Book review: Cruel story not the best way to write a novel
Alexia Casale. Picture: Faber & Faber
- The Best Way To Bury Your Husband
- Alexia Casale
- Viking: €15.99
- Kindle: €8.49
Her starting point was increased domestic violence rates in the pandemic. She says in an afterword: “On average, a woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK; in the vast majority of cases, that man is a current or former partner.
"At the start of the covid lockdown, the femicide rate doubled in the first three weeks: 14 women were killed where a man was suspected of, or charged with, the crime.”
Casale, senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University, and with a special interest in human rights and violence against women, decided to take a humorous approach, by packaging her message in a piece of popular fiction aimed at women: “I’m trying to make people laugh and then think,” she writes.
The novel opens with Sally, the chatty narrator, smashing her abusive husband Jim’s head in with her granny’s cast-iron skillet.
Her first reaction is to dial 999, but she hesitates, believing this would lead to a long prison sentence, and deprive her two ‘children’ (who have recently left home) of both their parents.
The privacy of lockdown helps her hide the corpse, which she wraps in a tarpaulin with cat litter and rice to desiccate the remains.
Within days, Sally has encountered Ruth, a black nurse from the Caribbean, who has killed her husband, Lionel, by kicking him downstairs; Samira, who used rat poison in his favourite curry to get rid of Yafir, who was proposing an arranged marriage for their daughter, Leila; and Janey, a 42-year-old coping with a new-born first baby and her equally sleep-deprived husband, Keith. Janey is hallucinating with tiredness when she stabs Keith with a spear-like light fitting, killing him.
Led by Sally, who becomes stronger and more assertive with every day, the women form the Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club to face up to the biggest challenge of all: Disposing of the large, bulky bodies of their husbands. Rather than a who-dunnit, the novel’s theme becomes, “Will they get away with it?”.
One of the best characters is an older woman, Edwina, the nosy neighbour, who changes in the course of the novel from a bad-tempered old stick to a vibrant and funny companion and mentor to the younger women.
I felt ambivalent after the first death, but by the fourth dead body, this had turned to a distinct unease. The chatty tone of Sally’s narrative, the banter, and the cleverness of the group’s body-disposal plans — which include setting up an alternative scenario via mobile phones and sat-nav to explain the disappearances of the four men — were not enough to distract me from this terrible unease about their deaths. Or should I call it moral repugnance, old-fashioned though it sounds?
As Sally prepares herself in a chapter entitled ‘A Life in Pieces’ for “her final confrontation with Jim”, I am hoping she will spare us the details. “Just pretend you’re jointing a deer carcass.”
By the time she confides that “another bucket-full of Jim-parts is disposed of the next day”, I wanted to stop reading. But I persevered.
Alexia Casale is a good writer of popular fiction, but somebody more experienced should have told her this project was not a good idea. It is a huge waste of talent, and of her readers’ time. And its lack of respect for human life, even if the lives belong to wife-abusers, is unforgivable.
