The whole concept is quite bizarre and I’m not one to read books about spirits or ghosts or even violent crime. And yet from the very beginning I was almost mesmerized - I really could
not put it down.
Through Susie’s narration, we’re taken back to her last day on earth and the terrible events that happened. But Sebold doesn’t dwell on this and we’re soon with Susie in heaven as she watches her loved ones coping with the despair of her loss. Gradually over the weeks and months, she sees her friends and family begin to come to terms with their grief. But at the same time Susie is also changing. While she can never grow up physically, in heaven she does have a coming of age through a growing understanding of compassion and love.
This quote towards the end on the book, sums up Susie’s newly found reflections and also reveals where the title of the book came from.
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought 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 lifeless body had been my life.”
In some respects The Lovely Bones is a murder/suspense thriller – will they ever catch the killer? - but in a way he doesn’t really matter. Only Susie and her family matter – we want them all to be able to grow and be happy but in particular we want Susie to find acceptance and peace in her own death.
As the author, Alice Sebold knows first hand about rape and near death experiences which we first know about in her first novel/memoir, Lucky. So her empathy and understanding of what Susie would be feeling is convincingly drawn from her own experience.
But The Lovely Bones isn’t a book just about sorrow and horror - otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed with it. What saved it from being merely a thriller or tear-jerker is that there was always the expectation of hope and amazing things that can come out of grief – even grief and despair this terrible. While I found it incredibly sad, I also found it healing, sometimes funny, sometimes joyous but always incredibly lovely.
Note: A film of The Lovely Bones is set for release in December 2009. The film is directed by Peter Jackson and stars actress Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, with Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg as her parents, Susan Sarandon as her grandmother and Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, her murderer.
Reviewed by Virginia Scott
