A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe - Review

This book was my choice for book club this year. I saw it while browsing in WH Smith or something last year, but didn't pick it up. But I thought it would be good for book club so chose it. I am writing this review before the book club meeting so I am intrigued as the what people will think. This is partly because the book didn't go how I thought it would at all. It wasn't that I disliked it, but the blurb doesn't quite match up to the actual narrative.

The main character is called Will. At the very beginning of the book he is nineteen and he has just qualified as an embalmer. He is at a fancy dinner with his girlfriend, Gloria, when the whole room - all embalmers celebrating - get the news that the Aberfan disaster has happened. Some volunteer embalmers are required to go to south Wales and help with the clean up of the bodies. Will volunteers and sets off from his home. He will be the closest he has been to his mother in five years, as she lives in Swansea. It's not clear why he is estranged from her for quite a while, but it becomes clear. 

The book splits off into different narratives in different time periods. It isn't confusing to follow but I'm not quite sure it was the right decision to make as the author, but I will take each strand separately.

First of all there's Aberfan itself. If you're not familiar, the disaster was that a coal spoil tip slid - after three weeks of rain - down the hillside into the school and into some houses. About 150 people died, including something like 116 children. It happened at about 9.15am so the kids had just arrived for the day. Hundreds of people - mostly miners - turned up to help pull bodies from the slurry, which solidified as it stopped moving, and their bodies were taken to two local chapels nearby. There really were embalmers who came over to help, including some from Ireland who also brought dozens of tiny coffins for the children. Will is a fictional version of these men and the story here is absolutely harrowing. I hadn't ever really thought about the trauma that the bodies must have gone through before being found. It took days for them to find all the bodies, and no survivors were found after 11am on the day of the disaster. It's something that I am interested in so I picked the book on this basis.

It is clear that Will suffers PTSD after his work in Aberfan, and really that's what the book is about. He marries Gloria but tells her that he doesn't want children because of what he saw small bodies go through. He suffers from nightmares and flashbacks. Reading this from a modern perspective is really interesting, actually.

But he also has PTSD from other events in his life, if you want my opinion. His dad and his dad's twein brother, Robert, were funeral directors, along with Robert's partner - in the business and sexual sense - Howard. Will's dad wants him to follow in the family business but his mother, Evelyn, is against it. She's quite jealous of the relationship that Will has with his uncle and Howard. Will's dad dies when he about eight years old. A couple of years later, Will is off to chorister school in Cambridge. He has a beautiful voice although later, as an adult, he rarely sings anymore because of his traumas. At the school he meets Martin, but it's clear he has become estranged from Martin, too. His uncle and Howard love him like their own, but they don't know what he went through in Aberfan.

I feel like Aberfan was just kind of a useful tool to show someone's trauma, which kind of annoyed me. I wonder what other people in my book club will think. I did like the book, though, and I'm giving it four out of five.