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freshly graduated … with top marks for every piece of practical and written work, William looks at what’s left of the little girl who he’s just found out is called Valerie, and realises none of it counts for anything, not a thing, unless here and now he can do his job and prepare this child’s broken body for her parents, who are right now standing on the wet pavement behind.
A Terrible Kindness | Faber A Terrible Kindness | Faber
A Terrible Kindness is a novel about grief and forgiveness; of misplaced love and decisions that have long-lasting consequences. It’s strong on setting and the portrayal of anguish. The scenes in Aberfan are handled particularly well; portraying the immensity of the task faced by the volunteer embalmers as they wrestled to maintain professionalism in the face of unbelievable tragedy. What we discover is a tale of a childhood blighted by the death of his father when he was eight years old. William’s mother is determined that her son will not get caught up in the family’s undertaking business but instead will pursue a career in music. But her plans are thrown into chaos and the relationship with Williams is destroyed because she cannot overcome her jealousy over the boy’s relationship with two other people, her dead husband’s twin brother Robert and Robert’s partner Howard. My father died nearly 40 years after we left the crematorium. Despite a lifelong career in the funeral industry, he refused to contemplate his own death and, even as a frail, elderly man, made no end-of-life plans. But there was never any question that he would be cremated, the means of disposal he had championed as the modern, clean, civilised option . For years I viewed burial as old-fashioned, unsophisticated, unsustainable. Today, the green burial movement offers a simpler, more environmentally friendly approach; many choose willow or cardboard coffins over the expensive treated wooden ones. My husband and I have already chosen the green burial ground we will be buried in – something my younger self would have been surprised at. But when it came to my father, cremation and a heavy, lacquered coffin seemed the only way to go, with his ashes being scattered in the crematorium grounds of which he had been so proud. These chapters could so easily have been either mawkishly sentimental or too graphic but I thought Wroe skillfully avoided both traps. Yes there are descriptions of the practices followed by an embalmer, but they are not gratuitously detailed. Nor are there explicit details of the injuries suffered by the children. What we do get is a deep sense of the sensitivity, almost reverence, shown with the arrival of each small frame. What if he’d chosen differently? What if all that had happened could have made him a bigger person? If each disaster had been a crossroads at which he could have taken a better path? It’s too painful to dwell on.”But the parents of surviving children felt survivor guilt. They kept their kids inside as much as they could. And the kids grew up with survivor guilt too. William does not hesitate. A passionate kiss from the student nurse who has captured his heart sends him off on this mercy mission. But William has no idea what the long-ranging effects of this charitable act will be. This book drew me in straightaway and I consumed it in a couple of days. The story is not a happy one as it begins with the Aberfan disaster and follows a young embalmer called William who volunteered to help identify and clean up the young children that lost their lives. We then hear the story of William’s life as to how he got to be an embalmer and then up to and after Aberfan and how that affected his life. The author has based her story on fact, wanting to highlight the unsung heroes of that terrible time, the embalmers who went to help out. The story is handled with compassion and what comes out of it other than how events can impact your future decisions is an overwhelming sense of hope and that things can get better. It’s a story written to be read and to linger with you after it is finished. It has lots to offer a book group with many discussion points and a wide appeal.” In the final third of the book a series of set piece scenes and important conversations cause William to come to terms with the hurt in his life, his anger and guilt and to start to forgive himself and others and seek to repair and heal his various broken relationships. Some of the scenes either slightly strain credibility or seem to involve perhaps rather too much coincidence but there is no doubt that they are powerful in their impact and in their message: there is a particularly clever scene I felt when Robert uses the recording of Miserere to convey his understanding of the hurt he has caused to his mother as well as I think starting to understand the need to forgive; and later a very powerful one in Aberfan when he realises that he does not have to stay trapped in his memories. whilst his mum summed it up with ‘What a terrible mess we can make of our lives. There should be angel police to stop us at these dangerous moments, but there don’t seem to be. So all we’re left with, my precious son, is whether we can forgive, be forgiven, and keep trying our best.’
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Goodreads A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | Goodreads
And this article by the author some six years ago gives an excellent introduction to the author’s research and her views that the embalmers were unsung heroes of the aftermath How then, after four years as a lauded Cambridge chorister, did his career path change so radically? How could he be estranged from his beloved mother and not have sung a single note in five years? Of course, everyone needs distance to appreciate the quirks and oddities of their particular childhood. My father was the superintendent of a Birmingham city council crematorium, and the job came with a small house set within the grounds. From our kitchen window we could see the wrought iron gates through which the funeral processions came every 20 minutes and rolled past our window. It was all I knew. It was normal. Nevertheless, I think I was slower than I could have been to realise just how unusual it was to have spent my formative years in such an environment and to consider how it shaped the person and writer I became. A Terrible Kindness is a moving literary fiction novel, about the impact working as a volunteer embalmer in the aftermath of the real-life 1966 Aberfan disaster has on the life of a young man and his family. Definitely not my usual kind of read, I got this from Book Club, and didn’t really know what to expect going in. I enjoyed some parts more than others, and struggled to reconcile William’s adult character with the thoughtful boy portrayed in the first half.I would also recommend this recording of Allegri’s Miserere which is crucial to the plot of the book as well as its themes – listen in particular to the tenor solo at for example 1:30
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review - The Guardian
We had no neighbours, no nearby friends to play with. It wasn’t until I started infant school, three miles away, quite unprepared and astounded at the vast number of children in one place, that I began to learn how to mix with others. It was an undeniably lonely and isolated early childhood. But I appreciate, now, how much solitude was a key nutrient in my compost. There was nothing to do except watch everyone and everything closely, and develop an imaginative inner world. This constant attentiveness not only saved me from death by boredom, but gave me a keen eye for detail and a certain self-sufficiency. When a girl in my class was killed on a busy road and came to our crem, I felt a strange, fierce ownership of the tragedy This approach helps William make his decisions in life – if this, then that – and seems to work well for him as his moral compass, until his self-discipline slips to self-indulgence and then self-loathing. I would recommend this book to all - although it is historical fiction I believe it would suit those who prefer a more contemporary read too.Aberfan is a story that Britain will, and should, find difficult to forget. A natural disaster, caused by official negligence, that took 116 children’s lives; photographs of the giant spoil-tip that swept through a Welsh primary school; schoolgirls praying on the ruins as men dug towards classmates entombed below. This wasn’t a bad book by any means. It’s a nicely written, easy enough read. After a great opening though, it lost pace and plodded along. Supporting these are friends and family whose patience, acceptance, devotion and love may be unremarked upon but is ever-present. Eyes may well up and throats may clog with emotion in later scenes: only the hard of heard will fail to be moved and uplifted by this exceptional debut novel.
A Terrible Kindness book review: character-driven drama, post A Terrible Kindness book review: character-driven drama, post
Prize Co-winners: Ravenous Girls (2023) by Rebecca Burton and Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (2023) by KimKelly William decides he must act, so he stands and volunteers to attend. It will be his first job, and will be – although he’s yet to know it – a choice that threatens to sacrifice his own happiness. His work that night will force him to think about the little boy he was, and the losses he has worked so hard to bury. But compassion can have surprising consequences, because – as William discovers – giving so much to others can sometimes help us heal ourselves. Selection panel reviewI didn’t fully buy into the premise of the book about the source of William’s inability to deal with his emotions. The narrative puts it down to one event that occurred when he was about 14 years. Certainly it would have been a distressing incident for a young, impressionable boy but it didn’t seem realistic to me that it was so traumatic that it caused him to stop singing entirely. The Aberfan passages, opening and closing the book, let the tragedy speak for itself: more reportage than invention, they have a hushed effectiveness. The rest of the novel is meagre stuff. Much of it turns on William’s boyhood as a Cambridge chorister, and a mysterious traumatic event. The set-up is familiar, the dialogue is flat and the characters are clichéd. We go from Charles, who arrives at school in a Rolls-Royce and bullies the poorer kids, to Gloria, whose entire personality is “sweetheart”, and whose dreadful treatment by William can only shake, never break, her love. TBH I think that they report that the counsellors are coming for the victims, so that they know they are on the way. We do sometimes hear reports that ‘no one’s come to help’ when in fact they are on the way, they just can’t get there instantly which is what some people expect. (Though who can blame them for being unreasonable, in such circumstances.) More than 100 children and scores of adults, were killed in the disaster, dug out by relatives and volunteers who worked tirelessly for days even when they knew there was no hope.
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