A Terrible Kindness: The Bestselling Richard and Judy Book Club Pick

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I interviewed two of the embalmers who'd been there at length,’ said Jo. ‘They told me their stories in great detail with great feeling. Their story was linked to going into Aberfan, and helping, and then leaving again.’

William is a young, newly qualified embalmer, following in his father and uncle’s footsteps in the undertaking business, when the disaster in Aberfan happens.How then, after four years as a lauded Cambridge chorister, did his career path change so radically? How could he be estranged from his beloved mother and not have sung a single note in five years? His memories swirl and gather, intertwine, and draw him to face a possible future upon which he believes only he can decide, but as he peers over the edge, it becomes clear that the ‘concrete feet’ of Aberfan are not the strongest grounding forces in his life.

Despite the most tragic of scenarios, this is a book that is filled with love, hope, friendship and forgiveness. William’s life is for ever changed after his involvement in the aftermath of Aberfan and he decides at this tender age that he never wants to be a father. He’s seen first hand was loss looks and feels like. 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. Approaching Aberfan the day after the disaster, 19-year-old William Lavery, a newly qualified embalmer, felt exhilarated, excited even, that he was about to do a good thing. With skills gained (with distinction) from his recent training and from teenage years of apprenticeship in the family business, he believed he was perfectly prepared. For a while, as a chorister, William feels almost complete. Music plays a huge part in the novel, two pieces especially: Myfanwy, the haunting Welsh song of unrequited love, and Allegri’s sublime Miserere, the equivalent of Everest for treble choristers. Without giving the game away, they act as rich strands that interweave through William’s childhood and adult life.

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Special mention must go to the recurrent musical threads of Myfanwy and Allegri’s Miserere mei, Deus which are so elegantly woven that only a hard heart would be unmoved. In the opening chapters of A Terrible Kindness, they dutifully arrive with embalming fluid, technical paraphernalia, and tiny coffins, travelling through the night from all over the UK to ‘take care of the dead’ with the sombre focus of their profession. I enjoyed the role of music in the book, as redemption for both William and Martin. As well as William’s gentle, caring nature, I also loved Martin’s cheeky character and the man he became. The novel really made me feel William’s pain both at losing his musical future and the PTSD he suffered after Aberfan. I admired the author’s gentle touch in dealing with William’s issues but did feel he was somewhat immature and stubborn in his relationships with his mother and his wife Gloria, while everyone around him seemed to be so tolerant and forgiving of his behaviour for so long. This is a very original book which has managed to bring together the diverse topics of the Aberfan disaster, the life of a boy chorister and embalming as a career choice and meld them into a delightful novel.

I think anyone above a certain ages in the UK will be familiar with Aberfan, as it was a disaster that was and still remains seared on the national conscience due to both the huge loss of life – including 116 young children and 28 adults – and the aftermath – in particular the refusal of the National Coal Board to accept their clear corporate culpability. It’s a long time since I’ve read a debut novel that moved me so much.’ RACHEL JOYCE, Miss Benson’s Beetle 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. Although he comes from an undertaking family, that he would train as an embalmer was never a given. A gifted singer with a stunning voice, William knew his mother was fiercely determined that he should follow a musical career. Exactly what his father had wanted for him was never stated before his premature death when William was just eight.

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 It will be William’s first job as an embalmer and what he experiences over the next few nights in the makeshift mortuary in Aberfan, re-awakens memories of his own childhood trauma. As he tends gently to the bodies of small children dug out from the slurry and witnesses their parent’s grief, “the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief.”

How marvellous it is when a book broadens your horizons, takes you to places you would never envisage yourself going, and provides you with an enjoyable reading experience all at the same time. A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe did all of that for me. Horizons were broadened when I learnt about the 1966 Aberfan tragedy which resulted in the deaths of 116 children and 28 adults. I'd never considered the life of a boy chorister boarding and training at Cambridge and I certainly never envisaged being taken into the world of an embalmer. Granted this was all via a work of fiction but it propelled me toward an evening of Googling and YouTubing once I'd finished the book. I truly appreciated listening to the magnificent sounds of various Cambridge choir renditions of Miserere and Myfanwy two songs regularly mentioned in the book. However all I've mentioned so far was the icing on the cake. The book itself was well written with interesting characters having to handle difficult situations and I was super impressed to learn this was a debut novel. As a child with an exceptional voice, he wins a scholarship to Cambridge University choir school, setting in motion some profound events which affect his relationships for years to come. For those familiar or unfamiliar – this documentary I found extremely moving, very well made and also very pertinent to the novel. whilst his mum summed it up with ‘What a terrible mess we can make of our lives. There should be angel police to stop us at these dangerous moments, but there don’t seem to be. So all we’re left with, my precious son, is whether we can forgive, be forgiven, and keep trying our best.’ Well, I learnt about embalming in the 60s and 70s by just talking to people who were embalming at that time. I also spent many hours with a current-day embalmer. He told me pretty much everything I know about the embalming process, but more importantly, he talked to me very openly and humanely about what it is to be an embalmer as a human being because there is a cost. It's not straightforward doing that sort of thing every single day.’Browning Wroe easily evokes both setting and era with gorgeous descriptive prose and popular culture references. Her characters, realistically flawed, are worth investing in as they develop and change over the years: a mother so mired in grief and jealousy she is blinded to freely offered love; a boy too consumed by humiliation and resentment to show loyalty; a young man so traumatised he cannot look ahead in hope. I would also recommend this recording of Allegri’s Miserere which is crucial to the plot of the book as well as its themes – listen in particular to the tenor solo at for example 1:30 What was it about the make-up and purpose of the Midnight Choir in Cambridge that made it so central to William’s rehabilitation? Mark ended the interview asking what’s next for Jo. ‘As your first book has gone so well, there will be demands immediately from your publisher for number two. When are we going to see that? What's next?’ William does not hesitate. A passionate kiss from the student nurse who has captured his heart sends him off on this mercy mission. But William has no idea what the long-ranging effects of this charitable act will be.