Doubting the Salmon

Just as I know that there are perfectly decent, civil, reasonable people with whom I’m never really going to get on, let alone be friends, so I’m also aware that there are well-written, thoughtful, accomplished books that just aren’t going to do it for me. Human personalities are so bafflingly complex and mutable that it’s virtually impossible to work out why two people do or don’t hit it off; at least with the average book the text is fixed and subject to analysis.

I first started hearing rave reviews of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones some time in the middle of the last decade: one writer who I’d always sort of respected admitted to being reduced to tears by the conclusion. When Peter Jackson’s film adaptation came out a few years ago (haven’t seen it, by the way), I recall a few reviews along the lines of ‘such a disappointment, the book was so perfect.’ So when I was given a copy (fallout from a bad-tempered Secret Santa-related dispute at somewhere I don’t even work – I’m not completely sure I understand all the details myself) I had fairly high expectations.

What kind of book is this? Ultimately a fantasy, I suppose, but this is to some extent debatable. Susie Salmon, a thirteen-year-old girl, is raped and murdered by a sociopathic neighbour, who disposes of her body and is never seriously suspected. The manner of her death, not least the lack of a body, traumatises her entire family. Her father becomes obsessed with finding the killer, driving away her mother, who has an affair with the investigating detective and then leaves entirely. Her brother and sister also have to cope with the effects on their own  family relationships.

Immensely grim as all this sounds, the distinctive thing about the book – well, one of them – is that it is narrated by Susie herself. Susie is up in heaven watching over her family, and recounts their various experiences in what is really some of the most self-consciously pretty prose I can remember reading.

And this is really my problem with the book: the big whack of cognitive dissonance inside my head when the style of the thing jars so obviously with the subject matter. I suppose there may also be issues with the way that Sebold’s approach allows her to basically write in an omniscient third-person style, which is not exactly common these days, but less so than the style mismatch. Sebold’s use of artful, delicate prose to describe ugly, brutal acts just kicked me out of the story right from the start.

Even when this is less of a problem (the narrative is addressing a small, precious moment of adolescence) the arteries of the prose are too narrow to allow any real emotion through. I came away thinking ‘wow, the writing is really precise’ rather than caring very much about the story. And that’s when I wasn’t having to stop and re-read a particularly fancy passage to figure out what it actually meant – ‘Back and forth, a crazy schizoid solace they’d create.’ Er – yeah. Right. Elsewhere the writing gets so delicate it can actually be confusing – ‘I held that part of him that Mr Harvey had forced inside me.’ In context it’s clear what’s actually going on, but it still jumps out at you as oddly phrased.

To be honest, it probably helps in getting this book if you’re a parent, or a teenage girl, or a sensitive type – or just not a high-function psycho, anyway. Reading about earlier plans for an movie version, I was interested to hear Lynne Ramsay’s take on the story, and found myself agreeing – ‘I really didn’t like the My Little Pony, she’s in heaven, everything’s okay aspect.’ Beneath all the cool, carefully crafted prose, this is in many ways a terribly sentimental, almost schmaltzy story that doesn’t do much more with the topic of bereavement than tell people what they want to hear.

Apart from this, though, some parts of the book are effective – I caught a distinct echo of Stephen King in the deftly-evoked picture of small-town life and the serial-killer elements of the story. And it’s not exactly a grind to read – the prose manages to be thoughtful without being dense or heavy. But we never really hit it off: one of us in this relationship was too chilly and detached and concerned with our own poise and cleverness for the whole thing to work. Maybe it was me. And maybe it wasn’t.