“The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold
Synopsis
The novel follows 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who, on December 6th 1973, is brutally raped, murdered and dismembered by a neighbour, George Harvey, on her way home from school. As her spirit flees the earth to her own personal heaven, it touches Ruth Connors, a girl in Susie’s year, and this initiates a connection between the two girls.
In her heaven, Susie meets Holly, whom she befriends, and Franny, a woman who used to work for social services and acts as their counsellor in heaven. Whilst in heaven, Susie also meets George Harvey’s other victims.
After her death, Susie watches over her family and friends from her own personal heaven, seeing how their grief affects each of their lives as she herself comes to terms with her death, experiencing hope and longing for things she sees others doing but that she herself missed out on.
Susie watches as her mother and father grow distant, her father desperate to catch her murderer whilst her mother is unable to cope, starting an affair before leaving home for eight years. Her sister Lindsey grows up, experiencing everything Susie longed to whilst trying to help her father prove Mr Harvey’s guilt, eventually marrying her boyfriend and giving birth to a baby girl, Abigail Suzanne, named after both Susie and her mother. Buckley, ten years younger than Susie, grows up coping with a family grieving for a sister he can barely remember, whilst watching his father’s health decline, and becoming bitter due to his mother’s absence throughout his childhood.
Mr Harvey returns to the area years later, and drives to the sinkhole in which he dumped Susie’s body, chopped up and locked in a safe. Ruth Connors is there, stood with Ray Singh – a boy who wrote Susie a love note on the day of her death – and Ruth, due to her connection with Susie, senses the women he has killed and is overcome. Briefly, she and Susie switch places, and Ray senses this. Susie finally makes love to Ray, and afterwards must return to her heaven, which is now much larger.
When sufficient evidence emerges that links George Harvey not only to Susie’s murder but to the killing of a number of other girls, he flees the area, and is never found by the authorities. Whilst stalking another young girl in New Hampshire, an icicle falls from a tree onto his shoulder, and he is knocked off balance, falling down a steep slope to his death, where his snow covered body will later be discovered.
Characters
Susie Salmon: a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in the beginning of the novel, and who has always harboured a dream of becoming a wildlife photographer.
Lindsey Salmon: Susie’s younger sister and a talented athlete who through school joins the boys track team. Lindsey tries to help her father investigate Mr Harvey.
Jack Salmon: Susie’s father who, after her death, is consumed by guilt at having been unable to save his daughter.
Abigail Salmon: Susie’s mother, who starts an affair with Len Fenerman, the detective on Susie’s case, and who later leaves her home only to return eight years later.
Buckley Salmon: Susie’s youngest sibling whose unexpected birth came ten years after Susie’s, ending Abigail’s dreams of teaching. He occasionally sees Susie after her death.
Grandma Lynn: Abigail’s mother, an eccentric alcoholic who comes to stay after Abigail leaves to help Jack in raising Lindsey and Buckley.
George Harvey: a single man living alone, one of the Salmon’s neighbours and Susie’s killer.
Ruth Connors: a girl from school that Susie has a connection with after her spirit brushed her as she left earth.
Ray Singh: an Indian boy who wrote Susie a love note on the day of her death, that she never had a chance to read.
Len Fenerman: the detective assigned to Susie’s case. His young wife committed suicide, and he starts an affair with Abigail Salmon.
Samuel Heckler: Lindsey’s boyfriend, who she later marries.
Holly: Susie’s best friend in heaven.
Franny: Susie and Holly’s mentor in heaven.
Themes
The main identity-related theme in “The Lovely Bones” is looking at how we impact upon the lives of others, and who we are to them. In the novel, Susie watches down on her family and friends from heaven, seeing how she, and her death, affects them.
An important quotation on this comes from the novels conclusion, and also gives the novel its title:
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.” (pg. 320)
A number of aspects of the story tie into this theme, for example:
· Susie, a budding photographer, was given a camera for her birthday, and the first picture she took was a candid shot of her mother. This photo captured her mother as a woman, rather than a mother and wife, showing Susie a side of her mother she had never really thought of before. We are different things to different people, depending on what we mean to them and how we enter their lives – Susie discovered this through her mother.
· Building ships in bottles was a hobby Susie shared with her father, a hobby he himself shared with his father but that would forever “hold an echo of me [Susie]”. After her death, Susie watches her father smash every bottle in his den (a physical manifestation of his grief over losing his eldest child and the emotional detachment of his wife), and Susie appears to him in every shard of glass – this can be taken metaphorically, as each bottle represents Susie and the years of love and care they spent over a shared hobby.
· Susie was Ray’s first love - he later sees her in Ruth Connors, and in making love to Ruth he believes he is making love to Susie, a belief he holds with him through the rest of his life, despite studying science and becoming a doctor.
Racial Identity: - Ray Singh, an Indian boy that wrote Susie a love note on the day of her death, is the police’s first suspect – the novel is set in America in 1973, and as a foreigner Ray is socially isolated, with locals and local law enforcement seeing him as a viable suspect for Susie’s murder.
Sexual Identity: - Susie never reaches sexual maturity whilst alive, and is brutally raped before being killed. One of her main regrets is never having had a relationship – as she watches her little sister grow up, she sees her lose her virginity at the same age Susie was when she died, in a situation painfully romantic in comparison to how Susie lost her virginity. Samuel is holding Lindsey after they find that their summer camp project is based on how to commit the perfect murder, and he pulls her closer to protect her from the rain as they lay beneath an upturned derelict boat. Lindsey and Samuel retain their relationship and end up getting married, starting a family as idyllic as the one Lindsey lost when Susie died, even giving her daughter the middle name Suzanne in Susie’s memory. Susie grows up through living through her sister, watching her experience everything that Susie didn’t get a chance to.
In addition to this, Ruth Connors struggles with her own sexual identity, which she begins to question in response to her “crushes on female teacher or her cousin”.
Personal Identity: - Lindsey in particular struggles with her personal identity after Susie’s death, as she becomes known not as Lindsey but as “the dead girls sister” by almost everyone. – “people looked at Lindsey and imagined a girl covered in blood”.
Susie also struggles to come to terms with the reality of her death. Susie’s heaven is a manifestation of her hopes and desires, and in her heaven if she wants something, she will have it, provided she understands exactly why she wants it.
Susie died very young, and feels she has missed out on many of the experiences she wanted to have in life – falling in love, having a career, etc. This could be what is holding her in her heaven, preventing her from moving on – after she makes love to Ray Singh through Ruth’s body, her heaven grows, allowing her to move on, and from that point on she less frequently looks down on earth, as she is more content with where she is.
Religious/Spiritual Identity: - When Susie dies, Ruth sees her spirit, and develops a connection with her. For the rest of her life, Ruth explores the idea of the existence of spirits, writing poetry on the topic. Throughout her entire life Ruth never forgot that she saw Susie’s spirit, despite other’s believing it impossible.
Ray Singh also holds a belief in spirits after he makes love to Ruth, as both he and Ruth are certain that it was Susie he really made love to. Ray goes on to study medicine, and even though he throws himself into the rational world of science he retains that belief:
“he [Ray] had more and more moments he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were serious scientists and surgeons who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the result of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me.” (pg. 325)
