Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones is a memorable text that is seen as an elegy for the short life of the protagonist as is made clear from the outset:
“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.”
Despite its horrific subject matter, the novel descends into melodrama. It is painfully funny, bracingly tough, terribly sad; it is a feat of imagination and a tribute to the healing power of grief.
Throughout Sebold’s beautiful novel, she demonstrates how a vicious event can initially create havoc for the family’s victim but ultimately it can also heal the growing gulf within a family and restore their strong bonds:
“They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums.”
The novel is set in heaven, but this is not the traditional heaven we associate with Christian scriptures. Heaven is presented by Sebold’s powerful imagination as an extension of each individual’s desire and imagination. For the protagonist, heaven is filled with the accoutrements one expects of an adolescent girl including media magazines, a gazebo, as sympathetic roommate and lots of canine companions.
From the safety of her new environment, Susie observes the lives of her family, friends and even the life of her killer. Being dead, she is also liberated from the traditional constraints of time and thereby she can also reflect on important events from the lives of the people she observes. Aided by Susie’s frank first person narration, in prose which is lithe, resilient and delightful, we, the readers, are able to travel to new imagined worlds and to reflect on the fragility and beauty of life.
Inventively, humorously, imaginatively and, through references to other texts Sebold, subverts the novel of self-actualisation since her omniscient narrator, Susie, is already dead. She does this through using fantastic elements such as her bodily invasion of the idiosyncratic Ruth. This allows Susie to experience lovemaking, something which was lacking from her own heaven. The narrator is able to reach a new level of maturity and insight near the end of the novel:
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at a great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a new way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events of my death wrought were merely bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future.”
Ultimately, The Lovely Bones disarms the disbelieving reader and challenges us to re-imagine happy endings, to reflect on out own heavens on earth and to question traditional beliefs.
Notes from Pan Macmillan Australia.
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