It was kind of like a Christmas card to the reader, I couldn't believe it.Īfter the series of false endings, because she had no idea how to end it, she suddenly just wishes us all well for the rest of our lives. The last line of the book, in that sense, is just unbelievable. However bad your death is, however revolting it is, you will go to this heaven and everything will be fantastic, everything ends lovely.
I mean, after the now legendary opening line, which suggests we are having literature, we are quickly into a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull book about recovery, and within that, you know, the instant kind of feeling there is a heaven, everything's going to be OK. You would imagine if there is a God in heaven, he does have a long, white fluffy beard. It doesn't seem a particularly rigorous heaven, it's quite a light, obvious heaven. Paul Morley, it struck me about this that if you asked cardinals, bishops, archbishops, they'd say the question that is hardest is when people ask what is heaven actually like, to explain the rules of it, the physics. So it turns into this incredibly candy-floss read, very, very sugary which is something you don't expect to say when you open the book and first start reading it. What she does is provide these incredible consolations, which is that when somebody has died, they can still be around, they can still pop into their memorial service and check out what people are wearing.Įven though this girl's only sexual experience was being raped when she died, in fact she can return and lose her virginity beautifully with this guy who loved and was faithful to her memory forever. It's surrounded by this kind of rosy haze.Īt first you think, yes, Sebold is really going to confront the reality of loss and death, but she doesn't at all.
At first, when I opened the book, I thought what an incredibly daring device to have a 14-year-old dead girl narrate a novel and what an explosive way to begin with her murder and her rape, but then the book completely changed.Īll that force and explosive energy was utterly dissipated, because the whole device of having this dead girl narrate actually made the book so much more bland and cosier than I expected because she is only 14 and she stays at that level, and she loves everybody that she's left behind on earth. Does that tell us about the book or about American culture?Ī bit about both I think. Natasha Walter, this has sold at an astonishing rate for a first novel in America.
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