Death and the Cybernetic Mind A review of the novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones was published in 2002; and released in cinema adaptation in 2010. As a runaway success, doubtless many reviews and discussions would have taken place. This review is experimental: It seeks to consider this popular novel from a perspective about systemicity. My concern here is with the plausibility of transmission of cybernetic ideas and systemic knowledge in popular cultures through practical and symbolic means, rather than explicit conceptual discussion. Other concerns inform my desire to wrestle with an attempt to respond to this book. In my reading it had a compelling, haunting and powerfully beautiful quality— resonant and backlit. It transported me back to my brother’s demise in 2003. A story about death would doubtless remind any reader of the one(s) that he or she has faced. However, my own experience had imprinted me with a radically altered—perhaps, heretical—perspective on the phenomenon, which I have wanted to write about. The novel reprises these ideas; compels me to revisit, exhume and perhaps attempt articulation. The protagonist in Sebold’s novel, Susie, is sexually assaulted and then murdered right at the start. She then goes on to narrate the story from her personal heaven. This is a brilliant stroke of literary technique that provides the canvas for an examination of our constructs around death. At once, this location provides for an unusual perspective, as Susie can then be present at and witness any of the myriad events that unfold from this point on, and link them all in a single coherent pattern of meaning. This device further permits semiotic interpretation by the narrator of everybody’s actions and all events. I think this creates a situation where Sebold’s imagination of a space for an omniscient knowledge of human affairs, makes us review the limitations of our own human perspectives and knowledge. By our partial knowledge, do we know and intuit wider patterns than we know that we know? What is this chilling knowledge in the bones that we frequently and conventionally refer to—an idea that there is a vast understanding of all there is to know deep within our bones? Sebold takes a strong stab at these epistemological puzzles in crafting her story. There are dialogues between Susie, and her mentor in heaven—Franny, her “intake counsellor” (Sebold, 2002, p. 18) who tells her how she