Social media has its vices, but it also helps me discover books I wouldn’t otherwise have picked up. This was one such book. Had I not seen others falling in love with this story I might have avoided it for fear I wasn’t emotionally resilient enough for its subject matter, but in fact I found it shored me up far more than it broke me down.
There aren’t many thing I specifically avoid when reading. I know that I don’t handle tension well, so horror, thriller and crime are mostly, usually, out. And I have small children and anxiety, so things featuring child death are usually off-limits for me. Why give my brain more imaginative ammunition to keep me awake with? Which is why usually I might have avoided this book, as it deals very directly with the aftermath of an event which caused mass child death, the Aberfan disaster. But the reviews I was seeing on Twitter were all about how uplifting a read it was. I’m so relieved to have listened, because it’s an absolutely beautiful book.
William is a newly qualified mortician when a call goes out about Aberfan – volunteers are needed. He goes. The book begins with his experience of the disaster, and then unspools forward and back to explore how he came to that moment, that decision, and also what consequences the choice will have on the rest of his life.
Jo Browning Wroe has an incredibly delicate touch for this very sensitive topic, an absolutely assured knack for finding the heart and the humanity in impossibly sad situations. The lightness of the prose led me right into the story until I forgot I was reading. The whole story is saturated in remarkable empathy for its characters, which allows you to understand them far better than if you met them in real life. The book vibrates with compassion for the difficulties of being a person – of loving and losing and trying to carry on.
I am always drawn to books about death and mortality, but as I said I was nervous about a book grappling with the mortality of children; with the bereavement of parents, siblings, families and communities. It touches on many types of loss, in all the overlapping and tangled ways they can disturb a life and change its course, be they suffered unwittingly or self inflicted, and it manages to never blame its characters for the hard choices they make in bad circumstances.
Before reading I had no idea there were LGBT themes in this book, but I loved that the story touches on gay love and life in the 1950s and 60s, and the difficulties and beauty of that. The representation of queer love quietly existing before it could be openly acknowledged was beautiful as well as deeply sad.
The early storylines focus on William’s time as a chorister – as someone who loves but doesn’t know very much about music I really enjoyed these sections. Browning Wroe writes about music wonderfully and expresses the creative thrill of singing exquisitely.
More than anything, this is a book about love. Love for the dead, love between young and old, love within a community, love between parent and child, love between spouses and families and how different families get to show and experience that. It is about death and it is about life. It is about the miracle and terror of caring for other humans, and it’s about why our hearts are worth risking for what we gain.
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