Novel of the week Cal Revely-Calder

A TERRIBLE KINDNESS by Jo Browning Wroe

377pp, Faber, £14.99, ebook £8.99 ★★ ★★★

Aberfan is a story that Britain will, and should, find difficult to forget. A natural disaster, caused by official negligence, that took 116 children’s lives; photographs of the giant spoil-tip that swept through a Welsh primary school; schoolgirls praying on the ruins as men dug towards classmates entombed below.

That 1966 disaster underpins A Terrible Kindness, the debut novel by 58-year-old Jo Browning Wroe. Her approach is the obverse to that of The Crown, which focused, in its 2019 episode “Aberfan”, on the sluggish political and royal response (which the Queen is said still to regret). Browning Wroe invents a 19-year-old, William, from a family of embalmers, who arrives that night on his very first job. He finds bodies being borne through the rain, slurry coursing across the streets.

The Aberfan passages, opening and closing the book, let the tragedy speak for itself: more reportage than invention, they have a hushed effectiveness. But 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 RollsRoyce and bullies the poorer kids, to Gloria, whose entire personality can be summed up as “sweetheart”, and whose dreadful treatment by William can only shake, never break, her love.

Only in the Aberfan sections does the sentimentality of A Terrible Kindness not seem out of place: the bereaved parents are true pictures of grief, and later, the words on their children’s graves have a plaintive naivety. But away from there, in Cambridge or London, this much-hyped debut reads like average Young Adult fare. What happened in the Welsh valleys that year is enraging, compelling, haunting – for a storyteller, the works. The great Aberfan novel, however, is yet to come.