The Silent Companions

Content Warning: The source material and this guide discuss violence toward women (including implications of rape and incest), child loss, miscarriage, violent death from murder and execution, the mistreatment of someone with a disability, animal abuse, substance use, mental illness, and racism against a Romani person.

“It played like a tune she could only just recall.”

The passage uses a simile, comparing Elsie’s experience of hearing herself referred to as “Mrs. Bainbridge” to a familiar but forgotten melody. The comparison creates an image of a half-remembered experience as Elsie strains to recall something important that evokes powerful emotion. The vagueness and lack of specificity add to the mystery of Elsie’s past.

“Bricks had fallen from it, leaving gaping holes like missing teeth.”

The simile accentuates The Bridge’s degradation, which adds to the novel’s Gothic atmosphere. It conveys a sense of ruin and desolation, implying that the house is physically disintegrating as if it were a living entity with missing teeth. This personification heightens the spooky and frightening atmosphere, making the home appear alive and capable of suffering.

“[H]er past laid out, exposed, like a body on the slab at a mortuary.”

By comparing the exposure of Ellie’s past to a body on a mortuary slab, the passage underscores the novel’s themes of vulnerability, revelation, and the inescapable nature of the past. The comparison evokes not only the sense of being laid bare but also the finality of such exposure, which it implicitly equates with death. The clinical and somber tone reveals Elsie’s feelings of vulnerability as Dr. Shepherd reviews her files and forces her to write her story.