Articles

Reflections on Bryony Lavery’s

 stage adaptation of 

Alice Sebold’s novel

The Lovely Bones¹ started life as a best-selling novel in 2002. There was a film, followed by a stage version which did the rounds in the UK in 2019. I saw it in Chichester. I was drawn to it purely by a professional interest — violence, trauma, loss, bereavement and adjustment — the basic stuff of ministry and all rolled into one.   

When the curtain goes up we have a solitary 14 year-old girl centre-stage. She tells us her name is Susie Salmon. 'Salmon: a small creature in the ocean of life absolutely dependent on the current‘, and proceeds to introduce herself with her favourite quote from a Spanish poet (Juan Ramón Jiménez):

 ‘If they give you ruled paper, write the other way’.

And that is all we we ever know about Susie. Within five minutes she is raped and murdered by a near neighbour. There is no body, the culprit is never found, and the lights go out. 

When they come on we are treated to two hours, watching her close family and friends as they seek to pick up the threads of life, by the end of which we know quite a lot, not because of any further action on Susie’s part, but by sitting in on her impact and the consequences of her death for those who shared her life. 

By an unusual dramatic device, Susie, presumed to be in heaven, is on stage throughout, narrating and commenting on events, which none of the cast can see or hear and with no interaction between the two. Only the audience is privy to both. 

Sebold’s ‘heaven’, however, may be seen as a fair description of Susie’s favourite quote (‘writing the other way’) but that is not sufficiently strong to counter underlying assumptions of the traditional heaven and in the end probably raises more problems that it solves. while running the risk of blurring what she wants to say. My preference therefore is to stay with Susie for ‘writing the other way’ and to replace ‘heaven’ with a variety of synonyms² such as ‘the other side’, ‘Susie’s new abode’ or ‘vantage point’ avoiding The Lovely Bones as a story about heaven in favour of a story of friends and family in the face of violence, trauma, loss, bereavement and adjustment.

My  starting point is the strapline. What does it tell us about Susie? First, it savours more of an adolescent soundbite than a serious conviction. At 14 she could have no real understanding of its implications, and sound though it is it needs years of experience to mature.  Obstreperous youth she may be but she is no Greta Thunberg. We soon discover that her ambition was to be a photographer — notice, an observer rather than an activist — and then of all things, a wild-life photographer — risk and danger, only at a safe distance. Writing ‘the other way’ for Susie is mischievous, but not threatening. A really obstreperous teenager would have torn up the paper. So ‘adolescent soundbite it may be‘ but that is no reason to ignore it.

As the play proceeds, listening carefully and reading between the lines, Susie comes across as a fairly normal teenager: happy, popular, steady boy friend, and everything to look forward to when suddenly she is the victim of utterly mindless, unbelievable and brutal violence. She has done nothing wrong . . . taken no unnecessary risks . . . sent out no unwise messages . . . or given her murderer any encouragement. She was simply walking through a field one afternoon on her way home when she was ambushed, raped and murdered by a local neighbour. 

So what was it about ‘ruled paper’ that grabbed her? An early hint suggests it was frustration with the rigidity of contemporary school life, but was that all, or might her home life have had something to do with it? Take a closer look at the Salmon family.

Until that fateful afternoon the Salmon family seemed just like any other family, but over the next twelve months sharp differences come to light, typified in a single moment when the police tell her parents, Jack and Abigail, they believe she was murdered. Abigail ‘almost nods’. Jack ‘almost shakes his head’, and from that point surface differences reflect deeper tensions, which gradually become cracks to the point where a once happy family becomes dysfunctional.

Jack is a classic case of writing on the lines. A sound family man, steady, dull, quiet and reliable (if unexciting), in a fairly routine job ‘counting numbers for an insurance firm’; everything under control and safe. Two objects in particular define the man.

One, a Snow Globe containing a penguin. When Susie was little he would pick it up, turn it over, let all the snow collect on the bottom, then quickly turn it upside down, and together the two of them would watch the snow fall gently around the penguin. Susie, obviously a social being, worried for the penguin, in there, alone, and when she told her father he said, ‘Don’t worry . . . he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world’. That was Jack: a perfect world where you could only turn things upside down (write the other way) gently, under control and without any external consequences to note.³ 

Two,  a skill learned from his father, making model ships for bottles, all safely stored on a shelf in his den. Susie, the apple of his eye  was First Mate but her sole contribution was to hold the bottle steady wth the ship glued fast to the bottom of the bottle until it was ready to raise the sail and that was Jack’s job.⁴ 

In the current situation Jack is in denial (a widely recognised early stage in bereavement) and in his case frustration (stage 2) followed by anger (stage 3), till the failure of the police to find either a body or a suspect drives him to smash both globe and ships, leaving him in tears with a broken heart, driving police and family to despair and fighting a battle he can never win. In such extremity guilt is often not far behind, and Jack has that too, as when he says to Abigail, ‘I wasn’t there when she needed me’⁵  and after finding a love letter from Ray among Susie’s possessions, says, ‘ I wish I had told her I loved her’.⁶ 

Not surprisingly, suddenly finding herself married to a different Jack, difficult, almost impossible, at her lowest point and with her marriage at breaking point, Abigail describes him as ‘a man frozen in time’ with whom she can no longer live.

Abigail is different, possibly more so than either of them realised when life was less tumultuous. Susie’s key moments with her mother were story time and bath time, with Abigail lost in her story and Susie lost in ‘the soft lullaby of her words’, but Abigail’s life was much more complicated than the family realised. 

First, her home life had been far from happy. She was an only child whose relationships with her mother’ Lynn, were cold and those with her father non-existent. Later, her mother was to admit that she could ‘count on her fingers how many times her tall father had leaned down and kissed her as a child’,⁷ all feelings which Abigail had, no doubt subconsciously, conveyed to Jack and the children, contributing to their view of Lynn as the black sheep.⁸ 

Second, Abigail also carried a burden of guilt, worried that what happened to Susie may be divine punishment because when she was pregnant with Susie she rejected her.

Third, unlike Jack, Abigail knew there was no such thing as a perfectly safe world but until now Jack with his unexciting equanimity, his globe and his boats, had always provided an anchor. With that gone all she had left was her scant diminishing reserves.

So well had Abigail handled these feelings that the rest of the family were totally unaware, though Susie, being Susie, had doubts. She once snapped a photo of her mother caught unaware, ‘looking tired but smiling’, and suddenly saw her as ‘someone mysterious’⁹ leading Susie to treasure that photo as the only one in the family to know her mother like that. 

Suddenly, and without any warning, both Jack and Abigail have a hole in their lives, but handle it very differently. One stayed in, the other went out,¹⁰  but what they do have in common is that they are both ‘ruled paper people’. The family is a ruled paper family which may well explain why Susie fell for that strapline. Ruled paper people are fine as long as the lines are there but when the supply of ruled paper runs out leaving them with with nothing but a blank sheet it is anybody’s guess what will happen. In this case simply the death of Susie would have been enough to cause problems but add in the violence, the trauma, no body, no culprit and no justice and you have a volatile cocktail. 

Neither Jack nor Abigail are ever likely to write ‘across the lines’, but when the only alternative is that blank page Jack will not rest until he gets the lines back in place. Abigail, on the other hand,  whose whole life has been rocky is more ready to accept the reality and move on, till that means encouraging Jack to be more understanding of the police, which Jack instantly sees as the seeds of an affair between Abigail and Len, the policeman. Faced wth violence, trauma, uncertainty and suspicion, Susie’s death has precipitated a radical change in personal relationships. What so recently seemed a perfectly ‘normal’ family is now a family ‘in turmoil’ and on the road to becoming dysfunctional.

One generation down it’s different. For Lindsey, Susie’s sister, younger by one year, Susie’s demise is a double blow. First, a loss of identity. Lindsey is a victim of the Walking Dead Syndrome,¹¹ when people see the Walking Dead in other people. When she walks in her parents see Susie, an impression so powerful that even Lindsey finds herself a victim, avoiding mirrors and showering in the dark. At school she was no longer Lindsey but the sister of the  ‘murdered girl’. At the school camp where she is less well-known she refuses to put her name on her label because her father’s outrageous behaviour in the community has led her to be known as the daughter of a nut case. And well into the story, when her father asks why she doesn’t talk about Susie these days, he gets a dusty answer when she says, ‘Why would anybody want to talk about her. She’s absolutely everywhere‘, and Abigail agrees. 

With a loss of identity goes a loss of role. With Susie alive Lindsey could live in her shadow; with Susie gone, Lindsey finds herself in the front line, and with a difference. For Susie the strapline was little more than a mischievous slogan — Susie was not much of an activist, but Lindsey is. She doesn’t actually have to do anything but by nature Lindsey is a more active and determined nonconformist, and with no Susie she has lost her source of inspiration and sense of balance. So, for example, sharing her father’s commitment to find some evidence to incriminate her murderer by breaking into his home and realising her father will never get round to doing anything about it she takes it on herself to do it. Unphased by her parents’ problems, she breaks with family tradition, responding positively to the unpopular Grandma Lynn’s sheer force of personality, asking her for lessons on make-up. 

The first sign of hope came on the anniversary of Susie’s death. Abigail and Lindsey, unaware of the date, are suddenly surprised to find the local community gathering in the cornfield, carrying candles and singing songs. Jack is there, joining in the singing. ‘Let’s go’, says Lindsey. ‘No’, says Abigail. I don’t believe she’s waiting out there. I don’t think lighting candles and doing all that stuff is honouring her memory. There are other ways to honour it.’  ‘Like  what?’ says Lindsey. ‘Like living’, says Abigail. I just want to live! I want to be more than a mother.’ ‘I understand’, says Lindsey. ‘I want to be more than a girl’.¹² 

Prematurely denied  her adolescent years thrusts Lindsey into adulthood, with a capacity to adjust and find a new life’ She grows up overnight, no longer a girl but a woman, ‘an adult who can take care of herself’¹³, and quickly establishes a serious relationship with Samuel Heckler. So what at first sight seemed like an end (and was) Lindsey turns into a beginning as she assumes her new role, writing across the lines as Susie would have wished.

With Susie irreplaceable, Lindsey finds support of a different kind from a different source in a developing friendship with Susie’s friend, Ruth. Ruth was a fairly recent arrival in the school and she and Susie soon discovered that they had much in common. They were two ‘odd girls’ who seemed born to keep each other company. They were never close¹⁴ and the feelings were not entirely mutual, but if Susie was the advocate of ‘writing across the lines’ Ruth was the practitioner. Ruth’s special interest in early feminist tracts¹⁵ suggested Lesbianism and Susie described her as a misfit — the girl who got chosen next to last in the gym,¹⁶ a floater at the school camp who ‘stood apart from most things‘ and didn’t belong to any one group,¹⁷ a bookworm with an artistic bent who wrote poetry, with a touch of the mystic. ‘Two peas out of one pod’, but complementary not identical. Ruth gave meaning to life and Susie gave inspiration to Ruth, ‘the quietist kind of rebel’,¹⁸  a world in which she could ‘fit’, not ‘misfit; she was 'subversive' in that she did write ‘the other way’ and was ‘more talented than her teachers’. As a duo, they provided that rare cocktail whereby Susie gave Ruth the inspiration to write poetry and Ruth’s poetry had the capacity to bring Susie to life once she was gone. Hence Susie’s comment from the grave, ‘(Ruth) has the power to resurrect me';¹⁹  in other words, ‘to bring me to life’.

In a late night tête-a-tête at the school camp Ruth and Lindsey share their feelings for Susie and develop a warm relationship. Ruth recounts a couple of dreams demonstrating the impact of Susie on her life. In one she describes how she was crossing the faculty parking lot, when suddenly  she saw a pale, female ghost running toward her which then all at once flew up out of the field’ and Susie endorses the closeness of the relationship when she says that on her way out of Earth she touched a girl called Ruth,²⁰ suggesting Ruth was one of her last thoughts as she gave up her life.²¹ Ruth’s mother simply dismissed it as letting her imagination run away with her.

The other dream was a clear case of transposition (and a forerunner of what comes later in an incident with Ray). That time Ruth dreamt she was buried in the cornfield and felt Susie walking all over her. She called out but Susie couldn’t hear. Then she woke up.²²

When she asks Lindsey whether she misses Susie, Lindsey says. ‘More than anyone will ever know’.²³  Such was (no, is) Susie’s impact on Lindsey and Ruth, in death as in life.

The other significant character in Susie’s life, and it is not difficult to see why, was her boyfriend, Ray, also fourteen and recently arrived from India. Coming from a culture which thrives on ‘ruled paper‘ Ray finds Susie’s strapline a breath of fresh air, mainly because it chimes with his reaction to Indian ruled lines but whereas writing across Indian ruled lines was a threat to his way of life, he  finds writing across UK ruled lines faintly amusing.

Ray has a crush on Susie and his feelings are reciprocated. Judging by the fact that at the time of her murder they had not got beyond the thrill of the ‘first kiss’ the relationship appears somewhat tentative but Susie’s death certainly accentuated it. Suddenly finding himself in the firing line as the No 1 suspect must have been a bit a of a shock but what mattered to Ray was not the rape, the violence, the trauma or even the suspicion. It was the thought of life without Susie on the one hand, and continuing life with the Susie he cannot get away from on the other. On the one hand she is dead and gone. On the other she’s everywhere, summed up in his response to her Memorial Service. At fourteen, ill-equipped to handle it, he excuses himself on the grounds that he would prefer to spend the time alone, gazing at a photo she had given him, yet even that proved too much because, as he says, she was not there in the photo but ‘in the air around him’, typifying the enormous impact Susie had made on those closest to her and the difficulty they all experienced coping with that once she was no longer around.²⁴ 

With Susie gone it is hardly surprising that Ray and Ruth make common ground. Ruth assumes Susie’s role, walking to school alone and by the same route. Ray notices, senses her isolation, joins her and the two individuals became a pair. When Ray asks Ruth whether she ever thinks about Susie, Ruth’s reply duplicates the answer she had got from Lindsey to the same question. ‘All the time’²⁵  she says.

Their youth and Ruth’s feminist leanings make it difficult to express the closeness they feel but eventually settle for ‘an experiment’ where they are ‘Just Big Friends'!!!  Ray, on Ruth’s initiative, pretends she is Susie and Ruth similarly goes along with it. How long the relationship lasted is left to our imagination.²⁶  On one view, a very artificial attempt to keep Susie alive, but for Ray yet one more indication that she is far from dead.

By this stage you are probably wondering (as I was) where is it going and how will it end, and the key I found was Grandma Lynn, a tricky customer who gives the impression she has been 'writing the other way’ all her life. I decided this must have been where Susie got her genes. 

We first met Lynn (the relative you prefer to avoid) when she blew in unexpectedly, like a ship in full sail, on the eve of Susie’s memorial service, not ‘invited’ but ‘included if she wanted to be there’. The background appears to be that ‘She liked to hire limousines and drive in from the airport sipping champagne while wearing what she called her “thick and fabulous animal — a mink she had got second hand at the church bazaar".' Apart from being an embarrassment to Abigail as she walked round the block in her used furs, she was also an unconscionable nosey parker, wanting to know everything about everybody.²⁷ 

Lynn’s second appearance was at Thanksgiving and if her first appearance was unwelcome, this time the atmosphere is different.  Time for a few home truths. Susie’s death had reopened wounds from the death of her husband whom she had never allowed herself to ‘mourn properly’, and she knew that Abigail had never forgiven her for it. So with relationships between Abigail and her mother as icy as ever, on this occasion Lynn has decided it was time to talk. She insists she and Abigail go out for a walk to get on neutral territory, in the course of which Abigail opens up on how lonely she has always felt.²⁸  An only child, a father gone, and no sister to share secrets. 

The current crisis has produced three Abigails, one committed to the family, one prepared to accept the inevitable, and a third wanting to move on. This conversation is the first step towards catharsis, the conversation they might have had (and indeed should have had) many years before but never did. Skeletons come out of the cupboard to what Lynn describes as a ‘nugget of truth’, (‘something good’ coming out of all this). Somebody just had to write across the lines and Lynn did.

Her plea to Abigail not to go off falls on deaf ears, leaving Lindsey and Buckley to struggle on.  Then within months Jack received a call from Lynn to say she was coming to stay — ‘to make herself available for Jack and the children‘ — and Jack puts the phone down wondering ‘Where will we put her?’  The answer was obvious. Susie’s room. Lynn is a Susie replacement.²⁹ She creates a different atmosphere, with the kind of support and encouragement that the shattered Salmon family sorely needs.³⁰ 

From this point the story moves swiftly and inevitably to its Denoument. Abigail hives off to California.³¹  Jack comforts himself with Susie’s photos of Abigail to the point where he finds himself ‘falling in love all over again’³² with a woman he felt he barely knew’. Once Abigail hears he has had a heart attack she is back in a flash³³ with a warm welcome from Jack. With Jack and Abigail finding a new togetherness, Abigail still finds Susie everywhere but is now able to boast that she has got three children once again. Jack similarly finds a more positive approach to Susie’s presence and the two of them find themselves sharing anything relating to Susie and thinking and talking about the dead as ‘a perfectly normal part of life’.³⁴ 

In the interests of literary tidiness both novel and play have to end as they began with Susie. She too, wherever she is, also has to ‘let go’,  but with the Salmon family having ‘come home to one another without her,³⁵ Lynn no longer the ‘evil mother’ but established in her rightful place within the family after supporting and encouraging Lindsey and Buckley as they organised their lives around a fragile father,³⁶ Lindsey on the cusp of a wedding, a new home and a family, and Ray and Ruth bearing the marks of Susie in all they do, Susie finds a peace as she sees how her lovely bones have grown in her absence, bowing out with the line, ‘I think I can hold the world without me in it’, leaving me as I left the theatre muttering, ‘Who is alive, and who is dead?’³⁷

After the first five minutes I thought I knew. By the last five minutes I was not sure and trying to answer that question called to mind Micklem’s On the Look Out,³⁸ a book I had recently reviewed,  so having gone to the theatre for insight into violence and bereavement I suddenly found myself re-visiting the resurrection narratives.

The Resurrection Narratives

Other than her strap line, we know absolutely nothing about anything Susie said or did. She ‘lives’, only and entirely, through her impact on those around her in her short and very parochial life. In the case of Jesus there is no shortage of information but the only one sure and certain fact is the impact he had on those who met him face-to-face and their stories in which he continued to 'live' long after he had gone.

My first port of call was Norman Perrin’s ‘New Approach’ in which he notes³⁹ that none of the Synoptic Gospels actually gives an account of the resurrection per se. What they do is describe the discovery of the empty tomb, followed (in the case of Matthew and Luke) by a series of appearances and the reactions and experiences of the women and the disciples. So here too we are in the realms of impact and consequences.

My second stop was a re-visit to David Jenkins⁴⁰ when he was asked whether he believed that Jesus rose from the dead and entered into heaven. He said what he saw was a series of experiences which gradually convinced a growing number of the people that he had certainly been dead and buried but (equally) certainly ‘wasn't finished’. On the contrary, his life, power, purpose and personality continued to make him a risen and living presence.⁴¹

Both Micklem and Perrin invite us to re-read the gospels with a focus less on Jesus and more on the people whose lives were changed by him, and my third scholar, Gerd Theissen, a major figure in 20th century theology, has to some extent already given the lead in The Shadow of the Galilean,⁴² a scrupulous reconstruction of the Jesus story with a narrative in which Jesus never appears but whose shadow is everywhere.

So, for example, think of the man who said ‘all I know is that once I was blind and now I can see’,⁴³ or that other man sitting by the pool at Bethesda⁴⁴ or the woman who touched the hem of his garment,⁴⁵ and many more.⁴⁶ Every miracle had its own impact and resonated well beyond those who were actually present at the time. Every parable had its own take and varied according to time and circumstance. Carefully considered responses to traditional custom⁴⁷ and occasional throwaway lines provided the foundation for healthy community life (notably the Sermon on the Mount⁴⁸) and finished up rooted in western society over two thousand years.⁴⁹ Nor was the impact uniform. The impact on the woman whose questionable lifestyle brought her so much grief from the realms of respectability was very different from the impact on those who who brought her.⁵⁰ 

A dip into the gospels almost anywhere and a little imagination on similar stories,⁵¹  which must have well and truly done the rounds in the local communities long before they assumed written form, can throw fresh light on familiar and well-worn territory. Focus on how lives changed when human contact trumped the nuts and bolts of controversial issues.⁵² Unearth nuggets of truth and discover fresh emphases on familiar well-worn narratives. Each story is the product of two ingredients. One, the changed life and circumstances of the beneficiary. Two, a readiness and a willingness on the part of others to spot it. Then comes the big question. 

How are we to read the impact when Jesus is no longer physically present?⁵⁵

The answer lies well beyond this paper but it might be worth an exploratory look at the resurrection narratives, with the emphasis not on the empty tomb but on the impact on those first witnesses.

If Recognition is a key issue for us, it clearly was for the disciples. Both Luke and John almost go out of their way  to draw attention to it — three times. Mary in the garden, mistaking him for the gardner,⁵³ the disciples at Tiberias who saw this man and had breakfast with him but dare not ask him who he was,⁵⁴ and finally two people who chatted with another man on the road to Emmaus⁵⁵ and entertained him to supper though ‘something kept them from seeing who it was’⁵⁶ until he had gone on his way, when the penny dropped.  What is going on here? 

Commenting on anything approaching extrasensory perception is fraught with hazards, but that should not deter us from asking questions and after a couple of hours watching Susie in her new abode some questions persist. So having stuck my neck out let me now lay my head down on a block. Two cautions. One, first century Judaism had a totally different approach to the subject from 21st century Western Enlightenment. Two, the 21st century is more open and enlightened  on this topic than the 20th. Mental Health treatment is not what it was and people who hear voices or see visions today are more likely to get a sympathetic hearing than did their grandparents.

So, with that in mind, four questions.

1. Is Mary’s experience in the garden on a par with Ruth’s mother telling her she is letting her imagination run away with her, or might it be the only way either of them can find for saying what they feel and want to convey?
2. Is the experience of the disciples in the Upper Room akin to Ray’s reaction to Susie’s ‘presence‘ when he says he finds her in the air around him? She is no longer there, but she hasn’t gone away. I suggest it is an indefinable experience and will ring bells with many a bereaved person facing a similar situation.
3. Is the reaction of Thomas not that he doubts what they ‘say’,  but that he can’t ‘believe’ something he has never experienced. Next time round, when he too captures the atmosphere (or the atmosphere captures him) he readily understands what they were trying to tell him.
4. Walking along with those two disciples on the Emmaus road⁵⁷ (and treading in the footsteps of Micklem and Theissen with the focus on ‘impact’) there is nothing there out of the ordinary until we get to the end when their companion has gone and the penny drops. Their eyes were opened. They see and appreciate what he has told them. No wonder they had to rush back to Jerusalem to tell somebody, but that companion could be anybody.⁵⁸

As Perrin points out,⁵⁹ none of these stories tells us anything about resurrection. What they give us is the impact on those who experienced it, very much like those who had responded to the impact of Jesus when he was alive. The women and the disciples had seen it all but never quite ‘believed’. They were still ‘ruled paper people’: their blind eyes had to be opened, their sealed lips unlocked, and they had to begin to ‘write the other way’. Give or take a detail this is now where the disciples find themselves.

Understanding it is one thing, coming to terms with it is another and these stories are the first sign that something is happening . . . to them. Jesus, in the flesh, has gone, and all the Jacks in the world will have to live without a body but the spirit of the living Christ just doesn’t go away. They know it, but they don’t find it easy to handle, let alone convey it to others as they struggle to find appropriate words for a totally new experience.  Later thinkers may choose to make a distinction between ‘Jesus’ (flesh) and ‘the Living Christ (spirit), but right now this is a luxury not available to them.

No wonder I came away wondering who was dead and who was alive,
and ‘which am I?’

Lovely Bones Pt 1                    Lovely Bones Pt 2                   Lovely Bones Pt 3