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For the gentlest, most kindhearted person I know, you are extraordinarily good at making a pig’s ear of things.’..... But I do not feel the Aberfan disaster was essential to telling this story, which was about a young embalmer William. After the first 10% where William volunteers to help at Aberfan as a newly qualified embalmer, it isn't really mentioned again until towards the end of the book. There is a PTSD link somewhere towards the end but I don't think this was really explored enough. The Aberfan passages, opening and closing the book, let the tragedy speak for itself: more reportage than invention, they have a hushed effectiveness. The rest of the novel is meagre stuff. Much of it turns on William’s boyhood as a Cambridge chorister, and a mysterious traumatic event. The set-up is familiar, the dialogue is flat and the characters are clichéd. We go from Charles, who arrives at school in a Rolls-Royce and bullies the poorer kids, to Gloria, whose entire personality is “sweetheart”, and whose dreadful treatment by William can only shake, never break, her love.
Book club: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
The book was selected with the help of a panel of library staff from across the UK. Our readers loved A Terrible Kindness – here are some of their comments:In general I found William a difficult main character to warm to and some events difficult to wrap my head around. Some parts of the middle of the story I found boring and frustrating. A Terrible Kindness is among the best books I have read this year and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review – a saga
Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived their childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. In researching my book about the Aberfan disaster, when a coal waste tip slid down a mountain on to a small village primary school, I read about the embalmers arriving in the early hours to prepare the bodies for identification, then for presentation in their coffins before burial. It felt natural for me to find out more, to talk to embalmers, hear their stories, watch them at work. There was a palpable sense of homecoming in it. Their manner, their humour, their deep respect for the dead and their loved ones felt incredibly familiar.My guess is that our recent floods have put enormous pressure on counselling services because it’s been a never-ending horror show for the people caught up in them. What was it about William and his experiences that made him such a good embalmer, and why was the activity so good for him? Planning to buy A Terrible Kindness for your group? Buy books from Hive or from Bookshop.org and support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no extra cost to you. In washing away the coal-waste-assault, preparing the little bodies for burial, and helping the bereaved identify their kin, he and his fellow volunteers brought their unique skills to carry out the services that ‘no-one wanted to need’. And as his feet fix ever more firmly into that concrete, it is then that the true concepts of family and friendship make themselves known to him.
REVIEW: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | The Good REVIEW: A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe | The Good
A Terrible Kindness is ultimately a tale of humanity, showing how love and compassion endures even in the most difficult of situations. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe: Footnotes TBH I think that they report that the counsellors are coming for the victims, so that they know they are on the way. We do sometimes hear reports that ‘no one’s come to help’ when in fact they are on the way, they just can’t get there instantly which is what some people expect. (Though who can blame them for being unreasonable, in such circumstances.) A Terrible Kindness does not wallow in, appropriate, or invade the events of Aberfan 56 years ago, but rather positions William’s experiences there as another layer of his life which wraps around him, constricts, and shapes his future.
Listen to the author Jo Browning Wroe in conversation with Malcolm Doney in this week’s Church Times podcast. This is a new monthly series produced in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. The festival will return as an in-person event at the University of Winchester and Winchester Cathedral next February, and Jo Browning Wroe will be one of the speakers. faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk I don’t even know where to start with this review. I feel so emotional and afraid that I will never to able to praise this book enough. I was nine years old when the Aberfan disaster happened. It was one of those moments in time that no one could ever forget. So to conjure up that era just came naturally, how people dressed, talked and the taboos of that time. Aberfan in the days immediately after the disaster, showing the extent of the spoil slip (Wikipedia) The story of William Lavery - from chorister to embalmer, son to husband - is almost fantastical but also sincerely realistic. The friendships, losses, relationships and family are the core of the story, but underneath it all is the experience that the character has in the first few chapters, and the scars that are carved into him; that of attending Aberfan in October 1966 as a freshly qualified embalmer.
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe review: a moving
What was it about the make-up and purpose of the Midnight Choir in Cambridge that made it so central to William’s rehabilitation? A Terrible Kindness was inspired by conversations I had with two embalmers, by then in their 70’s, who as young men had gone in 1966 as volunteers to the Aberfan disaster, when a mining waste tip, loosened by rain had careered down the Welsh mountainside and onto a small village primary school.To William, the intricacies of embalming are logical and calm and provide both an escape from and a framework for the more unpredictable elements of his life – his love for the beautiful and patient Gloria, and his dear and mischievous friend Martin. And this article by the author some six years ago gives an excellent introduction to the author’s research and her views that the embalmers were unsung heroes of the aftermath On the night he got the call he was at a dinner dance to celebrate his success in completing his training, and he is there with Gloria, the love of his life. He now can’t face the possibility of children. He has terrible dreams reliving his experience and he thinks he should not inflict himself on the girl he loves. Arranged around the apparently pivotal phase of his life embodied in Aberfan, William is indeed stretched thin, out of time, his past and future constantly pulling his present out of shape. There are moments when William takes solace — and paradoxically finds kindness — in the presence of the deceased. Taking care of them with tenderness and precision is an act that can’t be lost in translation. Their tacit acceptance of this compassion — his sense that he is doing good — confers healing to him.
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