A very private grief

Soham: A Story of Our Times
by Nicci Gerrard
(Short Books, £9.99)

It must be said at once that this is a deeply satisfying and thoughtful book. Much rubbish has already been written about the heart-rending tragedy of Soham, and doubtless there will be more, so it is a relief that Nicci Gerrard has found the cool, perceptive calmness of mind to deal with it responsibly and reflectively.

She has obviously been driven to it. This is not a task she has undertaken for want of any other at hand, but because she had to. There is an imperative urge in the writing which transforms a private meditation into a superlative essay full of bite and indignation.

The disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, and the subsequent trial of their murderer, Ian Huntley, are themes which hover behind each page, but they are not central. Gerrard is much more concerned with public responses, the impertinent presumption that we could share the wounds of the girls' families with a selfindulgent, tawdry display of imagined grief.

Emotion has replaced religion in our world, she says, the facile surrender to emotion being much less demanding (or intelligent, one might add) than moral pondering. The resulting collective grief was both inauthentic and shallow, due to the fashion of judging people "by the feelings they display rather than the ideas they hold", which ultimately implies assessing their selfishness.

This selfishness is further compounded by the ludicrous, even pernicious doctrine that we are all in need of " counselling" to withstand those inconvenient accidents of life - distress and unhappiness.

We have grown suspicious of reserve and stoicism, and actively encourage everyone to give way at the drop of a hat (or a counsellor). Thus the whole country was said to be in shock, which was a gross insult to the girls' parents. Mr and Mrs Chapman have let it be known that they will not welcome any enquiry by any journalist; their grief is their own, not ours, and they thereby teach us a lesson.

Beyond that, Gerrard's clearness of mind guides her into many surprising side-streets. After a blistering account of the relentless cross-examination which smashed Huntley's assurance in court, she concedes that he probably believed his own version of what happened in his house that August evening, that he was moved by his own words.

"It's hard for the mind to know itself as wicked," she writes, and reminds us, moreover, that none of us know what we might do in any untried situation, and "most of us have the moral luck never to be tested".

Lest this sound dangerously close to relativism and excessive tolerance, I have to promise you that it occurs in a chapter tautly controlled by firm philosphical honesty. She also says that most people are totally hidden from one another, "because kindness and cruelty often wear the same face".

To make the reader reflect upon the possibly sordid reasons why we all devoured the Holly and Jessica story so thoughtlessly, she quotes the example of the 14-year-old girl from south-east London whose decomposing body was found in a disused cement works.

Her tragedy attracted little attention, but there was a devastatingly foul remark from a police officer that the little girl's mother "was not really press conference material". That encapsulates everything that Gerrard is struggling against.