We have been conditioned through countless inspiringly uplifting stories to think that getting over trauma is as simple as having your eyes opened to the true nature of your pain, realising how much better life will be without it, and deciding to do something about it.
And then doing it!
It’s a seductive idea but if you’ve been alive for longer than about five seconds, you’ll know pain and its lingeringly enervating aftereffects and know that seeing it of is rarely that simple or easily accomplished (were that it was; when you are neck deep in therapy, you wish for the first paragraph to be the living truth).
Which is why a novel like A Terrible Kindness is such an empowering comfort because it understands with an affecting truthfulness that when trauma takes us into its uncompromising grip that there is not often much we can do about it.
Well, not easily, and that even when we don’t want to be a victim of our past, and let’s be honest, does anyone, it has a way of sinking its claws, seductively whispering that we’ll get over it and convincing it that the way life is now is the best we’re going to get.
Like the kindhearted, voice-of-an-angel protagonist, William Lavery, we hold fast to the idea that while we want a happy life, close to loved ones and lifelong friends with all our dreams fulfilled that it’s simply not possible and that the only solution is to shut down or run away or stare warningly out at the world …
OR all of the above …
‘You’re going to see things you’ll never forget.’ Uncle Robert glances sideways at William, concern all over his gentle face. He turns back and looks straight ahead. ‘You know, your mother’s not far from Aberfan.’ He slides a piece of paper into William’s pocket. ‘You could call in on her.’
‘I can’t. You know that.’
His uncle’s mouth turns down as it always does when they mention her. He breathes in and out slowly. ‘And you know I’ve never accepted that, and I never will.’ (P. 10)
It’s wearing and exhausting way to live your life, and nineteen-year-old William, who has entered the family business as an embalmer at his uncle’s funeral business, an occupation that brings him rare peace and joy, well knows it, but he can’t pull himself away from the trauma of a grief-stricken past which is cemented in still further when he responds to a call for help on fateful day in 1966.
It’s the night of the Midlands Chapter of the Institute of Embalmers Ladies’ Night Dinner Dance and freshly graduated William is nervous about the recognition he’s about to receive as a star student and excited to be with the lovely, garrulous Gloria who may just be the best thing to be about to happen to him.
Nursing the grief of losing his father years earlier and still unsure how to navigate the close, loving but emotionally complicated relationship with his mother, and overwhelmed by taunting memories of a painfully traumatic incident when he was fourteen, Williams is hardly in a position to ingest yet more trauma.
And yet that’s precisely what happens when he goes to Aberfan, Wales where a colliery spoil tip has cascaded with immense destructive power down the mountain above the town, swallowing a school and a row of houses and leaving 116 children and 28 adults dead.
It’s an overwhelming tragedy and William is right in its midst, embalming the bodies of countless children in a race against time, all while comforting grievously wounded parents and subsumed in the collective grief of a town that has little idea what to do with the horror visited upon it.
While he simply concentrates on getting the job done, his time among the quietly corrosive trauma deeply affect him and he finds himself unable to fully enter into the host of wonderfully supportive and unconditionally loving relationships that characterise his life.
His friendship with the irrepressibly cheeky Martin at chorister school in Cambridge. His loving if emotionally smothering mother who has significant grief issues of her own. His close relationship with his dad’s brother, his Uncle Robert and his partner Howard who provide a consistent male presence in a life that has been wounded by the loss of his father.
And, of course, gloriously good and lovely Gloria who embraces him wholly and completely and who transforms his life with a romantic love that William could only have dreamed of … or at least she tries to, struggling, like so many others, to find a way through the protective mechanisms arrayed around and in the man she loves, made all the more impenetrable by his time in Aberfan.
The moving brilliance of A Terrible Kindness is that it tenderly and with greatly thoughtful insight explores what it’s like for someone to not to be a prisoner of their past but unable to find a way to navigate through it.
Robert turned to face William. ‘Because I know grief, William. Your father has been dead six years, and I still think of him every day. I need to do that with a clear conscience and a lightness of spirit. Your father loved your mother. If I hold on to bad feelings towards her, I couldn’t ever think of him without guilt. And I couldn’t bear that. So, when enough time has passed, I’ll hold my hand out to her and I’ll keep doing so. No matter if she refuses it, slaps it, or bites it off for that matter. She was the light of your father’s life. And anyway, you’ll be off to live with her soon.’
William looked back at Kenneth, and gently smoothed his hair again. (P. 188)
If you have ever stared longingly and with great frustration at the good things in your life, and wondered why you are never able to fully enter into them, you will find A Terrible Kindness reassuring and inspiring in the very best way because it doesn’t pretend that rising above your trauma is a simply matter of determining you want to.
Rather, in a story beautifully told, with nuance and an embrace of the flawed humanity at the heart of us all, A Terrible Kindness movingly articulates the idea that the journey towards freedom from the shackles of trauma can be a long and bumpy one, full of backward steps and imperfect forward ones, misapprehension, flawed perception and a fear of change so great that it can counteract the need and recognition of change to the point where a perpetual state of life damaging limbo is always in place.
Interestingly there are times when you, like many of the people around William, become frustrated with his lack of concrete action towards meaningful change but then Browing Wroe beautifully and with an aching sense of empathy, pulls you back to the salient fact that we are all William – able to see what is holding us back and what needs to be changed but afraid and unable to make the leap.
Ultimately, A Terrible Kindness is a reassuring story of hope lost, and then found, largely through coming to understand how we are always better staying in contact with others and that while there is a temptation to keep the world at bay lest it hurt you further, or you mistakenly think you will hurt others, it should be resisted because it’s when you give to others and acively become a part of their live, over time or in one crucial moment, that true healing can begin.
It’s not an easy process and A Terrible Kindness doesn’t pretend that it is, but this wondrously affecting and emotionally robust novel shines with evocative writing, a memorably moving protagonist, a fulsomely drawn cast of characters and a story which is big in scope and time while also remaining emotionally intimate and hopeful, assuring us every step of the way that while trauma does great damage, it does need to enfeeble us forever and that healing can come, transforming our lives in ways big and small in the process.