Official Review: If You Sit Very Still by Marian Partington

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[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "If You Sit Very Still" by Marian Partington.]

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“If You Sit Very Still” is the fascinating memoir of Marian Partington, the sister of Lucy, a women abducted, raped and murdered in the 1970’s. It deals with Marian’s path to forgiveness and details the known facts of Lucy’s murder, so first I want put in a warning. This is an intense, raw book and it deals with very very difficult subjects, there are many things that may be triggering in this book, including but not limited to rape, murder and dismemberment. If these things are triggering for you, I would definitely not recommend reading this book. However, I have one caveat, one of the central ideas of this book is that silence and avoidance only increases our fear, pain and shame of these subjects; that to speak of these things openly, allows a new kind of healing and connection. For that reason I encourage everybody to read it, carefully, with a notebook to write down that which is useful to you and a handkerchief for when it gets a little too much.

On 27th December 1973, Lucy Partington was abducted from a bus-stop in Evesham Road, Cheltenham, raped, murdered and then buried in the basement of 25 Cromwell St by Frederick and Rosemary West. Her whereabouts remained unknown for 20 years until Frederick West told the police in Gloucester that there were more bodies in the basement on 4th March 1994, and that one of them was Lucy’s. “The Wests” are the perpetrators of the rape, torture and murder of at least twelve young women between the years of 1971 and 1987 and who are particularly famous in England for the scale of their crimes and the long-winded nature of Rosemary’s trial. Frederick West confessed to his crimes but hanged himself on the 1st of January 1995 before going to trial. Rosemary West has maintained her innocence since she was arrested but was unanimously convicted and will remain in prison for the rest of her life. The depth of the depravity of their crimes is hard to fathom, particularly as many details will never be known, but a timeline of events can be found on Wikipedia. This book is an expansion of Marian’s essay “Salvaging the Sacred”, published in The Guardian Weekend in May 1996.

While the book is first and foremost a memoir of Marian’s life, it also holds the secondary purposes of showing how and why we should strive to forgive those that hurt us, and as a reminder of all that Lucy was and is to those who knew her. While Marian’s life is interesting and worth reading about, and the mementos of Lucy are very touching, the greatest result (in my opinion) of this book is the many insights Marian makes into forgiveness and the effects of tragedy on a person. These insights come from many sources; some come from fellow suffers of tragedies as the quote below does, others from religious leaders. “Forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past” - Abagayle Blount

Religion is one of the major themes of the book; Lucy was a newly converted Catholic at the time of her abduction and Marian uses both Quaker and Eastern Holistic (Buddhism) teachings to help her find forgiveness and a more peaceful state of being. The quote below is of Buddhism’s beliefs on the nature of Evil and this new understanding of the Wests actions inspired new insights into forgiveness for Marian. “Evil is an enormous mistake made by the perpetrator. This emphasized the need for mindfulness in all of our thoughts and actions, and the need to work towards purification and commitment to the good”. Literature is also of huge importance to both Marian and Lucy, they both took English Literature degrees, Lucy wrote poetry while she lived and Marian has used writing as part of her healing process. She quotes poems by Lucy and from literature throughout, and uses dictionary definitions of words to illuminate and emphasise the understanding she gained at each stage. The below extract of a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko had particular significance as it tied together several ideas involving how words get distributed and how one can heal through writing.

I Hung A Poem On A Branch by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, extract;

If we have trouble on the way,
We’ll remember that somewhere bathed in light,
A tree is waving a poem
And smiling, we’ll say:
We have to go on

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about this book is its structure. At the time of Lucy’s abduction, she was studying for an English Literature degree and for this reason she was carrying in her bag an extremely old and valuable manuscript, the fourteenth century Dream Vision called Pearl. This manuscript was lost the day Lucy was abducted and it has never been found. In a truly uncanny turn of events, this poem was also about dealing with grief in the face of great tragedy, its narrative was divided into four parts; these were Crisis, Confession, Comprehension and Transformation. Marian uses this form to divide up the fragments of her life, which places each piece in a framework of understanding that is greater than a simple chronological narrative, would have been. Dreams and their interpretation are also used throughout the book as part of her homage to Pearl and to illustrate the raw emotions and issues she needed to deal with. In her researches of Pearl, she found that the genre of dream vision was in itself very relevant to her process of healing as quoted here: “in the National Library of Wales I read that this genre is “a process of psychic redemption, closely resembling, though wider in scope than, modern psychology”

This book fills you with both, overwhelming sadness and hope; it is an intense rollercoaster ride of emotions as Partington describes the raw details of Lucy’s disappearance, its effect on her own life and finally her struggle through crushing grief to acceptance and forgiveness of the perpetrators of Lucy’s murder. There were many things I loved about this book, such that I feel it is a privilege to read and review it. In no particular order a few of the great features of this book are; the way Marian doesn’t hold back from using gritty, painful details of her life, that many parts are written as though speaking to Lucy herself and the interwoven use of themes to illustrate how she felt and how she found her way forward. If You Sit Very Still is a fascinating book that is both technically well written and deals with some very important issues that we all face to some degree. Marian allows us to examine our own grief and forgiveness issues by breaking her silence. She allowed herself to be vulnerable for this book and as a result her humanity shines through. I give this book 4 out of 4 because I truly do not see how it could have been any better. However given the seriously adult nature of her story, this is definitely for mature readers.

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