The Depressing Bones

The Lovely Bones

Author: Alice Sebold
Published:
Brown and Company (2002)
Number of Pages:
328
Review:
”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 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.” At first I didn’t want to touch this novel because of the depressing issue of rape and murder (both of which have affected many members of my family, myself included) and I did not want to face up to haunting memories that I had put behind me, but I did put this on my TBR challenge (that I started before I started this blog) because I wanted to read it for a while I just never had the courage to.  Not only did the novel put me past my demons, but I also enjoyed reading something of spectacular prose.
Sebold was quoted as saying (and I paraphrase), she wanted to write a novel about violence because it is all around us. She herself was a rape victim and therefore fitting that she included this plot line in her first novel.
The main character, 14 year old Susie Salmon, is dead and lives her afterlife in “heaven” a place where everyone has their own sanctuary, hers is much like the schoolyard she left behind.  While she spends the remainder of the novel coming to terms with her death, her family spends the time trying to piece together the mystery of her disappearance.  Through their grief, the Salmon family grow and learn to accept her death while learning to come to terms with the emptiness of their lives. While the hole, that was Susie, never quite mends their lives continue to the best of their ability and one sees a broken family survive the best they can.
While the novel touches on themes of grief and loss, it also brings to the forefront a topic that one doesn’t like to dwell upon often: murder and rape.  The murder scene is raw and unforgiving, and it’s what makes the reader so much more sympathetic for the main character.  Sebold was BOLD when it came to writing out this scene for many people would not want to hear or read about a child brutally raped and murdered, however bringing this issue to the masses and merging it into a plot line is probably, however extreme, the best way to address the real horrors it is to experience rape. There is also a scene where Susie’s sister also experiences sex for the first time. “At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.” The contrast of the two scenes is brilliant. In one you see horror, violence, the evil humans are able to commit and in the other scene you see beauty, love and the tender gentleness that comes with human affection.
There’s also this underlying feeling- throughout the novel but also evident in this quotation- that Susie doesn’t want to let go of her family, the experiences she’s never going to get to experience, or of life itself.  In one scene -“When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things,“ Franny said. “What about the dead?“ I asked. “Where do we go?”- the conversation she has with one of the inhabitants of heaven clearly shows that she is confused about where she belongs and that she clearly longs to be in the world of the living to experience what she’ll never get the chance too. The vast spectrum of human emotions and their capabilities that Sebold plays with is nothing short of brilliant.
Throughout the novel the child is sometimes sympathetic towards her killer. Going into the minds of a psychopath as Sebold attempts to do is risky however, she does it tastefully. The reader is angry at the Murderer but also feels somewhat sympathetic towards him, for he’s a man possessed who desperately wants to break out of the mental frame he finds himself in yet doesn’t want to end the pleasure he gets from murdering his victims. You also see how complicated the character of Mr. Harvey really is. His isolation from the rest of the neighbourhood, his quirky habits, his internal confliction, he really is a complex character to analyze. One quotation I loved was: “He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat.” An observation that Susie makes which implies that Mr Harvey, who’s gotten away with so many killings in the past actually believes in his innocence and portrays this innocent act to whatever community in which he happens to find himself.
The characters in the novel all deal with the disappearance of Susie in different ways: her father becomes obsessed with finding the Murderer, her mother becomes a shadow, her sister suppresses all emotions, and her neighbours eventually get over it. She becomes “the girl who was murdered,” not even her name is remembered in that statement.  The one person she affected the most was Ruth, whom she passed (her ghost) as she was exiting the world.  Ruth later becomes possessed by women victims of murder and starts to see them everywhere and befriends Susie’s only boyfriend Ray.
The book, however well written it is, is not without flaws. The ending is drab as the author tries to give Susie a coming-of-age type of epiphany. This scene is not necessary and seemed a bit rushed and to me the ending doesn’t seem that fulfilling… the irony of the bones I guess is what disturbs me. All in all it was a well written story and I was glad I got the chance and the courage to read it.