Ghost Month
Author: Simon Wroe
ISBN-13: 9780571394708
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Guideline Price: £16.99; 416pp
In the film The Sixth Sense, the sentence “I see dead people” sent viewers reeling. For the readers and characters of Ghost Month, Simon Wroe’s second novel, it’s just part of being a Londoner.
The book begins on the first day of September and ends on its last, charting the month when the deceased return to London. Despite an odd smell and slight pallor, they appear much like you or me. And they appear wherever they please, as they have done every autumn for the last five years.
Ghost Month follows four people in the city as they prepare for and grapple with this mass haunting. Nine-year-old Eddie envies the attention his dead brother gets at the dinner table, but decides death isn’t for him: “For one thing he wouldn’t be able to eat chocolate. Probably even very light chocolates like Wispas or Aeros.”
Jane, a teacher, rents a faux husband to appease her judgmental mother (ghosts can’t speak, but looks are telling). Gideon, scion of a property magnate, wonders whether this month will bring consequences which he can’t pay his way out of. Lil, living on the street, is a ghost of her former self before the month begins.
Wroe renders this fantastical concept with remarkable conviction and wit; advertisements on the tube offer “hexes for exes”, and excessive use of blusher has become de rigueur “to show how far the wearer [is] from the grave”. The pragmatism with which the city has accepted its ghostly residents – assimilating the dead into political rhetoric, children’s games and celebrity gossip – points to the absurdity of daily life and death in our own reality.
But in comparison to the fleshed-out world of the novel, the central characters of Ghost Month feel somewhat hollow. Their thoughts and backstories are overexplained, and the extreme arrogance or destitution of certain characters – which sets them up for predictably Dickensian redemption – strays close to cliche.
Nevertheless, Wroe uniquely captures the ridiculousness of death, and the book’s humour makes stark the peculiar individualities of grief. This is an odd, thoughtful inquiry into how it is possible to live alongside loss. Though Ghost Month’s impact is underwhelming at times given the gravity of its subject, it is sure to linger hauntingly in the minds of its readers.
Phoebe Pascoe is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New Statesman and Mission Magazine