The Life We Bury
By: Allen Eskens / Narrated By: Zach Villa
Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
Was really good… until I started thinking about a few things
But maybe that shouldn’t sway you from an audiobook that I listened to all in one sitting, so obviously it held my attention, yes?
For a college class, Joe is assigned to write the biography of someone, anyone, who’s lived a long life that had turning points along the way. Naturally he seeks someone out in a nursing home and decides that it’ll be all right to interview Carl, the only person the staff is okay with him interviewing. Just one thing: Carl is a murderer, and Carl is going to be dying very, very soon. Perhaps Joe will get a dying declaration?
The book follows as Joe gets to know Carl, a man he views numbly at first, then with horror as he studies up on Carl’s murder of a 14-year old girl. It’s a gruesome, gruesome crime, and Carl set a shed on fire to incinerate the girl’s corpse.
But not all is as it seems. Carl’s friend Virgil is absolutely convinced of Carl’s innocence, even tells Joe of some heroics during the two men’s time in Vietnam. It’s enough to make Joe begin to question absolute guilt, even as Joe’s neighbor Lila is filled with disgust, wanting Carl dead sooner rather than later because of the horror of the crime.
And things just start getting weirder and more complex the more Joe and Lila look into the crime, the more they study the trial transcripts, the more they view the evidence and even question people involved. The Life We Bury is a long search for guilt, a long search for innocence, a long search to discover what would make a person evil.
There’s more to it than that. Joe’s family life makes him feel trapped and angry. He’s desperately trying to bury his own life, leave his irresponsible, alcoholic mother behind. And he’d really like to leave his brother’s problems behind too (his brother is pretty heavily on the autism spectrum, and Joe doesn’t have the resources, the time, to care for him).
There are twists and turns. There’s plenty of action. It totally kept me going for the 8+ hours of the book. But when the story came to the end, I started thinking about it, turning things over in my mind, and I realized that a LOT of things just fell into Joe’s lap. He conveniently had the skills he needed whenever anything hit the fan. And the way it ends? Very, very lucky. So lucky for all involved. …too lucky…?
Still, the plot and characters kept me going, and though Zach Villa’s narration sometimes felt flat, he did a good enough job to keep me engaged. Plus I thought that Joe’s a guy who’s desperately trying to not feel anything—that could explain why the delivery of his thoughts comes in a near monotone.
Make of it what you will. The Life We Bury is sure to keep you going. It’s just that, when all is said and done, when the last sentence has been delivered, you might think that things were simply a taaaaad too easy…
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