Light Perpetual

 

I've had a soft spot for Francis Spufford ever since reading his memoir, The Child That Books Built, in which he discusses with love and insight all the same books that I read myself as a child (well, a good handful of them). But I'd never read any of his actual fiction before. 

I'm pleased to report that Light Perpetual is an absolutely superb novel. Spufford begins with a bomb falling on a London department store in the Blitz, killing everyone including five young children. He then imagines the lives that those children might have led if they hadn't been obliterated, taking the reader on a journey through the whole twentieth century in five mostly separate, but sometimes interweaving, strands. (As it happens, the five children are exactly the same age as my mother!)

Light Perpetual proceeds in glimpses, beautifully crafted little chapters like sparkling jewels -- his prose is wonderful. While it's probably not a great thing that all the children are white, Spufford does take pains to increase the diversity of the characters as the book goes along. There is Ben, prey to obsessive thoughts; Jo, a singer; her twin Val, who becomes shackled to a white supremicist; clever Alec; and greedy Vernon. Of course a single novel can't touch base with every historical moment or movement over eight decades, but Light Perpetual does cover a lot of ground, and I was invested in the life stories of each of the main characters (we glimpse them about every fifteen years or so). It was a bit like the 7 Up docos in structure, a series I have loved and followed all my life.

Now I'd better look for Golden Hill, I suppose -- oh dear, the list of books I must read never gets any shorter.