I want to compare The Lovely Bones with a book that I was thinking of quite often while reading it, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel as if the two books come from a similar intention: to explain what happens when we die and to comfort us.
The best way for me to quickly relate the relevance of the Book of the dead is to quote a documentary I recently watched,
‘Death is real it comes without warning and cannot be escaped’. (From the movie The Tibetan book of the Dead. The story about Ladakh is from this source as well. This is abridged) In what used to be Western Tibet, now Ladakh India, a man has died. His family cries as they await a Buddhist yogi to come to read the Tibetan Book of the dead.
The holy man will read the book every day for 49 days. According to Tibetan belief the consciousness of the man is able to hear and will linger for 49 days. The text’s message to the consciousness is, “that which is called death has now arrived… recognize the luminosity before you it the essence of your own mind, …both life and death are a flow of uncertain transitions … Now is the time for you to seek a path. You are not alone everyone who has come before you has died … now I will abandon clinging to this body to this world I will go forward and abandon fear and terror I will recognize whatever appears as a projection of my own mind.
At death we lose everything that is real. Unless we can let go of all the things we cherished in our life we are terrified.
Carl Jung called the Tibetan book of the Dead his life’s partner in whom he found the secrets of his own soul.
The Lovely Bones is a novel that also tries to answer for us what happens after death. It is the story of a girl who is murdered, and her first few years in the afterlife as she continues to follow the story of those in her family.
There are some basic assumptions about death that Lovely Bones makes. The first is that there is an afterlife. The dead person is able to travel anywhere on earth and can see and hear and cannot be seen or heard themselves; they can make themselves known by allowing their presence to be felt. There is a similarity to the Tibetan belief here.
In this afterlife there is a heaven. The book makes no mention of hell. The heaven that is mentioned consists of a first-stage heaven where the person who has recently died is able to construct their surroundings out of anything they can conceive and desire. They are not alone but instead have a couple of people who have intersecting conceptions of ideal environments and spend time together when and where these conceptions and environments intersect.
There is a second level of heaven described in the book as being one of more general comfort. It is a place the author describes as one where you could just enter a room and hold a stranger’s hand for and hour.
The process to move from one level to the next is the closure that happens in the dead person’s own heart as they come to terms with their own death and the closing of the gap left by the dead person as the people they knew on earth, their family and friends, finally are healed.
In the Tibetan Book of the dead the desire to hang on to the things we cherished in life, the people, places and possessions, is called attachment, as in Lovely Bones, it is an obstacle to moving on.
Stories about death have been around for as long as humans have had language. I love comparative mythology, and though I am not an expert, I would like to thank you for indulging me on this Blog. I have always been fascinated by the work of Joseph Campbell and his study of the common parts of the stories we tell as humans and the most common, and in fact inescapable, of these is death.
Following Fred’s methodology I am going to do an analysis of the novel Lovely Bones by using Alf’s metaphor.
The popular series of the 80’ ALF, was about an alien living in a middle class family. This could be read as a metaphor of how every family hide a monster in their basement. I start with this reference because this is very similar with the social organization that Lovely Bones shows. In an American suburb, different kind of “monsters” can live and hide in their “perfect houses”. Mr. Harvey, Susie’s mother and Susie itself are examples of this.
These three characters share a common aspect: their biggest desire is outside their “perfect homes”. Mr. Harvey, is the most clear monster of the story: the psychopath pedophile killer that lives hiding in his basement, using the routine, represented by the sound of alarms, to show a normal life to the outside world, “When the alarm had gone off to tell him to shut off the most of the lights because the suburbs were asleep after that, Mr. Harvey would go down into the basement, where there were no cracks that light could peek through and people could point to, to say he was strange.” (130) He hides from the society because his desire it is not allowed. He is repressing himself hiding down in the inside of the house.
For Abigail, Susie’s mother, the monstrosity is to live in her perfect and beautiful home, which is a trap for her, “I want to be more than a mother” (207). She feels trapped in the life she choose, therefore, she needs to go outside in order to reach her desire even if this meant to destroy her marriage and abandon her children. She reaches her desire by breaking her family.
Unlike the previous characters, Susie is dead. She has already gone by the most terrible monstrosity: be raped and killed. But through the text what it seems more hideous for her is to leave their family alone, the distance. This is the opposite of the above-named characters want. She is trapped in a perfect world as the penguin in the preface of the text, “Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. […]The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, “Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.”(3) This quote works as a metaphor of how Susie is trapped in her perfect heaven, her perfect world, her own personal constructed space. But even in the most constructed perfection the desire is outside, in this case in Earth, the desire of a last kiss, the desire of love. So, in order to reach her goal, she needs to break the natural order. To do this, she find someone take her place. She possesses other person and, in this way, gets what she wants and at the same time became a monster.
The three characters locate their desire outside. They are trapped in the inside of their homes and, in order to reach their desire, they need to do terrible things. This is how they became monsters. In this sense, the text could have a real application to explain that it does not matter if we live in perfect and esthetic world, if we have a perfect live, because commonly our desire is outside these places and we have to be careful to not become monsters in the way of fulfilling it. Monstrosity in sensu stricto is more common than we think. Every person has an alien in his basement.
Fred and Magdalena’s analysis are very interesting. I almost forgot about Alf!! I think the author was definitely trying to make her audience feel more comfortable with death and afterlife in the novel. Looking into Sebold’s biography and finding out that she was raped in a field, it seems this novel is a way for her to perhaps come to terms with her past and find comfort. I was surprised then with the scene where Suzie inhabits Ruth’s body and sleeps with Ray…it just didn’t make sense to me that she, Sebold, would have Suzie do this after what happened to her, to both of them-did she have Ruth’s consent to use her body for this purpose? This part, to me, just didn’t seem to work – she was suddenly a bit like the monster who had hurt her.
I didn’t hate this book…but i didn’t love it. I probably wouldn’t teach it if I had a choice, though I did see a grade 8 student reading it at my practicum school. It seems to me more suited for a grade 9 or 10. I had some trouble following the book-it was a bit jumpy for me, scenes seemed to change awkwardly at times. I did like the penguin in the snow globe metaphor-the idea of being trapped in the perfect world. And I liked the imagery or how the author described Suzie’s presence in her blood/remains after her death. Like how Mr. Harvey washed her off in the bath, and how she washed down the drain, or how she was is in the earth. This really showed how Suzie was holding on in ways to the earth and not ready to let go.
I actually enjoyed the movie for this story more than the book-which is rarely the case for me with books and movies. I found the movie a bit more linear and easier to follow. I really liked the shots of the doll houses and seeing Mr. Harvey through the windows-it gave him a real creepiness. In the movie we get to see a bit more into his character. I liked the imagery in Suzie’s heaven too. The smashing of the bottled ships, the crumbling of the gazebo like decaying bones, the environment changing depending on Suzie’s mood-rainy when she is sad, misty and icy when she is angry. I also liked how the film didn’t draw out the timeline over as many years as the book did. If I were to teach the book, I would definitely use the movie to compare and contrast.