal frame!
What dying worms we be.

All flesh is grass. Enjoy your biscuit.

It’s little wonder such unflinching morbidity is unwelcome in the sanitised funerals of the modern world. But many European cultures still hold on to the funeral biscuit. In 2011, a Greek family were accidentally fed cocaine-sprinkled funeral biscuits, leading to what sounds like a lovely service:

The elderly bystanders, instead of mourning, began to dance around the dead, and the tears turned to nervous laughter. The cognac was consumed in shots accompanied by the sound of happy toasts, and there were some who started ordering mojito cocktails.

So what do you have planned for your send-off? If you could have a sin-eater come to wipe away your deeds, would you?

New readables

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Verity Holloway

My short story, Cremating Imelda, is the featured story in this month’s Animal Literary Magazine. When Imelda’s 440lb body overwhelms a crematorium’s ventilation system, the newspapers are equally horrified and amused. But Imelda had a life before her cremation, and a secret talent only her parish priest was privy to.

Also out soon in the Pre-Raphaelite Society Review is my article ‘In Defence of Walter Deverell’. Sometimes referred to as the ‘lost’ Pre-Raphaelite, Deverell died before his talent could truly take off. What happened to his family – and how they kept Walter’s place in PRB history alive – was interesting and poignant to research. Some typically bitchy Victorian letter-writing, too, with what appears to be the use of some rather sneaky pseudonyms.

Protected:

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Verity Holloway

The Heartbeat at My Feet

Posted on September 14, 2014 by Verity Holloway

By now, you’ll have heard the appalling news about the Manchester Dogs’ Home fire. Though the temptation is to detail the circle of Hell I’d dearly love the arsonist to languish in for all eternity, I’d rather focus on the good that can be done for the dogs who survived. Over a million pounds have been donated by the public so far, on top of food, beds, and toys (you can donate here if you haven’t already). All these dogs and more need loving homes, so to prove how fantastic a ‘second-hand’ dog can be, allow me to introduce my rescue dog, Brontë…

I’ve wanted a rescue dog for years. What I didn’t realise was that I’d end up physically doing the rescuing.

A bit of background. My childhood dog, Bobby, was basically my brother. I wrote comics about him, fashioned miniature Bobby adventure novels out of cereal boxes, and set up a fan club. With over fifty members in my Primary school alone, he was possibly the most celebrated Jack Russell in 1990s Suffolk. This was the dog who once leapt out of a window to hijack a Royal Mail van (postman was unharmed) and defiantly trampled the hallowed lawn of Kings College one snowy Christmas Day. He was irreplaceable, but I always knew I wanted another dog after him, especially one who needed a bit of help.

You know that story about how Neil Gaiman found his beautiful white husky by the side of the freeway? This summer was my turn. Driving through the countryside with my dad on a simmering hot day, we had about four seconds to realise a four-legged muddy thing was rocketing towards us out of the heat-haze and that it had no intention of avoiding us. We opened the car door and she threw herself in.

I later joked the sight of her galloping down the tarmac was like the Black Beauty title sequence, but she really was majestic. A long-legged grinning wolf with a foxy tail and black-rimmed yellow topaz eyes.

Up close, it was a different story. She was bony, thirsty, and riddled with fleas. No i.d., just a godawful Paris Hilton-style collar, the leather torn and frayed where she’d been fighting a tether. We later learned she’d been locked in a caravan on one of the hottest days of the year, alone, for hours. Had she not forced her way out, she could well be dead.

Long story short, her owners were happy for us to adopt her. We named her Brontë, because we found her Wuthering.

We bathed her, treated her parasites, got her to eat. It wasn’t an instant transformation. You’d throw a tennis ball and she’d morosely watch it bounce away. She would follow me from room to room, silently, avoiding eye contact. Move too quickly, and she’d flinch. Once, when I left the house, she attempted to squeeze her way out of a first floor window to follow me.

It’s been two months. The vet says she’s almost an ideal weight. She loves to meet strangers and let them tell her what a big, bad, beautiful wolf she is. Toys are no longer a mystery, and she’s beginning to respond favourably to that arcane primate ritual, the hug. And bones. So many delicious bones. We love her. We love our life with her. She’s a troublesome beast, and we wouldn’t be without her.

Adopt a rescue dog. With rescue dogs, you enjoy the satisfaction of taking on a creature who needs your help and seeing it improve day by day as a direct result of your kindness. Adopt a rambunctious terrier. Adopt an old lapdog. Adopt a wee beastie rescued from a puppy-farm cage. If it’s a pup you want, register your interest at your local shelter, and they’ll contact you when a litter comes up. When you adopt a dog from a shelter, you make the choice to take business away from unscrupulous breeders, puppy farmers, illegal importers, and other assorted lowlife. Those people deserve every blow that’s coming to them, and dogs deserve all the very best humans have to give.

“My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.” – Edith Wharton.

A Sense of Place

Posted on July 2, 2014 by Verity Holloway

I find I’m writing more and more about a sense of place. I’m moving house this week, and all my notes are about waterways, familiar food, and the colour of soil.

I was born on the Rock of Gibraltar. My Dad was stationed at the Navy base there, and I spent the first two years of my life beautifully oblivious to the existence of England and drizzle and Margaret Thatcher. I went back last month, not for the first time. As usual, didn’t want to return.

As a Forces child, going wherever the MOD tells you to while the head of your family sweats in a minesweeper’s engine room somewhere far-off and unpronounceable, you’re left feeling like you belong nowhere. Family interactions take place via satellite phone, friendships are brief, and your birthday plans depend on what Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Miloševic have in store for June. Though I left Gibraltar in the late ’80s, the place always meant more to me than anywhere that followed. Two years after Gib, we were on a godawful submarine base in Scotland. Our allotted house had been arsoned a few months previously. Shards of glass, all over the garden.

The Rock was stable, I was safe there, and it was mine. Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti.

Gib is dusty and colourful and intimate and huge, and every time I get off the plane and crane my neck to see the gulls wheeling around the harsh green crags of the upper Rock, I wonder why I ever let myself get mired in the flat Fens – though I love those, too.

It’s the abundance of light and water.

Plus, you can buy a litre of vodka for £3.99. If that were the case in Britain, you’d be stepping over mounds of poisoned teenagers, but the closest I got to an encounter with a drunk was a sober gentleman carrying an easel, wanting to tell me something important:

“You’ve changed your dress. You were wearing black this morning. I saw you, wearing black. I had a demon inside me for fourteen years. But I met a man from Birmingham, and he made it come out of my neck, like whoosh.”

I find it’s only after you leave a place that you begin to feel it inside you.

Review: The Sick Rose – Disease and The Art of Medical Illustration

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Verity Holloway

The Sick Rose: Or; Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

– William Blake

In a pub a few weeks ago, a doctor friend was telling me about his first autopsy. What stayed with him, he said, was how the surface brutality of the act was accompanied by a strange, palpable tenderness as the assembled students protected the face of the deceased, keeping it clean and untouched. I thought of this when reading Dr Richard Barnett’s new book, The Sick Rose, ‘a visual tour through disease in an age before colour photography’. These painstakingly detailed images, so much more intimate than a quick photo session for The Lancet, take on the task of showing human bodies at their most vulnerable while also communicating something of the subject’s soul. Even affirming it, in the face of what was – at least then – helpless suffering.

In case it comes as a shock, I love the history of medicine. Being a) a medical oddity myself, and b) from a family of doctors who refused to censor their conversation at the dinner table, I’m always up for a chat about the experimental origins of rhinoplasty or how best to suspend a foetus in lucite. I’ve been looking forward to this book for months, especially as I went on a London gin tour with Dr Barnett a couple of years ago, and if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have known about the 18th century gin-dispensing cat. That’s the kind of thing I need to know.

And have I mentioned the contents of my living room?

I was always going to love The Sick Rose. Physically, it’s gorgeous. A heavy, tactile hardback. Even the endpapers are smallpox, and the clinical, geometric cover design contrasts sharply with a portrait of a wasted young Veronese woman, blue with cholera. Thought has gone into the aesthetic, and it doesn’t go down any of the obvious ghoulish routes, making the reader uneasy from the off. Is this art or science? Is there a line dividing the two?

That’s what I like about the book. It’s unflinching but compassionate. The images of sores, growths, pestilence, and dissection are shocking without being childish. You’re invited to look into these faces and wonder who they belonged to. One particularly moving page features a baby wizened with syphilis, staring past the reader with ancient eyes.

And then there’s the human ingenuity. Silver noses for patients disfigured by venereal disease, or beautiful art nouveau posters warning against ‘the white death’, a poetic and oddly desirable pseudonym for TB. Even my Uncle Thomas Holloway makes an appearance, with his delicate ceramic pots of useless ointment, bearing the image of Britannia and her shield. Disease and death are inseparable from the human condition, so it’s natural we should turn to art for expression and protection.

These symbolic gestures are not always comforting. For medieval physicians, leprosy was a sign of moral degradation, and the rituals that followed are disturbing. Barnett writes: “[Leprosy was] not only a disease but also a metaphor for the frail state of the human soul, portending the foulness of the grave and the agonies of purgatory. Some Catholic communities developed ceremonies in which lepers were declared symbolically dead, excluded from communal Christian life, even made to lie in a grave while a priest recited a burial mass”.

Compassionate. One can’t help but look at the recent cultural resurgence of zombies and feel queasy. Can such things only appeal to us when we’re comfortably removed from the possibility of actual living death? And what does it say about us?

L0073310 A girl with tuberculosis appealing for funds for a sanatorium

Philosophical reflections aside, the most unsettling thing I learned while researching The Sick Rose was that the makers of the game series BioShock based the faces of the splicers (drug-crazed mindless killers, if you haven’t played) directly on those of disfigured WW1 servicemen. There’s an essay on it here by Suzannah Biernoff – upsetting reading, and something I’m astonished isn’t more widely known. BioShock is one of my favourite shoot-em-ups, but I’d never made the mental link until Biernoff pointed it out. These ‘points of contact and dissonance’ between art, entertainment, and anatomy too often tread the problematic line of appropriation. It needs examining, and The Sick Rose is refreshingly mindful of this.

In short, I’m recommending the book to everyone. It’s beautiful and emotionally-engaging. All the while the ravages of disease and cultural ideas of monstrosity go hand in hand, thoughtful books like The Sick Rose are still very much needed. It’s natural to be fascinated by the blood and horror of the past, but it’s important to temper that fascination with the humanity of the subject. We mustn’t forget how relatively fortunate we are today.

Somewhere Without Horizons

Verity Holloway, writer