A murdered schoolgirl's views from heaven.

A debut novel by Alice Sebold that's topped the US best-seller lists.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 26 July 2002

MARK LAWSON:
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Natasha Walter, this has sold at an astonishing rate for a first novel in America. Does that tell us about the book or about American culture?

NATASHA WALTER:
A bit about both I think. At first, when I opened the book, I thought what an incredibly daring device to have a 14-year-old dead girl narrate a novel and what an explosive way to begin with her murder and her rape, but then the book completely changed.

All that force and explosive energy was utterly dissipated, because the whole device of having this dead girl narrate actually made the book so much more bland and cosier than I expected because she is only 14 and she stays at that level, and she loves everybody that she's left behind on earth. It's surrounded by this kind of rosy haze.

At first you think, yes, Sebold is really going to confront the reality of loss and death, but she doesn't at all. What she does is provide these incredible consolations, which is that when somebody has died, they can still be around, they can still pop into their memorial service and check out what people are wearing.

Even though this girl's only sexual experience was being raped when she died, in fact she can return and lose her virginity beautifully with this guy who loved and was faithful to her memory forever. So it turns into this incredibly candy-floss read, very, very sugary which is something you don't expect to say when you open the book and first start reading it.

MARK LAWSON:
Paul Morley, it struck me about this that if you asked cardinals, bishops, archbishops, they'd say the question that is hardest is when people ask what is heaven actually like, to explain the rules of it, the physics. This book has that problem.

PAUL MORLEY:
It doesn't seem a particularly rigorous heaven, it's quite a light, obvious heaven. You would imagine if there is a God in heaven, he does have a long, white fluffy beard.

I mean, after the now legendary opening line, which suggests we are having literature, we are quickly into a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull book about recovery, and within that, you know, the instant kind of feeling there is a heaven, everything's going to be OK.

However bad your death is, however revolting it is, you will go to this heaven and everything will be fantastic, everything ends lovely. The last line of the book, in that sense, is just unbelievable. It was kind of like a Christmas card to the reader, I couldn't believe it.

After the series of false endings, because she had no idea how to end it, she suddenly just wishes us all well for the rest of our lives. I am faintly troubled by the book, as if it had come out of some peculiar church in the middle of America, with some kind of propaganda kind of thing that had been twisted as if there was a little hint of literature. I found the book very disquieting.

MARK LAWSON:
Ian Rankin, you write crime fiction, and this is a variety of it. One of the challenges has been to find a new narrator. I read one a couple of years ago that was narrated by the gun, as an American novel. This is certainly quite a fresh twist, being narrated by the corpse.

IAN RANKIN:
Yes, well, books narrated by dead people are not new. We had Ali Smith's Hotel World very recently in the UK. But it's certainly a very different take on the serial killer novel. And her take on the serial killer himself, I thought was interesting, because the girl never seems to feels any real anger against him.

In fact, she doesn't deal with her feelings about him at all and he gets a fairly light read all the way through until the end, when, as Paul says, she has trouble ending it and one of the endings involves him.

But I liked the book better than I thought I would. I mean, it opens in a strange way and then when she goes to heaven, the first person she meets is an intake counsellor, at which point I thought, "Dear God, I'm going to hate this." I thought it got better as it went on.

It did drift off towards the end, but I thought her take on the American family was good. I thought the way they dealt with this tragedy was interesting and it felt to me quite realistic. She had a good way of turning suburban American life into something kind of strange and exotic and alien in a way that I hadn't really seen since Jane Ann Phillips.

So there are a lot of good things about it and it is her first novel. One of the problems I've got is where does she go from there because if she has been lorded in America as having written this great novel that's sold hundreds of thousands, this is often the death knell for young American writers.

MARK LAWSON:
And Natasha, it is in the end, we suspect, certainly in America, being read as therapy rather than literature.

NATASHA WALTER:
Yes, I'm really surprised that you make the comparison with somebody like Jane Ann Phillips because although Alice Sebold can deal with family life, and she does bring it alive to a certain extent, she keeps closing it down. You know, she closes down all the possible loss, uncertainty, tension that's there.

She always wants to smooth it out so much, which a better writer I don't think would do. I mean, when the mother moves away from the family, she moves away right across the country and comes back when the father is having a heart attack. The son won't speak to her any more.

You just get this wonderful kind of family reunion when they are all sitting around, saying, "Yes, yes, I love you dearly still," and the dead girl is looking in. There is a strange way in which she wants to kind of wrap everything up all the time, didn't you feel, which is the sign of a weaker writer.

IAN RANKIN:
It has one of the most toe-curling scenes in modern literature, I do agree, which could have come straight from the film Ghost, with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.

PAUL MORLEY:
There's a moment when you're hoping that's something's going to happen like that, that it's going to go back to a good piece of literature.

IAN RANKIN:
I also wasn't convinced by her take on heaven. It seemed a very odd kind of heaven to me.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's an ordinary heaven.

MARK LAWSON:
But also, isn't there something worrying about just how consoling this is, that it's like magical realism. That if you invent this kind of system - it's like that reading a lot of people have at funerals and memorial services, "I'm not dead, I've just gone into another room." That's what it's saying all the time.

PAUL MORLEY:
Absolutely, it's totally conventional, that line. When you die, you will go to this heaven and it's fantastic and you can control it and you can still communicate with your family and everything's all right. And it's like she has written a novel that people in America are hoping is the truth about heaven.

IAN RANKIN:
When I read the novel, I didn't know about her previous book and that she had been raped in a place very like the place that's described in this book. At a different age, a slightly different age but she had a very similar experience.

MARK LAWSON:
Psychologically, that it makes it fascinating, I think.

IAN RANKIN:
Once I knew that, that made it a different kind of book for me.

NATASHA WALTER:
A better book?

PAUL MORLEY:
But more a therapy book in a way, more a recovery book isn't it?

IAN RANKIN:
Once I was reading more of her into it, not just taking it as straight fiction, then I suppose I thought of it in a lesser way.

MARK LAWSON:
Well, we'll leave it there, see if it does as well in this country. We've rather picked the bones out of The Lovely Bones.