A Terrible Kindness Accidentally Told the Queer Story I'd Wanted for Years

I didn't read this book because it had queer content. Honest.

In fact, I had no idea. I had only heard buzz about it and needed a book to fulfil the 'modern history' prompt for History Girl Summer. Couple that with the feeling of connection to the Aberfan disaster that every UK person has, I was sold. 

What I wasn't expecting was for this book to (partially) tell a story I'd been yearning for my entire adult life.

 A Terrible Kindness [Jo Browning Wroe] is about the impact of the Aberfan disaster on a man's life. The real-life disaster happened when a small Welsh village was devastated by a half-million tonne man-made avalanche. It primarily struck the village's school, leading to the death of one-hundred-and-sixteen children and twenty-eight adults. 

In the aftermath, nearby undertakers are begged to come and assist with the body-identification and embalming process, and though it's a job more suited to those with disaster experience, newly-graduated nineteen-year-old William Lavery answers the call.

When his job is done, he still has a life to build, but he is now burdened with the emotional fallout - leading him to question his own repressed trauma, including an incident that destroyed his relationship with both his mother and his closest friend.

For all that this is about Aberfan, much of this book covers William's time as the poor-boy at Cambridge's Choir Boarding School, where he is a talented soloist with an incredible future ahead of him. Almost immediately he is befriended and protected by the boisterous, good-hearted Martin and it's a friendship that shapes both of their lives. Martin's love for - and burgeoning crush on - an oblivious William is as obvious as it is inevitably tragic.

It's at this point I need to talk about Goodnight Mister Tom. 

It may be a strange book to connect with this one, being a WW2-set children's book about a boy (also called William) whose evacuation to the home of a gruff old man frees him from his abusive mother. What possible connection could that surprisingly dark kid's story have to do with this? 

Well, I have personally always held the belief that that there is an untapped queer story in the depths of that book. William is befriended by Zach, a boisterous, good-hearted boy with a theatrical background and a flamboyant love of tap-dance. William is amazed by Zach's confidence and joy and Zach is thrilled by the otherwise shy William's talent for drawing and performing, and openly pleased to have found another 'oddball' like him in a world of nice but exceedingly normal children. They have adventures, they play Holmes and Watson, and even go on holiday together.

When, in the latter part of the book, Zach briefly returns to London and is killed by a bomb, it's devastating. William's grief is overwhelming. He spends the final chapters of the book trying to get over the loss (talking to an imaginary Zach, wearing his clothes, riding his bike) before eventually reaching a better place. In the epilogue he starts to form a burgeoning interest in girls, and this is portrayed as yet another part of moving on.

Now I'm not saying I shipped it, or that I am out here writing fix-it fics where Zach never died... but I always believed that a return to Will as an older teenager would be a fascinating exercise, with all the ingredients for a powerful queer awakening. Will's journey is one of continually discovering new aspects of himself and blossoming - learning that the bible isn't just words to be learned by wrote, learning to read, making friends, having the chance to draw, discovering he can act, and coming out on the other side of trauma in one piece. He even goes through the process of learning where babies come from, and how they are fed. So this would be a fitting, final piece of the puzzle.

I don't think for a second that this author used Goodnight Mister Tom for inspiration, or that anyone but me will find a connection between the two, but William and Martin are, to me, Will and Zach, just a few years on.

Unfortunately this is not a queer story. This book doesn't advertise itself as a queer book and the main character is (textually) straight, and happily so. For all this book features gay characters, the focus is on the main character trying to fit them into his 1960s worldview, whilst having no thoughts in that direction himself. But subtext is an elder-millennial queer's bread and butter. You get out of a book what you put into it.

It's a shame because, putting that aspect of the story aside, I had some serious problems. This criticism isn't to say I hated the book. It was immensely readable and richly detailed. The characters stepped off the page, and even the most unpleasant ones were never two-dimensional. But the flaws the book has are... not insignificant.

From what I can tell, the author has no connection to Aberfan. This isn't always an issue in fiction - a tragedy can be a conduit to a bigger societal message, such as the stories we've seen around the Grenfell fire. However, walking the line between those stories and the tragedy porn we see in 'book-club friendly' holocaust/school-shooter fiction is a difficult one.

This book isn't quite on the level of The Crown, which made the loss of one-hundred-and-sixteen children all about the Queen's stoic inability to cry on cue, but it's not far off. At least the Queen's connection to Aberfan is historical fact.

The author has tried to avoid rubbernecking accusations by spending relatively little time in Aberfan. The actual event occurs during the first few chapters, after a relatively cold open; it's as shocking and disorientating for readers as for the character. Then in the aftermath, the character has time to reflect on the events that led him there. It feels like the author is trying to avoid accusations of mawkishness by making this book about his life instead.

But that means that the book uses the bodies of real children as an emotional beat in an otherwise-unrelated fictional bildungsroman. Which is somehow worse. The tragedy is the key to unlocking the repressed trauma of the main character, which turns out to be... an embarrassing family scuffle and the loss of the singing solo he worked for years to get. I'm sure the entirety of Wales is thinking of him in his time of hardship.

Some of the blame settles on the reader, and rightly. No one is picking up a book about Aberfan without a certain perverse interest - literary rubbernecking, if you will. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, but I still always hope for the story to provide more than grisly details.

Bizarrely there are two aspects of his story that are far more traumatic and completely glossed over in the forced feel-good ending. Both of which, unaddressed, leave the story feeling unfinished.

The first is Martin's plot. After devoting a good portion of the book to William's friendship with him, the absence of his character from William's adult life is a loss to the reader too. They have fallen out over the mysterious 'solo incident', or rather, William has fallen out with Martin, who is still writing unopened letters to him.

The reveal is that while the solo incident forced William to leave the school, it was mostly unrelated to Martin. Their falling out is caused by a separate incident weeks earlier, in which the two are caught in compromising but entirely innocent position by their peers. Rather than explain, William - already cross at Martin - decides to avoid the issue by implying that his best friend in the whole world molested him. When he leaves the school weeks later, he no doubt abandons Martin to a brutal final year of bullying, if not physical danger.

When William meets Martin again as an adult, Martin is as well-adjusted and big-hearted as ever. It's implied that Martin still adores William - whether he deserves it or not - and this thing that would surely cast a guilty shadow over a normal person's entire life is easily brushed aside. What's an accusation of sexual assault between buddies?

Meanwhile William's relationship with his mother is likewise given an easy out. As someone who has what I would describe as a 'not easy, but still loving' relationship with my mother, I found Martin's behaviour all too familiar.

Being the centre of someone's world is a double edged sword, one that forces you to maintain a perfect image of yourself, in which you always fulfil the role they need and disregard your own feelings. One scene in which she feels a perceived embarrassment because of William's beloved uncle, has him - still a child - desperately insisting that he loves HER the most. As someone who still has to regularly reassure my own mother that I don't love my (fifteen plus years dead) grandma more than her, I felt that.

Their relationship is complex, with plenty of good mixed in amongst the bad, and I liked that. Evelyn isn't a bad mother, just insecure, grieving, and desperate to protect William from the (perceived) negative influence of his queer uncle. The big crime she commits that sees her cut off from him for ten years isn't even that bad - she is startled into an embarrassing public argument caused by William's own meddling. She would be well within her rights to drag her son to their new home, but instead she lets him remain with his uncle on his own terms.

Yet time is all that's needed, the book assures us, and indeed when they meet again (during a low point of William's life and a good moment in hers) everything is rosy. Of course it is - she's getting what she wants and he is feeling the relief of not being separated from her anymore. Nothing in the story implies that either she or William have changed in any way that will fix their patterns.

Are these issues with the book a deal-breaker? They certainly cheapened the book for me, after an otherwise strong start. I think there is a good novel in here, hampered by some clumsy story-telling tricks and a slight lack of focus.

For all I accuse the book of using the Aberfan disaster, those initial chapters are unarguably the strongest in the book. They have clearly been re-worked and polished in a way that could only come from a respectful author's desire to do justice to the events. I think even if you don't bother with the rest of the book, those few chapters are absolutely worth it.