I honestly don’t know what this book is supposed to be about. On the surface, it should be obvious: a fourteen-year-old girl is raped and murdered by the local serial killer/pedophile; her family deal with their grief while trying to solve her murder; she finds various ways to contact them from the afterlife. What I mean is that I’m not sure what the author intended in terms of themes, messages, and the overall purpose of the text. Is the message that our loved ones are always there, even after death? I suppose that’s heartwarming, but in itself doesn’t really say much, and won’t correspond to most people’s experiences of bereavement unless you’ve had an experience much like the ones depicted in the book. There was no apparent ‘point’ to the novel along the way, and where I was hoping the ending would illuminate this, it only baffled me more.

I don’t think the plot was the problem here. One could criticise the fact that very little actually happens excepting the very beginning and the very end, but there’s nothing wrong with a more contemplative, psychological study of a book — it’s what best reflects the strengths of the medium, after all. There are plenty of books I love that are not at all plot-driven, or that don’t really have a plot at all: subject matter is what makes me pick a book up. However, if you are going to have an effectively plotless novel, you need to make up the substance in some other way. The initial description of Susie’s ordeal immediately before her death is written better than the rest of the novel, but in the end represents a false promise, and led to my feeling increasingly frustrated as the novel went on and failed to meet the same standard in either story or writing. The Lovely Bones feels like one of those bestsellers in which the first few pages are finely tuned enough that people who pick it up in a shop (or read the extract on Amazon) are compelled enough to buy it, but little to no scrutiny is applied by editor to the other 99% of the book. Alice Sebold seems to be a competent enough writer — enough that I could believe that this book was published and found an audience, at least — but her presentation of the material remained generic and paint-by-numbers for the genre, and nothing stood out here in a way that could justify the emptiness of other aspects.

On the other hand, the vacuousness and lack of purpose of the whole text was, unfortunately, far from the only thing that bothered me. Beyond the unsolved mystery of the moral/message/purpose of the book as a whole, there are many smaller question marks down the novel’s path. None of the characters are well or complexly rendered, and all feel very much like ‘types’, including Susie herself. I was particularly baffled by the way Ray Singh, a boy Susie was very briefly involved with not long before her death was treated like her one true love. I’m not sure it would even be accurate to say they ‘dated’; at best they had a brief fling, yet her encounter with him is treated as on par with her relationships with her best friend and her immediate family. I understand that, much like her going to a high school in the afterlife, it represents something that Susie wasn’t able to fulfil because her life was cut short, but there was no reason to romanticise this aspect of her life when she died at an age when serious romances rarely take place and other more established relationships in her life could have been explored to better effect.

The spiritual aspect of the book is the most obvious place to look for deeper significance, but felt internally inconsistent. The nature of the ‘in between’ is never explained — presumably it’s meant to be limbo, but the other dead people whom Susie meets there seem much more settled than she is, are of a peaceful temperament, and don’t have anything apparently keeping them in a state closer to Earth. The ‘in between’ must be in between the world of the living and the afterlife proper, but Susie refers to it repeatedly as ‘[her] Heaven’, perhaps because at that time she isn’t aware of the Heaven beyond that. Nor is this made much clearer by the end, where the messaging is mismatched with the rest of the narrative:

Spoiler

if Susie is in the ‘wide, wide Heaven’ at the end, i.e. somewhere different from ‘her’ Heaven/the ‘in between’, this presumably means she’s moved on to a more permanent resting place, but at the end she tells us that spirits are still ‘among us’ at a point in the narrative where that surely no longer applies

. Maintaining ambiguity and mystery with such a topic is one thing, but the ‘telling’ is never consistent with the ‘showing’. On another point which may or may not be relevant, I’m also not sure what to make of the continued emphasis on the protagonist’s surname, ‘Salmon, like the fish’, which is given in the first line and repeatedly emphasised throughout the book. Is she caught like a salmon? Could it be a reference to the Christian fish symbol — is she a perfect, untainted sacrifice like Christ? If elements like this are meant to illuminate the spiritual themes, it is never really clear what the connection is.

Beyond the thematic weaknesses, the ending as a whole was bizarre and disturbing. The implications of it are horrifying once you give it any thought.

Spoiler

Susie returns briefly to the world of the living, possesses her friend’s body, and has sex with a boy she was briefly involved with before she died. Keep in mind that Susie herself is still (for all intents and purposes) fourteen, since she is dead and therefore cannot age and mature, while Ray is now college-aged and so presumably in his early twenties. Furthermore, she is possessing her friend’s body and using it to have sex — is this not technically rape? I actually liked seeing Susie live vicariously through her friend’s experience as she grows up and has relationships, but the ending makes this disturbing in hindsight. The villain of the piece dies in the most ridiculous way imaginable (getting hit by an icicle, which is perhaps implied to be Susie’s doing, and then being knocked out, falling, and getting buried under snow and ice). The charm bracelet, which neither plays a major role in the plot nor as any kind of literary device, turns up again, perhaps to demonstrate that Susie’s physical remnants are still around but again is inconsistent with the idea that she is supposed to have moved on, nor do I understand why it features on the cover. The bracelet is also on the cover for some reason but never gains any special significance in the text. On a similar note, we have an excruciating ‘roll credits’ moment when the narrator, really in the author’s voice, explains the meaning of the title in a way that makes no sense at all: Susie’s family are apparently the ‘lovely bones’ which she left behind? This metaphor is unworkable, since bones don’t grow and change like people do, being only the lifeless refuse of a living thing

. I was hoping the ending would justify and contextualise the book as a whole as endings are sometimes capable of doing, but in fact it made me regard the book as a whole with much more derision. Overall I would say that The Lovely Bones has a decent beginning, a pretty vacuous middle, and a truly terrible ending.

I try to think deeply about everything I read, but I’m convinced that there just isn’t all that much to think deeply about here. I realise this review might seem overly harsh, but this is my first one-star review in years (the last was The Alchemist, an audiobook so bad even Jeremy Irons couldn’t save it), so I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. Perhaps this book could help someone going through a bereavement, and I don’t want to be unfair to those who might find value in the story for that, but there are certainly better books on the subject. Even Hereditary is a more thoughtful and sensitive take on the subject in my view, and it’s a horror film. My core question remains simply “Why does this book exist?”, which sounds harsher than I mean it to, but there’s nothing in it — not plot, not writing, not examination of themes — that justifies its existence or the time it takes to read it.