The Lovely Bones — book review

This is a crime thriller, a psychological drama and a fantasy woven into a fascinating texture set in suburban America circa 1973. It combines violence, sexual passion and the agony of grief that ultimately becomes reconciliation. As a novel, it depends for its existence on a trope of magical realism, but running counter to this is a harsh, factual evocation of violence and suffering. Susie, the protagonist-narrator is dead. She has been raped, then brutally murdered. So she tells her story in flash-back from a celestial perspective, and the mechanism works surprisingly well. The omniscient view of Mr Bradley, the repulsive, sleazy murderer is made shockingly graphic when viewed from a very conventional child's heaven.

The same applies to Susie's grief stricken family and how they deal collectively and individually with her brutal murder over a six-year period. The only problem for me is Susie’s actual heaven with its 'gazebo' and 'swing set', although it serves its purpose sufficiently to be acceptable. Heaven is a construct, created from long-term earthly desires such as Susie's passion for dogs.

'Every day in my heaven tiny dogs and big dogs ... bassets tripped over their ears ... nudging the rumps of dachshunds, the ankles of greyhounds and the heads of the Pekingese.'

Not all the coherence of heaven with earth is wrought in this obvious (not to speak of canine!) mode. A child's drawing on the (earthly) fridge door with its naive blue line dividing sky from land is a more subtle device used to blend the two states of being.

Susie 'became convinced that the thick blue line was a real place - an Inbetween where heaven's horizon met Earth's. [She] wanted to go there into the cornflower blue of Crayola, the royal, the turquoise, the sky'.

The plot of The Lovely Bones rests on the growth and development of a grief stricken family. Initially they are atomised by their own various takes on their shock and loss. Mother Abigail absents herself emotionally and geographically for five years and finds superficial relief in anonymity. Sister Lindsay uses brittle denial whilst little brother and father cling to each other in blind confusion. Grandma becomes the heart of the family and the stabilising reference to sanity.

Meanwhile the plot is driven by the obsessive and at times dangerous attempt to flush out the villain. We know for certain that Mr Bradley is a serial killer. We watch every gruesome detail from the safety of Susie's heaven. We know where her body is hidden and we're treated to a spooky tour of Bradley's house that is not dissimilar to The Bates Motel. The fact that it's almost next door to Susie’s family home makes it all the more gruesome.

A satisfying order descends on chaos to bring a chastening resolution to this extraordinary novel. Sebold fires on multiple cylinders in an ambitious and successful attempt to demonstrate the healing power of grief. Humour, charm and human compassion are shown against the horrors of psychosis and destruction. She invites us on a fruitful if harrowing journey. Our only obligation is to suspend disbelief that there's a heaven up there. I'm an atheist and I managed it.

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Tagged — The Lovely Bones; Alice Sebold; Fiction Review

The Superhighway - welcome to Cone City

One kind of literacy that's required by every UK motorist is that of UK road signs. Without them we'd be lost. Some of us are lost because of them! I happen to hold an intuitive belief that men have an inbuilt compass. 'I always know which way I'm pointing!', my late ex-husband used to exclaim. And on our visit to the seaside on the east of England as a refreshing change from the west, he pronounced. 'I feel weird here. The sea's on the wrong side'.

Now, I'm a simple northern girl and if the sea's there and I'm here that's all I need to know, no matter whether I'm in Whitby or Fleetwood. After all, this is bucket and spade country, not an expedition to the source of the Nile.

Back to navigation and the motorway system. What on earth is a non-English speaking tourist going to make of ADVERSE CAMBER? I ask myself. Or DEBRIS ON ROAD?

The Highway Code was ratified by The Plain English Society but how did these utterances-from-another-planet sneak into our navigation system? And speaking of navigation systems, would our neat little sat nav warn us about the aforementioned 'debris' or haughtily edit it out? Of course, this is a rhetorical question on my part but it does give me food for thought.

Frequently on our road ANY VEH is invited to join a certain lane. Qu'est-ce que c'est? might ask Michel or Nicole or even Fred or Alice. Wouldn't ANY VHCLE make at least some sense?

KEEP IN LANE is another weird construction, by now deeply ingrained into our LAD (language acquisition device). Wouldn't, STAY IN LANE be a more accurate instruction? Keep, in the sense of 'keep' (yourself) followed by 'off', 'out' 'away', is very colloquial. It's also a negative idiom. That's why as native English speakers we're not fazed by this aberrant use, but, again, what would Gustav or Heidi make of KEEP IN ...?

KEEP OFF whether it's followed by 'the grass' or 'my chips', makes total sense as a negative instruction.

Ask yourself which sounds more linguistically natural, 'Keep close' or 'Stay close' 'Keep there' or 'Stay there'. I think you'll find ... Oh, and, keep looking!

Politics and Language

Text massaging - lubrication please, not persecution

How is it that everyone who's not a teacher expresses absolute disgust at the language of text-messaging and at the fact that youngsters are using it to - wait for it - communicate?

I think I know why. The 'Disgusted' of The Ignorant Party are showing their true colours. That is, they've never had the job of encouraging youngsters to write anything. What's more, these people all went to grammar schools thirty or forty years ago, where writing was not only de rigeur as an ethos but actually carried out from morning til night by literate youngsters. What do The Ignorant Party know about the other ninety per cent who went to Secondary Modern schools, where the subjunctive was about as well known as the Chinese alphabet and a subordinate clause was a distant relative of Father Christmas?

Where do they think the equivalent of the ninety per cent are today? Answer: they're in our comprehensive schools: and they don't want to be made to read or write because it's not part of their essential culture. They're different, not disgusting, right? Understandable or what?

And I think technology's doing a great job in democratising the written word and that text messaging is at the 4front don't U C?

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost his constraint was the verse form. When The Dream of the Rood was sculptured into the stone of The Ruthwell Cross, the writer was constrained by the form and the medium. It's not easy to carve a poem on to a lump of rock - not that I've ever tried it. It's not easy to write an epic in iambic pentameters, and I have tried that!

Now, I'm not saying that Tracy's text message to Kevin is on the same scale but there are indisputable similarities in the basic endeavour. Tracy's challenged by the English language: but more importantly, by the form. In this case it's the text message. And most important of all, she's taking on that challenge for the same reason as did Milton and the Anglo-Saxon stonemason: because she wants to communicate, and she's succeeding.

The main reason for being conversant and fluent with the English Standard in all its manifestations is to have the versatility to deviate from it for creative effect. That's where The Ignorant Party and I do coincide in our desire for all youngsters, indeed all per se, to understand the standard code. But as Tony Harrison says in Them and Uz, ‘RIP RP’, as he points out that The Times made 'Tony' 'Antony'.

I rest my case.