Review

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie." Thus begins Alice Sebold's poignant novel of tragedy and loss, familial love and life after death - for both 14-year-old Susie and those she leaves behind on Earth. Susie herself is our posthumous narrator, watching from her own sterile, personalised heaven as her family and friends continue to live their ruptured lives after she herself is gone; raped and brutally murdered by an eccentric neighbour in a quiet American neighbourhood in 1973. 

Susie's death is the catalyst that propels the lives of her loved ones into new grief-driven directions; directions they may never had gone, had she remained alive. Her father becomes certain that he knows the identity of Susie's killer (rightly so, Mr. George Harvey soon being acknowledged as the serial killer in question). This leads to a series of events that label Mr. Jack Salmon as a crackpot in the eyes of a community who imagine insanity where there is only a brokenness beyond what they themselves have experienced. Susie's mother, Mrs. Abigail Salmon, emotionally withdraws from her family and soon withdraws from her daily life, seeking to elude the grief that pursues her. She absconds her marriage via an affair with the police detective heading Susie's case and eventually physically flees her suburban life, travelling the country like a nomad, wishing she could outrun her memories and her pain. 

Susie's younger siblings Lindsey and Buckley, her almost-boyfriend Ray and her friend Ruth, are also all lastingly affected by her death. Though strangest of all is the inclusion of Ruth's character, the girl who was a distant friend to Susie in life, becomes her closest friend in death. Ruth has an 'awareness' (for want of a better term), of the dead. She sometimes sees Susie and is sensitive to her presence. In one particularly unconvincing scene, Susie even inhabits Ruth's body and takes the opportunity to revisit her teenage romance with Ray Singh. 

With a deft touch, Sebold weaves a narrative so entrancing in the complexity of the character's relationships to one another, that the tale itself becomes almost secondary. A good thing too, because the tale is somewhat wanting. The characters and their emotional states vacillate between being utterly plausible to being wooden 'guesstimates' - you can almost hear Sebold thinking 'this is probably how someone like that would react". The realistic first few chapters give way to several contrived events that seem to have been interjected in flat spots to add some drama. Unsuccessfully. Finally, I cannot help but feel that Susie must not be dead after all. She is a tangible presence to characters like Ruth and Buckley, she is occasionally seen by those on Earth, and she is present in her family's every thought, - even years after her death. She seems to be absent more than dead. 

Despite the flat spots and the occasional eyebrow-raising problematic scene, the novel is a roaring success in human emotion. You care about these people, especially the Salmon family, willing them to find resolutions to their communal heartache, and anxiously waiting for them to connect their disparate existences to become a family once again. Sans one, of course. 

Susie makes for a tragic protagonist, who seems more stuck in time than her family, although in death she is free from the constraints of time in ways they are not. She is forever fourteen, and this is reflected in the narrative with key moments filtered by a 14-year-old's understanding of what is important. She hardly matures through the course of the book, but perhaps this is a literary device, illustrating the finality of death - not only how it ends the body, but also how it impedes growth. Regardless, she is beautifully portrayed and heartbreakingly believable.

Ultimately the title's Lovely Bones are not those of Susie, or any of Harvey's other victims. They are rather "the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I [Susie] was gone...The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life". 

Rating: * * * * (4 out of 5 stars)