Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

By MARGIE THOMSON

Alice Sebold's lovely, strange fable is an unusual candidate for popular status: it is told in the voice of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who has been raped and murdered and is narrating from heaven, where she watches her family and friends struggling in the aftermath of her disappearance.

She also watches her attacker, a creepy maker of dolls' houses, who had been her family's neighbour but who moves on soon after murdering Susie. Susie was not his first victim, and several more follow.

The book has been seriously popular in the United States and has climbed the bestseller lists in the publishing world.

It just goes to show you should never give up; this is Sebold's first published novel, written after she had almost relinquished hope of making it into print. Struggling with a much lesser script one day, she says she simply sat down after a brief break and found Susie's voice pouring from her. The first chapter was written in an hour or two and has scarcely undergone any rewriting since.

She was still working on the novel 18 months later when she decided to take a break and write a memoir, Lucky, describing the true story of her brutal assault and rape by a stranger when she was a freshman in college.

Having dispensed with her own terrible story, she felt freer to enter a purely fictional world. "Instead of writing an autobiographical first novel I wrote a memoir. I just cut straight to the chase. That way, it allowed me to go back and write a novel that was free of any of that need to write about rape," she told the Literature: Contemporary website.

In The Lovely Bones, the narrator's voice floats free, omnipresent, detached from the world but not from longing or from love. We are spared therapy, cloying sentimentalism and melodrama, even though the story is almost entirely about emotion and the almost-impossibility of dealing with great loss, grief and the ensuing loneliness that chases everyone deep within themselves.

In Susie's family, her disappearance (which they must accept as her death, although the body is never found) explodes within her tightknit family like a bomb, tearing them apart as they each struggle to move past the tragedy.

Her father is obsessed with finding her killer; her mother pulls away from the family, trying to escape into a different kind of life altogether; her sister Lindsey hardens herself behind a fence of public denial and rejection of sympathy; and her younger brother Buckley maintains a secret anger at his mother's rejection of him but remains vulnerable to love.

Outside the family, others are touched by the death. Ruth, a girl at Susie's school, is "brushed" with Susie's spirit as it rushes from the earth and her life comes to be defined by the experience. She is driven to track the places and times of other murders of forgotten women and children, and becomes a hero in heaven as a result.

And there is Ray Singh, with whom Susie had shared a first kiss just days before her death, and for whom Susie never ceases her longing, even from heaven. Ray, who goes on to study medicine, also comes to believe that the "ushering strangers" dying people see at the foot of their beds are what they seem, and not just a manifestation of illness.

Sebold's heaven is an intriguing construction, both mundane and dreamlike: buildings "like suburban north-east high schools built in the 1960s" (Susie had so much wanted to go to high school), duplex houses (not the hated split-level that her parents lived in), an icecream shop, personal counsellors (Sebold, after all, is Californian) and paths that let you make explorations outwards.

"We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams," Susie says, and so we see that heaven is indeed of our own making, and that we will make friends in heaven of those whose dreams are similar to our own.

Sebold puts it this way: "To me, our versions of heaven - all our versions - are as real as anywhere here on Earth because they inform how we live and breathe every day." She has taken as her subject matter probably the worst thing a family could face, and yet this isn't a grim or melancholic book. It is, however, lingeringly emotional, which is a tribute to the quality of Sebold's writing. We experience something of the desolation of loss, of lives shattered, and from that dark place travel 10 years towards a sense of hopefulness. Happiness and thankfulness exist in the world alongside sorrow and loss, we learn.

Seriously weird in places, funny at times, and always with great emotional authenticity, The Lovely Bones travels through tough reality armed with a sense of the miraculous. It's a journey well worth making.

Little, Brown

$37.95