The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
It has come to me before now that I might be reading books in an insufficiently critical fashion. Reading back through the entries in this journal, there are very few listed that I didn't like. I feel that it might even be a fair criticism to say there is a certain element of cheerleading about it. This has worried me in the past, so I asked Beloved Other Half what he thought. He said: “That's because you don't bother to finish books you don't like.” I think he may have had a point. I always have a 'To Read' list with around 20 titles on it, and so I do regard life as too short to bother with bad books.
Which is why I vowed to press on with this book even when, a few pages in then about a third of the way through, I found I really didn't want to finish it. Recently I had read another in this select group of 'cult modern novels' – Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I really did 'get' that one – found it a wonderful read, imaginative and intellectually satisfying. But, reading through the Amazon customer reviews, for every 15 or so who loved it there would be an anguished soul crying “But what do people see in this?” It just hadn't clicked with them.
I felt the same when, despairing of continuing with this book, I went and looked at the customer reviews for it. Such a paean of uniform praise I do not remember seeing ever before. People moved to tears in every succeeding chapter, people's lives being affirmed and their religious faith being strengthened. Recommendations to read it with a box of tissues to hand, people who cannot get the story out of their heads, people who return to it again and again.
Well, all I can say is: why? Firstly, stories that start out with the meticulously-described sexual assault and brutal stabbing of a 14-year-old girl aren't usually high on my reading list, though I appreciate the urge of the author to tell this usually untold story from the point of view of the person that suffers it and can't speak out themselves. Once that is out of the way, we get into the main structure of the book – the disintegration of the girl's family and its eventual reunification eight years later. Susie, the victim and narrator, perpetually 14 years old, watches events on earth from a kind of heavenly antechamber, discovering that she is as unable to let go of her family as they are incapable of letting go of her, as well as discovering a limited potential to influence events on earth. As we perhaps should expect from the heaven of an adolescent, her heaven is a place of staggering banality – a high school where all the textbooks are fashion magazines, and anything goes, including lighting bonfires in the corridors.
This book does, at its heart, contain an essential truth. It is the same truth that was so painfully revealed after September 11, 2001 when broadcasters played over and over the messages left on answerphones for their loved ones by people who knew they were dying and would never see them again. That truth is that our loving relationships, with families, partners, children – are the only things that really matter to us in extremity. A simple and rather stark truth, which this book manages to load with such a weight of baggage and sentimentality that you almost start wishing it wasn't. Another thing that has me troubled is the mixed messages about women that it contains. Lindsey, sister of the victim. Intellectually gifted, capable of great athletic achievements. But shown as only truly fulfilled and happy and achieving closure when clutching a dear little baby at the end, after 'accidentally falling pregnant'. Spare me, Dear Lord, from this nonsense, I can feel myself getting cross again as I type.
Then there is the credulous process by which Susie swaps bodies with a former friend and returns to earth in order to have sex with a boy she had been forming a relationship with when she died. I think the intention is for the character to overcome the brutalisation visited on her by her murderer, and experience how men and women would normally relate to each other. However, granted a few precious hours back on earth, this is how she chooses to use them? And the ambiguous women of a generation back – Abigail, Susie's mother, who runs away from her family for eight years and seems not to develop one jot as a character during that time, who comes running back the minute there is a serious tug on the string. I appreciate the author is trying to create a portrait of a society in which the position of women is ambiguous, compromised and threatened – with the prospect of male violence constantly half-visible and indeed kept constantly half-visible in order that women should remember their place. But this to me has more to do with The Stepford Wives than any decent feminist critique.
When Susie does finally manage to loosen her ties to earth somewhat, she graduates to a higher circle of Heaven, to take an example from Dante. I found myself profoundly irritated here by the complete refusal of the author to engage in any kind of discussion about religious faith. You might say, and indeed be right, that it would get in the way of the story, but how can you possibly write a novel that has heaven as its central component without even acknowledging the theological possibilities? Here the ultimate experience seems to be the opportunity to spend time with those we have loved – dead pets, grandparents. Again, a fundamental truth but wrapped in such a confection of sentiment and nonsense that I at least, a confirmed atheist anyway, found myself hoping that death really is the end if this is the alternative.
Polemic delivered, allow me to find some nice things to say about this book (purely for the exercise). It is highly readable, and does well to get 300 pages or so out of very little actual action. The characters are, with the provisos mentioned above, well-drawn. Ruana Singh (I am no expert on Sikhism, and apologise to anyone who is, but surely her name would have been Ruana Kaur?), the yoga devotee and former dancer with an entirely absent husband for whom the act of baking apple pies seems to be the symbol of an uneasy integration with American life, was easily my favourite. The act of using a dead person as narrator in the story of their own events is a daring and interesting one – but hardly entirely original; off the top of my head I can think of two novels by Douglas Coupland in which it happens. But to my eyes, I am afraid, it is glaring in its faults and inconsistencies and often objectionable in its outlook. While touching on some very serious points about our values and about the status of women and children in society, I think that in the final analysis it shirks its responsibility to these issues and plunges into sentimentality and trite answers, often reinforcing the very values that I suspect it may have been seeking to question.