*Ahem* You’ll have to forgive me for that one, I just couldn’t resist. All abysmal jokes aside, I decided that the only way to catch up with my reviewing was to pop a couple of books into each post until I’m caught up, and the two books that immediately jumped out at me were The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, and Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger; not only do both books feature dead people as central characters, but, to me, they also had a similar kind of feeling about them, too. So, onto The Lovely Bones first.
So, I’ve always been wary of the pod-people-like effect that seems to go hand in hand with bestselling books like The Lovely Bones, where seemingly everyone on the planet is reading the same book, and praising it to the sky. I rarely find that those books live up to my expectations, and, if I do want to read a bestseller, I usually wait at least a couple of years; which brings me to Alice Sebold’s novel. In case I’m not the last person on the planet to read the book, The Lovely Bones is narrated by Susie Salmon, a girl who was raped and murdered at the age of fourteen, and tells the story of her afterlife in heaven, where she watches over her family as they slowly fall apart. It’s not a whodunnit, as you know who killed Susie almost straight away. Instead, it charts the effect of Susie’s death on those she left behind.
There probably isn’t a lot more that I can say about this book that hasn’t been said hundreds of times before, but, personally, I enjoyed the book. I will admit that, on occasion, I found Susie a little annoying, and the ending, for me, wasn’t exactly brilliant, but the writing was lovely, the characterisation was brilliant, and the book was certainly emotionally charged. I’m glad, nevertheless, that I left it a few years before I read the book, as I think I would have found the book slightly disappointing if I had read it while all of the hype was still going on. While The Lovely Bones probably won’t make it onto my ‘best reads of the year’ list, and I can’t really see myself rereading it, it was an easy summer read, despite the subject matter, which was great when I was going through a patch of literary laziness and didn’t feel like reading anything that would tax my brain.
Her Fearful Symmetry, compared with The Lovely Bones, is a much more complex book, and, I have to say, I enjoyed it more because of that. I have to confess, I haven’t read The Time Traveller’s Wife, although I have a copy knocking about somewhere, but I loved Niffenegger’s “novel in pictures”, The Three Incestuous Sisters (which isn’t about incest, just so you know), and I thought that Her Fearful Symmetry sounded like it was in a similar vein, which it is.
The novel is actually composed of interweaving narrative threads, but the central story concerns Julia and Valentina, a pair of American “mirror-twins”, who inherit a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery from an aunt, Elspeth, whom they never knew they had, and from that point on their lives interweave with those of Robert, Elspeth’s lover, and Martin, the crossword setter who lives in the flat upstairs, confined by his severe OCD, and whose wife has left him, unable to bear living with his illness anymore. The twins see their move to London as a chance to gain their independence, and start living separate lives, but they face several problems, not least of which is that Elspeth hasn’t quite moved on, and is, in fact, spending her afterlife in the flat with the girls. Things get ever more complicated, until the novel comes to a surprising, beautiful and poignant end.
There are quite a few twists in this one, and while everyone would probably pick up on a few, I think it is fair to say that there will always be a few surprises; it is a testament to Niffenegger’s skill in handling her characters that none of these plot twists, when they come, seem out of place, no matter how surprising. Her Fearful Symmetry, then, is a deftly plotted, intricately woven piece of fiction, which is not only a highly interesting read, but is also beautifully written, perfectly paced, and incredibly moving. I loved it as soon as I finished the book, but over the next few days snippets of the book kept coming back to me, and I love it even more now, if that’s possible, than I did when I first finished the book. I can’t say for definite that I will read any more of Alice Sebold’s work, and I don’t know if I will read The Time Traveller’s Wife any time soon, but I am really looking forward to Niffenegger’s third book, which looks incredibly interesting too, and I would be happy to recommend both books to anyone who thinks they sound even remotely interesting.