Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual takes as its starting point an actual event when a bomb exploded at a Woolworth’s store on Bexford High Street in London in 1944, killing 168 people, 15 of whom were children.
The novel’s opening is astonishing. Spufford gives an intricately detailed, clinical description in slow motion of the bomb as it detonates and explodes. He suggests an alternative reality by inviting the reader to explore the lives of five children who died in the explosion. He gives them fictional names and offers an alternative trajectory of their lives, a what might have been had they lived. The five children are Jo and Val (sisters) Vern, Alec, and Ben. Spufford develops the narrative thread of each character’s progression in fifteen-year intervals. He begins with section t+5: 1949 and concludes their narratives with t+65: 2009 when they are in their 70s.
The structure is very original. Against the backdrop of the shifting cultural, economic, political, social, and physical changes in London, we witness the characters as they grow, make choices, and struggle with their inner and outer demons. They experience tragedy, setbacks, and triumphs. The characters are distinct, authentically drawn with rich and varied lives, their interior struggles skillfully depicted, their narrative threads compelling. The seeds of who they are as children forecast who they become as adults. We see them grow up, marry, become parents and grandparents, separate, divorce. We see them as bus conductors, musicians, teachers, con artists, union organizers at a newspaper, construction workers, mental health patients, and criminals.
The most outstanding quality of this book and what makes it such an incredibly powerful read is the luminous prose. It soars and lifts. Its intricate, tactile details create immediacy. Even the most mundane task, like washing dishes or working with a machine, are endowed with significance. Some of the descriptions are breathtakingly riveting. The pace varies, sometimes slowing down, other times speeding up. Spufford’s brushstrokes are masterful whether he describes Ben’s crippling anxiety or Val’s guilt, Jo’s synesthesia or Vern’s scheming. The interiority of the characters is handled with a delicate empathy. What emerges from this powerful story is the imagined lives of five children in all its thorny and poignant detail.
The writing is beautiful, perceptive, stunning, and threaded with compassion and tenderness for the lives cut short in 1944. The tone of melancholy throughout extends far beyond the knowledge that these children never lived long enough to experience a future. It extends to the complexity, fragility, finitude, and interconnectedness of all that pulsates with life.
Highly recommended.