‘The Lovely Bones’ by Alice Sebold
I first stumbled upon The Lovely Bones back in the winter of 2003, when I was about twelve years old. In actual fact it was the first strictly ‘adult’ novel I ever read - up until then my bookshelves were stuffed with nothing but Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson and, oddly, lots of books on Ancient Egypt. If memory serves, I was also beginning to tire of what was then my only legitimate leisure activity: playing on The Sims from early morning until late at night, downloading so much custom content that the formidable family PC gradually ground to a halt. So I decided to pursue a more worthwhile pastime, one I had been rather adept at in the years before everyone’s favourite people simulator and its myriad expansion packs came along - reading, that most simple, portable, cost-effective pleasure. As I recall, the middle school book fair yielded little in the way of literary gold, so over the Christmas holidays I resolved to go to an actual bookstore in order to purchase an actual adult fiction book. Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones was the product of that particular mission.
Unless you have been living underground for the past decade you will have heard of or indeed read The Lovely Bones. It is, in Sebold’s own words, 'a novel about a murdered girl named Susie Salmon who tells her story and the story of those she left on Earth from the vantage point of her own unique heaven. It hopes somehow, through the voice of a fourteen-year-old girl, to touch on love and loss and hope - huge universal themes that are often bashed but, in my opinion, are huge and universal for a reason.' And while this is certainly the best and most succinct summary of The Lovely Bones one could hope for, straight from the author herself, it still only scratches the surface of a work of extraordinary - if not unprecedented - tenderness and depth. Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when she is raped and murdered by a neighbour, George Harvey, on December 6th, 1973. Following a swift flight from Earth she arrives in an ostensible heaven, a metaphysical interpretation of the suburban high school she would have attended had she lived, and from here she is able to observe her family as they try to cope with the devastation of her death.
For the record, I adore The Lovely Bones. Whether I happen to be twelve, sixteen, or twenty-one years old it never fails to strike a chord and give rise to the most intense and undiluted feelings. I can still remember walking into the Waterstone’s in Barrow-In-Furness all those years ago and picking it off the store’s paperback chart where it sat near the very top. My twelve-year-old self was immediately taken with the blurb, I think because the idea of a book being narrated by a deceased girl just blew my mind and went against anything I had previously read. I quickly read it from cover to cover and have done so several times since with steadily increasing speed; consequently, my original copy is now yellow inside and curling at the edges (boo), so as soon as I saw this artful, monochromatic edition I knew it had to be mine. This particular edition, one of twelve modern classics being reissued by Picador to mark its fortieth anniversary, is supplemented with some interesting bonus material not present in the original. Alice Sebold discusses what it was like writing The Lovely Bones and also partakes in an interesting Proustian questionnaire, and there are also excerpts from early reviews of the novel. And, on a superficial note, I do love the special edition cover with its symbolic cornstalks and hypnotic wavy lines.
I could harp on about The Lovely Bones for hours without much hesitation - it has always been and will likely always be one of my favourite books, a kind of desert island book, if you like. I was eager to read it again not only due to the neat new cover but because I wanted to see if my opinion of the book has altered at all in the near-nine years since I first read it. It hasn’t. If anything, The Lovely Bones seems to resonate more deeply with me as I advance through life. The idea of a subjective heaven as opposed to the rigid clouds-and-angels heaven of traditional lore is one that I have tremendous faith in, and it is the depiction of this which really sets this novel apart from any other. If you haven’t read it yet, do so ASAP. Ten million readers cannot be wrong, after all.
This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in March 2012.