[This 2022 novel is in five sections, and as I finished reading each of these I wrote about it before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
1st January 2024
Part 1, Aberfan
A debut novel by a Cambridge author who wants to write about both one of the most Cambridge-y things you can do in her city—being a chorister in one of the famous college choirs—and something she’s had to do a bit of research on—the post-traumatic stress caused by having worked at the Aberfan disaster of 1966. How to bring them together? How about… having a newly-qualified embalmer—I’m not making this up—volunteer to work on dealing with the bodies of children being dug out of the landslide of unstable mining waste? How about him having a back-story as a resident chorister? And, for good measure, how about having him the top alumnus of his embalming course? Having him steal his first kisses with Gloria, the girl he fell in love with when he first saw her a year ago, on the very night not only of his big graduation celebration back home, but also of his dashing off to Wales to do his bit? And having him decide not to visit his estranged mother—he still hasn’t forgiven her for leaving to live far away from him in Swansea, of all places—not only on his first trip to Aberfan but when he returns for the funerals? Why did she leave him when his father had died five years before? Why didn’t she want him to go into the undertaking business at all? And why did he leave the choir so suddenly, leaving behind his best friend ever?
That’s a lot of baggage for an author to force a messed-up nineteen-year-old to drag around. But she’s kind enough to have given him some help in his trials. He’s a sensitive enough soul to make an excellent impression in the makeshift mortuary, and bond with the older woman who volunteers to help him clean the broken little bodies. He’s so good at his job—and so young!—that it’s almost a superpower. And he has not only the love of a good woman waiting for him, no doubt prepared to help him untangle the knotty issues in his life, but a loving uncle—a substitute father since his mother left—and that short-term substitute mother to help him get through a sleepless two days of industrial-scale embalming in Aberfan. My guess is he’ll get through it, but that it’s going to be a rough road. And will there be Gloria at the end of it? At the end of the opening Aberfan section, after the funerals, he’s just told her he loves her, but he can’t possibly marry her. He could never have children, knowing what he knows about the fragility of their lives.…He doesn’t actually say it, but how could he ever let them out of the house?
The plot of Part 1 is straightforward enough. I’ve already told you most of what happens, but not that the most memorable thing about it is the terrible, poignant intimacy of what poor William Lavery is having to do. He pulls back the sheet covering the next little victim, and perhaps there’s enough remaining untouched of the face to make the identification by the parents less harrowing. But it’s harrowing anyway, a shoe or the fabric of a shirt enough for the men and women waiting outside to know that their child, at last, is accounted for. Browning Wroe doesn’t take us methodically through the grisly details of the process. Instead, she builds up an impression, through the night, the next day and beyond, not only of what William is doing but how genuinely moved he is. He is as sensitive—that word again—to the parents’ trauma as to the sadness of the deaths of children. It means that by the time he telephones Gloria from Wales after the funeral, we can believe that the idea of ever becoming a parent is too much for him to contemplate.
My prediction, 50 pages into a 300-odd-page book, is that he won’t be an embalmer all his life. Whatever happened in Cambridge will be resolved, and he will be able to realise his potential as a singer. He’s good with women—we’ve seen enough of this with Gloria and the motherly volunteer—so those tricky roles he can’t imagine ever fulfilling will eventually come naturally. He’ll be a good son, and he’ll be a good husband and father. In a way, I hope I’m wrong, but this is such a polite novel I can’t imagine Browning Wroe considering success in the undertaking trade to be enough for her boy.
Part 2—Cambridge Choir
Hmm…. I didn’t find this section nearly as interesting. It’s an unashamedly straightforward, chronological account of William’s four years in the choir and the not-quite Steerforth-like Martin who takes him under his wing. It’s longer than Part 1, but everything about it seems plodding. There’s some necessary ground for Browning Wroe to cover, some narrative boxes to be ticked, so she—what?—gets on with it, starting at the beginning and ending a few months before William is due to leave. In fact, she ends on a teaser, musing on ‘how things might have played out differently for William if….’ If what? If Browning Wroe hadn’t brought together a series of unhappy events and accidental misunderstandings. It’s as if she’s been given a Thomas Hardy™ plot-fixing kit and decided to see what she can get away with.
The plot. William’s arrival at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters—really an unnamed college—at the age of ten. Feeling like an outsider because a) he doesn’t even recognise that the place, and the choristers, ooze privilege and b) he’s three years older than the other new boys. But, phew, feeling OK because he has a) superpower No 2, the voice of an angel, therefore achieving equal top dog status within a term, and b) Martin, the other top boy treble dog and all-round boy alpha. But… the other plot driver is Evelyn, the mother we know will leave. She pushed for the Cambridge voice trial—a walkover for our boy, obviously—in order to open a possibly life-changing door for him and slam another one shut. She feels excluded from the triangle formed by William, his father-substitute uncle Robert and—the revulsion she feels!—Robert’s boyfriend Howard. This is 1957, and Browning Wroe endows poor Evelyn with the unappealing anti-homosexual prejudices of her era. She wants to get her boy as far away as she can from them and the grubby life Robert and Howard offer, getting dead people into the ground.
(Author biog alert: Browning Wroe was brought up in a cemetery in Cambridge and retains an affection for the business Evelyn hates. It makes me think that a big part of Evelyn’s eventual redemption will be an understanding not only of her gay brother-in-law but also the value of William’s chosen career. As for the rift between William and Martin… I’ll come back to that. For now, I’ll just make a note of another box ticked on the authorial to-do list—LGBT issues.)
I was talking about Browning Wroe’s Thomas Hardy™ kit. What she’s using it for is to push everything towards the crisis that’s well on its way by the end of Part 2. For instance, the friendship with Martin. He’s the same age as William, but comes across as much older. He’s big in every way, confident, suffers frequent sanctions and punishments for his almost daily misdemeanours… and so on. Browning Wroe’s first job for him is to make sure William doesn’t have anything to worry about. He nips some incipient bullying in the bud so that William, the one with the ‘Midlands’ accent who doesn’t know anything of this world can do what he does best—rise through the ranks and be the next superstar. We know, because Browning Wroe told us near the start of the novel, that the friendship will go wrong…
…which might not be too bad on its own. But it isn’t on its own. We witness a couple of Evelyn’s half-term visits, which she loves, largely because she thinks William is in a safe place. He’s living the life he was born for—and she can pretend he’s out of reach of the family skeletons she would like to keep locked in the closet. It isn’t like that, of course. For a start, William is home for the vacations and, especially at Christmas, she feels as excluded as ever by the bond between the three of them. The other thing is that William loves Robert as the father he lost too young. We—and Evelyn—discover later in Part 2 that they have been writing to each other from the start and, of course, she feels terribly betrayed.
Everything is coming to a head halfway through the spring term of William’s final year. At last he’s centre forward in the most important match of the season—i.e. he’s the soloist for the Ash Wednesday performance of Allegri’s ‘Miserere,’ whose top C holds no terrors for him. Last time, he’d missed out because he caught the flu. This time, he’s beset by more complicated problems. His mother has told Robert and Howard they can’t come, because the pressure on poor William would be too much for him. But, using another useful superpower, William invites them anyway in handwriting that is indistinguishable from Evelyn’s. If I’m remembering it right, she discovers the deception—but he invites them again and seems to hope they won’t see each other.
That’s one problem. Another, by a stroke of misfortune—i.e. by an author flicking through the Hardy™ playbook—during the last Christmas vacation Martin, in a bedroom they are sharing at Martin Mansions, makes it clear that he had thought he wasn’t the only gay in the room. As William pushes him off, appalled, it looks as though the friendship is at an end. For the first four weeks of the fatal last spring term, Martin won’t even look at William… but it’s OK. By chance, however (yawn), they are caught in the lavatories, where nothing untoward is happening but appears to be. And the boys making the discovery are the horrid little threesome who made William feel unwelcome all those years ago. It’s William who threatens to do them life-changing damage if they tell. That’s two close shaves.
But things happen in threes. To show his all-round matiness with Martin, William joins him in the naked dormitory run that only Martin has ever done alone before. And this time it’s Matron who catches them…. Disaster. Martin is used to being caned, but William isn’t—but worse than the pain is the headmaster’s decision that such behaviour precludes even Bobby Charlton from making the first team. He’s on the bench for the Miserere. There’s no way back… except there is. William is the Welsh choirmaster’s protégé, and he pleads the case for mercy. (Oof. The penny’s just dropped for me.)
So, as Ash Wednesday approaches, we know that William is under a cloud, closet homosexuality is lurking around suspiciously, and the two people William loves most in the world will be arriving at the same time, one with a partner the other can hardly speak to, and the other with so much emotional baggage it’s made her seek a new life for her and William in Swansea. It’s a question not so much of what could possibly go wrong, but of what form the catastrophe is going to take.
Part 3—Family Business
I had to force myself to read this. Not because the way a cuckoo in the nest snatches away the only girl William has ever loved, not because even after thirteen years—count them—William is still blaming his mother for whatever happened on that fateful Ash Wednesday, and not because eight years of PTSD are so harrowing. No, it’s hard to read because it’s boring. I wrote about how Part 2 feels like a plod. Part 3 is worse.
Problem No. 1. The cuckoo offers no real jeopardy, because we know that soon he’ll be history and William will get the girl. We don’t know what the outcome of his desperate phone call from Aberfan will be, the one when he tells Gloria he can’t possibly marry her, but we can guess. And we’re right, of course. As soon as Part 3’s timeline has brought us to that point—and there are still xx chapters to go—Gloria tells him to stop talking nonsense, and they are married in six months. In other words, the chapters up to this point feel like Browning Wroe is treading water. For some reason, she feels she has to fill us in on his boring biography. We get four years of William doing OK at school but, far more immediately important, doing far better in Robert and Howard’s funeral business. It’s as if he has embalming fluid in his blood…
…a joke nobody makes, but it might account for his near-inertia in every aspect of life outside the mortuary during his year at college. As the cuckoo—another, far less committed student called Ray—says to him later, William didn’t put up any kind of fight to keep him out. When Gloria asked William if he minded them going out together, first he pretended that he was OK with it—I’m not making this up—and second, that it was OK for Ray to marry her when he got her pregnant. What? What? And this is before the bad case of PTSD he has to live with after Aberfan. After that, he can’t go near a child without imagining it’s already dead or soon will be. You should hear the nightmares—which Gloria does, every night. And you should see the near-breakdown he has at the end of Part 3, when he grudgingly takes his sister-in-law’s fourth baby in his arms. It’s Browning Wroe’s unsubtle way of signalling, as if it hasn’t already been clear for years, that he needs some serious counselling. At last, he appears to accept it.
Any surprises yet? Nope. The only ones that do come are preposterous, like when, after the Christmas vacation, William returns to his idyllic lodgings—where, for all the first term, Gloria has been the icing on the cake—to find that Ray has moved in to share his bedroom. It must be another of his superpowers that he can remain attractive to a beautiful, funny and thoughtful young woman no matter what an idiot he is. He buries his feelings so deep—just he does regarding his mother—that he’s practically one of the walking dead. Is there a pulse? Hard to tell.
After years of marriage—Browning Wroe having used the oldest narrative get-out trick in the book to save Gloria from a loveless marriage with Ray, the nick-of-time miscarriage—they are living over the shop with Robert and Howard. William is happiest when he’s alone crooning to a client—Gloria always wonders why he’ll only sing to the dead—and all is fine. Fine. Except for the nightmares, the children Gloria would love to have but is too considerate and lovely to talk about, and the fact that William never thinks about how good he is with the living. Perhaps the reader is beginning to think he ought not to be with the dead all the time. How can that be helping him? And, in case we haven’t guessed at a possible get-out, William hadn’t just been a good student, he was brilliant. He remembers all the names of the body’s internal structures, the arteries, the organs, the… everything.
Browning drops what, surely, is an unmistakeable clue a few weeks into his training. ‘It pleases him, as he looks at someone in the street, that he’d know which is their external and which their internal carotid artery, that he could name every single bone in their skull. Yesterday, Arthur [their teacher] asked him if he’d ever considered medicine. He was pleased at the implication, but was sure he’d found his vocation.’ You heard it here first, folks. I’m still guessing, as I did right at the start, that however polite Browning Wroe is about William’s ‘vocation’—everyone in the undertaking business is a diamond in her universe—it’s not what a nice middle-class woman like her would want for her boy. If he isn’t getting some medical training before the end, I’ll be very surprised.
But Wroe hasn’t quite finished yet. There are—how many?—unresolved issues in William’s life, and his PTSD is only one of them. The other is Ash Wednesday. He refuses to forgive his mother—he doesn’t really speak to her, either when she drives from Swansea to get him after he’s been living at Robert and Howard’s for a few months, or when Gloria insists they invite her to their wedding six years later. And he feels so ashamed by his behaviour towards Martin that he has never even been able to open his letters, never mind write.
As it happens, an easy trick from the Thomas Hardy writer’s kit sorts out this last one. Finally, finally—they’ve been married for six years—Gloria persuades him to lay some ghosts in Cambridge. They go for the weekend, but William can’t go into the chapel to attend evensong with her. But when he comes to meet her afterwards, who else would she be talking to, with some down-and-outs he’s taken under his wing, than—guess. Martin, for it is he, tells William to forget about whatever happened, and any embarrassment he might feel. In fact, with William and Gloria in the Eagle pub—Browning Wroe loves to mention every detail of the famous ‘historic centre’ of Cambridge—Martin says a lot more. He’s the one who is clearly going to bring about the final revelations that Browning Wroe is going to give us about what did happen, and why William has never been able to grow out of his adolescent pettishness. But first…
…another two years pass after this, with the friendship well and truly renewed, but then comes the meltdown with the newborn niece. We’re going to have to wait until Part 4 or Part 5 for all to be revealed. I don’t know about you, but I don’t care. The world Browning Wroe does her best to evoke, with its dusty British Rail seats, its wax-paper bread wrappings, its Ford Anglias, just doesn’t work for me. There’s too much empty space, because she has no idea how to bring to life the three-dimensional, noisy, physical world of any human being’s reality. It means the characters are all either ciphers, like poor Ray the unredeemed working-class weasel, or automata like the more central characters. Even William sleepwalks through his life, his high points feeling like tacked-on samples from the Meaningful Interior Life scrapbook. Browning Wroe doesn’t attempt to describe the emptiness he must feel because of his self-imposed exile from any music in his life—it seems nonsensical that he never listens to any now—and what it feels like to live for six months in the same house as both his crush and his ratty betrayer. She doesn’t have the words. Empty space.
Parts 4 and 5—Midnight Choir and Aberfan
I was wrong about William becoming a doctor, despite his superb bedtime manner with a dying member of the ‘Midnight Choir’ he joins as a favour to Martin. Through his care, he helps bring about one of at least half a dozen epiphanies that Browning Wroe levers into these last sections. She is determined to leave no stone unturned, no difficulties unresolved. But before that—what would be the worst thing William could do, this king of the avoidance strategy and runner-away from difficulties? What is it that won’t solve anything? As Part 4 opens he’s run away from Gloria with every intention of never going back. He’s inflicted nothing but pain on her and everybody else who loves him—as she finally forced him to recognise after the newborn niece incident—and his answer when she asked what he was going to do about it had been, ‘Simple.’ I really should have guessed what he meant.
Where does he go to for two months, never communicating with Gloria in best William Lavery fashion? He knows how badly it aways turns out, but he goes anyway. Luckily—a word I know I’m going to use a lot in relation to these chapters—Browning Wroe slips into kindly author mode, again. Most of those epiphanies come about through those happy chances we’ve come to expect from her—which is fair enough, seeing as the catastrophic Ash Wednesday incident comes about following a series of correspondingly unhappy mischances. We’ll come to that, as William is led by the most perfect person he, or rather Browning Wroe, could have chosen to set him to rights.
It’s Martin, of course, the one who’s his friend again following the lucky etc. near the end of Part 3. The big man has never planned anything in his life, so it’s Browning Wroe who plans out a recovery programme for William. First comes the ‘Midnight Choir,’ made up of fifteen of the down-and-outs Martin was with when Gloria first met him outside the chapel. William is roped in to helping and, in the most predictable way possible, he gets both to sing with them—sing!—and to like them. Especially one, Colin, who lost everything following a messy divorce and alcoholism. Does our man, for the first time since Aberfan, think there might be people who’ve had a worse time of it than he has? I couldn’t possibly speculate. But when Colin goes missing near the end of William’s time there, William goes looking for him. After some days, widening his search he finds him in—where else?—Browning Wroe’s favourite cemetery. He’s been to London to catch a glimpse of his daughter outside her school, and now he’s almost too drunk to walk. By a happy chance it’s the day of a special spring performance by the college choir of a programme that includes—guess—and William will not be going. But he reminds Colin about it because it’s his favourite piece. And, for the first time in his life, William has to swallow his fears and take him.
In the chapel, after he re-lives the excruciating embarrassment—it’s no more than that—of his failure during the Miserere, comes the first of the major epiphanies. But first, note by note, that pesky memory of his takes him through the horror of that Ash Wednesday. His apprehension concerning Evelyn, Robert and Howard. His mother accidentally arriving late because of a delay on her journey. Her accidentally sitting in front of the men William has invited in her handwriting. Howard’s choosing exactly the wrong moment, with William looking at them and not his choirmaster, to lean forward with tulips for Evelyn.
Stop for a moment. How will the proudest mother in the chapel, blissfully focusing on her son’s big moment, react to flowers being given her by the man she least wants to see? OK, they’re her least favourite flowers—she always throws them away when Howard gives them to her—but is she going to fling out her arm with such violence the bunch disintegrates as tulips fly all over the congregation, one even landing on the choirmaster? It’s ridiculous, the stuff of farce, but… that’s what happens. How unlucky that it’s exactly the moment, during a piece that lasts twelve minutes, when Willliam’s solo is about to start. William is beyond mortification, looking at his mother and not the choirmaster—but, after an imperceptible delay, there they are—the first notes in the solo, reaching up to the beautiful vaulted roof. (We know it’s beautiful and vaulted because Browning Wroe loves an adjective as much as she loves a preposterous turn of the plot.)
Phew. Except not phew. Only after some time does he realise it’s not him reaching the high C. The choirmaster is looking at Martin, because that’s who stepped in when William was just standing there in silence, agape. And even though William is ready to take over for the rest of the piece, the choirmaster focuses on letting Martin finish. Instead of scoring the winning goal, Bobby Charlton has taken off his shorts and is running around the pitch at Wembley, naked. He can’t stand it and, unprecedentedly in the choir’s history, he leaves his place and sets the pattern for the rest of his life. He runs away—not only from this humiliation, but from the mother he blames. For thirteen years he lets his resentment fester, never for a moment thinking that perhaps the forgery of an invitation to Robert and Howard might have something to do with her reaction. (Interestingly, Browning Wroe never makes a thing of his part in the catastrophe. She doesn’t let William think of it once in all those years.)
And that’s it. It might not have become such a rift, Browning Wroe lets us know, had Evelyn been ready for him in Swansea four months before he was supposed to leave Cambridge. But she’s in digs, so Robert lets him stay at theirs, where William discovers his vocation in his spare time… etc. When she says she’s ready, his resentment has crystallised—Browning Wroe doesn’t tell us how—into a full-blown rift. And no, I don’t believe it either. Family dynamics don’t work in this step-by-unlucky-step way. But they do when a novelist relies on unfortunate plot twists every single time.
Now, in these sorting-out final sections of the novel, the plot twists have to be lucky ones. Martin keeps him productively busy. William has met Colin, a professional man down on his luck and, without realising it, discovers that kindness towards the living is as rewarding as kindness to the dead. You can see why I was sure he’d become a doctor… but Browning Wroe has his self-destructive psyche to sort out. Two things happen after his re-living of the embarrassing farce of that bungled solo, and new revelations come out. Colin, an alcoholic, has done all he needs to do, so he kindly gets out of William’s life to give him space. (The decision is Browning Wroe’s, not Colin’s.) He lurches into the path of a speeding car, and is fatally injured—but, preposterously, not in a way that renders him unconscious. Wouldn’t it be great if his ex-wife and the kids he’s not allowed to see could get to the hospital in time to catch his final minutes? And wouldn’t it be great if there was somebody, a professional, who might have the idea of making him look, from the neck up at least, as well turned out as he was before his life went belly-up? Wouldn’t it just?
After all that, there isn’t a dry eye in the house. But I said there were two things to sort out. The other is to do with an unresolved issue between William and Martin. Sure, they’re best mates now. But they’ve never talked about that Ash Wednesday… and now they do. Did we know that William had done something much worse than miss his solo? We do now—he had let that incident in the toilets trash Martin’s reputation as top dog. The chorus in the corridors ever after is to not turn your back on Martin—so, even before the singing starts, things are strained between them. He never opened Martin’s letters after his hasty exit because he was ashamed, and fearful that Martin would blame him. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Before the end of the evening, they are laughing hysterically about the whole farcical episode, including the tulips. At least, as William had clambered out of the choir stalls, he had slipped on a tulip stem and not a banana-skin. So this demon is not so much exorcised as reduced to a fast-dispersing puff of smoke.
What else needs sorting out, and what happy strokes of fortune can make it all happen? First: Gloria. William still thinks he did the right thing in leaving her, so that’s a non-starter. For now. What about Evelyn? Wouldn’t it be nice if… guess. She’s going to be married at short notice, just at the right moment. And he’ll go. He borrows Martin’s car and drives to Swansea—but a neighbour tells him she’s driven to pick Gloria up to help with the wedding. He’s in the car again, this time to the where they had been living. He misses them both—literally, not emotionally—and isn’t at all sorry to see that Gloria has moved out…. He’ll go to the wedding and, if he must, deal with Gloria when he gets there. He’s going to have lunch with Robert, Howard and Martin when they get there, but changes his mind and asks to be dropped off at his mother’s instead….
Can you guess how it goes? Of course you can, because William seems to have suddenly made up for all his years of acting like a child. Evelyn is lovely, the matron of honour helping her is lovely, and William is lovely. He even does Evelyn’s nails—which doesn’t make her think for one moment that he’s a closet gay. Demon: taken itself back to hell without a murmur. At the church, he escorts her down the aisle and sits next to guess who. (No, not Martin. Try to keep up.) And guess what she is. Yep, pregnant. She tells him later that she had planned to tell him after he had met the newborn niece, hoping he would be softened to the idea by cradling her. But this was back when Browning Wroe wasn’t letting any of the cards fall right, and we can guess why Gloria doesn’t mention it after his meltdown. She doesn’t get the chance.
Like Martin, Gloria is lovely. So William’s appalling disappearance for two months is forgotten, and before the reception is over everything is obviously going to be marvellous again. And no, she definitely didn’t get pregnant on purpose. But William still has the biggest demon of all to deal with, his dead children nightmares. Will she drive with him to Aberfan? Of course she will and, now that Browning Wroe is dealing all her players royal flushes, it goes better than anyone could have possibly expected. Except, if we’ve been paying attention, how could it possibly be otherwise? Gloria struggles with William up to the children’s cemetery, and there’s not only one of the mothers sitting on a bench—eight years before, she had been standing behind William when he had sung Myfanwy, too far away from all the other parents down below next to the newly-dug graves. She tells them about the ‘angel’ singing, and then—was it him? Was it really him?
But that’s just the icing on the cake. The woman, who lost her child, made the decision to have more children. She’ll never forget her first, but now she has others to love… because that’s how grown-ups deal with things. Nobody says this, but that’s what William is finally coming to realise. Is he cured? I bet he would be if he could only say thank you to the woman who helped him during those traumatic days, all those years before. Her house had been destroyed, he knows—but the woman knows where her new house is. And she’s in. And she tells Gloria what a lucky woman she is to have such a husband. And with a baby on the way? He’ll be a wonderful father.
If only. If only the answer to post-traumatic stress was a rapid series of fortunate events, each more life-confirming than the last. Things had been coming together even before Colin’s picturesque death, William is completely reconciled with Martin, Evelyn announces her marriage, ably assisted by Gloria—who is forgiving, pregnant, and so willing to have him back it’s like winning the lottery. And he can benefit from all his good fortune because hidden inside the crassly self-centred overgrown adolescent who has caused so much pain is a lovely, lovely man. God bless us, every one.
We can read it for you wholesale 