However, despite the questionable prose, I have warm feelings for this book overall. An example is these zoo penguins, apparently ‘like amiable hams but living underwater like tuxedoed muscles.’ Bizarre! This is far from the only example, and there were several sentences that took multiple rereadings before I could make sense of them. Sebold’s prose is not bad, per se, but there are a number of similes that made me do a double take. I think the The Lovely Bones is ultimately about a young girl’s poignant struggle to reclaim herself from a narrative set by her murderer. Sebold has written a world in which Susie, denied her very existence, still has a voice. However, I gradually found myself taking a more sympathetic view, and by the end I saw the book as less of an unusual crime thriller, and more of an offering to the thousands of dead girls, like Susie, whose cases are never solved, or who are so often remembered only as the victims of infamous killers. They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never to be reopened or reread. I was becoming one of the many little-girl-losts. I knew something as I watched: almost everyone was saying goodbye to me. To me it begged one question: why? As a writing choice, why give this girl such a horrible death if her only reaction towards it was going to be lasting ambivalence? Her family would still have had something to mourn had she died through misadventure or illness, so I initially wondered if the shocking violence was nothing but a distasteful hook.
She never seems much bothered, and this detachment is unswaying, leaving little scope for any quantifiable act of ‘moving on’. The oddest thing about this book is Susie’s attitude towards the fact she is dead. Susie watches her family come to terms with the appalling, unresolved circumstances of her death, and makes a kind of peace with herself as she confronts the impossibility of ever bringing her killer to justice. She narrates from the afterlife, where she exists in a tranquil state of limbo. Susie Salmon died aged 14, brutally murdered by a paedophilic rapist. Though in places beautiful, Sebold’s 300 page novel is a strange, disturbing read. Reading it for the first time, almost two decades later, I found it difficult to fathom exactly what the zeitgeist was that this book managed to capture. I remember multiple copies stacked in the library all the way through my time in secondary school. The Lovely Bones was published back in 2002, and surged to huge, lasting popularity.
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