Time’s passing has done little to dim the horror of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, in which thousands of tonnes of coal waste thundered down a mountainside and engulfed a Welsh junior school. The sentiments it so powerfully evokes inform the opening of Jo Browning Wroe’s debut novel, A Terrible Kindness, which begins as hope of finding survivors dwindles.
Responding to the appeal for help, newly qualified undertaker William Lavery, 19, loads a hearse with embalming fluids and heartbreakingly small coffins, and drives through the night from his Uncle Robert’s Midlands funeral home. There are still 140 bodies to rescue, most of them children, and the scenes he witnesses are captured in a sequence of crisply etched images, some plucked from history, others from the author’s imagination.
Returning home, William finds himself prone to bad dreams and flashbacks. The experience solidifies something for him: never will he let himself become a parent – though when he tries to break things off with his cockney girlfriend, Gloria, she’s having none of it.
And yet what really undid William in Aberfan was hearing the strains of Allegri’s Miserere playing on a radio. The music unlocked a memory he has fought to suppress, transporting him back to Cambridge where, five years previously, his career as a boy chorister came to an ignominious end amid a flurry of red tulip petals. It’s a scene – and it really is a scene – whose cause is rooted still further back, in his father’s death when he was just eight years old, and in subsequently worsening tensions between his insecure, grieving mother and her late husband’s gay twin brother.
But there’s also the question of why William hasn’t spoken to his best friend, Martin, in half a decade. He turns out to be carrying a great deal of baggage for one so young, and it’s unpacked in a thoughtful period drama that skips confidently between his childhood and early adulthood, revealing that while, yes, he’s been dealt a lousy hand, he has also, as Gloria puts it, been a “big pillock”. Or as Martin more measuredly tells him: “You can’t bear anything to be more than one story.”
This well-crafted tale contains many joys, the least expected its meticulous evocation of the hidden world of undertaking, with its clannish decorum. Browning Wroe can’t resist a scene in which William embalms to a soundtrack of Build Me Up Buttercup.
Most of the music that flows through these pages is choral, however, striking a note of welcome profundity and counterbalancing the novel’s perkier attributes, such as Gloria’s simple loveliness, or the sustaining bond that Uncle Robert forges with his life partner despite living in an era of unchecked homophobia.
But what does it mean to hitch such upbeat fiction to a real-life tragedy? It’s a qualm the novel itself acknowledges, albeit indirectly. Before its close, William returns to the Welsh village and is confounded to find that it hasn’t remained trapped in the moment in quite the same way as a part of himself has. Aberfan, he realises, is more than one “story”, and it’s not his to use when explaining his own.
• A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
