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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.
A Terrible Kindness is sentimental to many a fault. In the Aberfan sections alone, its approach doesn’t seem out of place: the bereaved parents are true pictures of grief, and later, the words on their children’s graves have a plaintive naïveté. But away from there, in Cambridge or London, this Faber “lead debut” reads like average young-adult fare. What happened in the Welsh valleys that year is enraging, compelling, haunting – for a storyteller, the works. The great Aberfan novel, however, is apparently yet to come.
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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. And as his feet fix ever more firmly into that concrete, it is then that the true concepts of family and friendship make themselves known to him. I may have made the book sound a difficult read; in fact, it’s anything but. I was completely engrossed and always wanted to read just a bit more. Wroe’s prose (in the present tense) is poised and unobtrusively brilliant, I think, so that everything from the strongest emotions to the feel of Cambridge in the early 70s (and I was there, so I know) is excellently but quietly done. William decides he must act, so he stands and volunteers to attend. It will be his first job as an embalmer, and it will be one he never forgets.
There is no question that Jo Browning Wroe who, at age 58, has written her first novel (as a woman of a certain age, I love when that happens!) has writing chops. Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived their childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. In researching my book about the Aberfan disaster, when a coal waste tip slid down a mountain on to a small village primary school, I read about the embalmers arriving in the early hours to prepare the bodies for identification, then for presentation in their coffins before burial. It felt natural for me to find out more, to talk to embalmers, hear their stories, watch them at work. There was a palpable sense of homecoming in it. Their manner, their humour, their deep respect for the dead and their loved ones felt incredibly familiar. The 1966 disaster claimed the lives of 116 children and 28 adults, a trauma that reverberated down the generations. Browning Wroe says she was very conscious of achieving the right tone in the book, given the subject matter. 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 Mark asked, ‘William, as a 19-year-old, learns lots about embalming, and he becomes very, very good at it. It's a gruesome business though. How did you learn all that you needed to know about embalming in the 60s and 70s?’
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A beautiful and tender book that I did have a connection with (my dad’s family were miners in a village close to Aberfan). The scenes after the horrible event in Aberfan were so powerful, moving and poignant (I did shed a tear). It was possible to imagine what was happening as the writing was so descriptive, I felt that I was transported into the village. But despite the dark opening chapters the author manages to present such an enlightening and insightful view of kindness and humanity. The central character William is beautifully created and is so believable. Despite the bleakness and sadness central to the story there is a message of hope that really stayed with me. This is essentially a very relevant book with much to think about – essentially how broken communities heal. During recent times this really puts into perspective how events can shape us. There are just so many themes and discussion points that would have such a universal appeal.” About the author
It was never about me wanting to try and imagine what it was like to be in Aberfan. It was about the idea of your job involving heroic acts of kindness and what that leaves you with,” she says. “Most of us spend our whole time ignoring the inevitability of our death but certain people, like embalmers, have to face it again and again. There is a price to pay, there is a lot of mental health issues and depression amongst this professional community.” It will be William’s first job as an embalmer and what he experiences over the next few nights in the makeshift mortuary in Aberfan, re-awakens memories of his own childhood trauma. As he tends gently to the bodies of small children dug out from the slurry and witnesses their parent’s grief, “the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief.” Family plays a huge part in this story, the dynamics of relationships, love, death and acceptance. It has it all and with such powerful writing that every person feels real. Every event affected me. This story isn’t just memorable. It is unforgettable. It is perfection.
But as the guests sip their drinks and smoke their post-dinner cigarettes a telegram delivers news of a tragedy. An event so terrible it will shake the nation. It is October 1966 and a landslide at a coal mine has buried a school: Aberfan. I was constantly surprised by how much I cared about the characters in A Terrible Kindness, even when they made difficult decisions. Approaching Aberfan the day after the disaster, 19-year-old William Lavery, a newly qualified embalmer, felt exhilarated, excited even, that he was about to do a good thing. With skills gained (with distinction) from his recent training and from teenage years of apprenticeship in the family business, he believed he was perfectly prepared. Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with the opportunity to read an ARC of this very special book.
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.’
Throughout the book we’re given hints that some calamity befell William when he was a boy, causing him to leave Cambridge abruptly without completing a coveted scholarship scholarship at a university choir school . It’s not until the final chapters do we learn what happened, and why this has caused William so much anguish over the years. I absolutely adored this stunning book! It was only recently that I had even heard of the Aberfan tradegy, so when I read the blurb I was very intrigued to read this novel.
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