The spirits of the age

Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising group turned up as Trump, Kim Jong-un, a Disney Princess, and — I’ll admit that this had to be explained to me — a zombie Taylor Swift. Truly a quartet of contemporary horrors. Halloween, it is safe to say, is not what it once was: in my day, a gentle bit of apple bobbing, turnip carving and maybe a white sheet with holes for eyes at a fancy-dress disco was about the full extent of it. Ghosts and ghouls, it seems, change their appearance depending on time and place.

As Susan Owens notes, in her The Ghost: A Cultural History, ‘ghosts are mirrors of the times’ and her purpose is to hold up these cracked, spooky and cobwebby mirrors for our delight and examination. (The book, it should be said, is beautifully — the usual term I believe is ‘richly’ — illustrated throughout. Not quite large and lavish enough to count as a coffee-table book but much more pleasing to have and to hold than your usual scholarly tome, The Ghost hovers in tone and style rather magnificently somewhere between academic monograph and hefty gift, the kind of book that rather implies a television tie-in, perhaps presented by Simon Schama in a fright mask, with a sinister Tom Hardy voiceover.)

Owens is a former curator of paintings and drawings at the V&A, and her study focuses on the artistic and literary representation of ghosts and their symbolic role and function as signs and signals of mortality, as clues and keys to the mystery of human souls and selves, and as warnings and reminders of lost paths and troubling horizons.

Beginning around the 11th century, she is particularly good on the changing theological ideas and circumstances that allowed ghosts to come into being, to thrive and to transform.