Budge Burgess
There is an implied truism that bereavement is something which happens suddenly, usually unexpectedly, leaving the bereaved to discover appropriate coping mechanisms and survival skills. But, as Paul Wilson demonstrates in Someone to Watch Over Me, bereavement can be insidious, slowly defrauding the individual of opportunity and potential.
Wilson employs the massacre of school children as launch vehicle for his latest novel, then allows this singular horror to fall back to earth like so much discarded detritus. It is the consequences of this explosive violence which expose the real tragedy – he looks down on the grimy little universe of a Lancashire town, temporarily illuminated by the world’s media, to discover a morass of past dreams, current fantasies, and lost futures.
The murders, themselves, quickly become yesterday’s news – tragedy is briefly owned by the world, then bequeathed to the survivors. But what makes this a unique spectacle is the rain of ancient parchments which descend on the town, apparently ‘Letters from God’. Is this some divine salve, a celestial benediction to ease the bereavement, or an apology?
Brenden Moon, insurance investigator, intrepid exposer of religious and paranormal scams, is parachuted in to uncover the fraud of otherworldly intervention. His enquiries will chart a galaxy of fantasies… and outline a black hole or two.
Moon knows about dreams – a Salford lad can get to grammar school, City can win the League. He appreciates that, if memories can be misleading, the future is hardly certain. Nevertheless, he is caught in a tug of scepticism – he must use science to disprove miracles, must replace faith with certainty. What he uncovers is a very material world.
Paul Wilson brings creditable social work skills and experience to his writing. He systematically exhumes bereavement – the dead children are quickly relegated to ephemeral memory: what remains, what the ‘Letters from God’ underwrite, is the loss of dreams, loss of futures, loss of hopes which are the daily fare of disadvantaged and marginalised people.
At the core of his narrative Wilson constructs a sympathetic relationship between a lonely, ageing groundsman and his assistant, a middle-aged man with learning difficulties. Described with passing tenderness and without sentimentality, this is an allegorical observation that even the detritus of society must be accorded a place, a role… love.
Wilson writes with an easy grace and with compassionate insight. He exhibits a love of the living rather than a joie de vivre. All communities have skeletons – most unrecognised. Real horror, he explains, does not lie in the random, aberrant act of a lonely psychopath; it cannot be interpreted by a spontaneous media feeding frenzy. No, real horror is hidden behind locked doors, shrouded in institutional or conventional denial, drawing strength from the willing blindness of society – a dream state which sedates and seduces people into acquiescence in the belief that it couldn’t happen here!
A compelling piece of work, Wilson’s writing is a plea that, in a world where we are fed a daily diet of obsequious star-struck hype, it’s vital that we return our gaze to earth and value what is real.
