Jo Browning Wroe - A Terrible Kindness

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Exceptionally good 

 

 I thought A Terrible Kindness was excellent: it is readable, insightful, thoughtful and humane.

The story of William Lavery opens at a flashy dinner in 1966 where he is celebrating his qualification, aged 18, to be an embalmer and to work with the newly dead before their funerals. The occasion is interrupted by an appeal from Aberfan for help after the unspeakable disaster which overwhelmed the primary school and many homes and William volunteers. We see his work there, his response to it and its effect on him, and then jump back to his time as a boy chorister in Cambridge as the loving relationships and tensions in his family evolve and where a traumatic event has plainly occurred. It is a book about a decent, kind young man’s inability to deal with his own emotions and about both the difficulty and the possibilities of healing in friendship, love and music.

There are so many ways in which this could have gone wrong, but Jo Browning Wroe gets it pitch-perfect, I think, never once straying into mawkishness, sentimentality, exploitation, facile psychologising or any other of the traps looming around such a story. The opening section at Aberfan brought me to tears more than once with its delicate humanity and compassion, and I was close to tears at other times in the book, too. Wroe’s depiction of William is quite brilliant and utterly believable, and her evocation of his work as an embalmer is engrossing, moving – and fascinating, too. She is also really good at writing about music; the Welsh song Myfanwy and Allegri’s setting of the Miserere both have a very powerful part to play here and she conveys their power as well as any writing about music I have ever read, as well as the joy and transcendence which can come with performing.

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.

A Terrible Kindness is among the best books I have read this year and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Faber & Faber for an ARC via NetGalley.)