Light Perpetual

December 1, 2020

In 1944 London, a lethal fire rips through a crowd gathered to gawk at a Woolworths shipment of aluminum saucepans--a rare sight since most metal has been melted down for the war effort--and Spufford imagines how the lives of five children who died in the blaze might have unfolded in a rapidly changing Britain. The esteemed nonfiction writer follows up his Costa, Ondaatje, and Desmond Elliot-winning first novel, Golden Hill.

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Starred review from March 22, 2021
Spufford (Golden Hill) spins alternate narratives for five Londoners who died during the London Blitz in this magical yarn. The story opens in 1944 as the characters are killed in a rocket attack during Hitler’s “Vengeance Campaign” against Great Britain. After conjuring this tragedy, the narrator draws on Zeno’s paradox to theorize that for every historical event that’s occurred, there is an event that might have occurred. Thus, the reader comes to know sisters Jo and Val—the former, a brilliant and soulful rock star living in California; the latter, a woman trapped in a relationship with a violent, racist skinhead in England. As a London businessman, Vern sees peaks and valleys, as does Alec, a once-typesetter at the Times who in the ’70s finds his calling as a teacher. Ben is a schizophrenic whose heart-wrenching breakdown in 1979 London comprises the novel’s most stunning chapter. These narrative threads sometimes overlap, as when an adult Vern, bullied by Alec as a child, inadvertently knocks on Alec’s door while pursuing a property scheme. Watching the roles of bully and victim get reversed as the two of them catch up over tea is both tense and satisfying. Thanks to Spufford’s narrative wizardry, all five protagonists come to vivid life in this spectacularly moving story. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

May 1, 2021
This richly imagined mosaic tracks the lives five Londoners might have experienced if they hadn't been killed as children by a V-2 rocket during World War II. It starts with a bang in an almost poetic description of the German weapon's inner workings and the utter havoc it wreaks. Spufford notes in a postscript the historical source of his opening scene: the 1944 bombing of a London Woolworths that killed 168, including 15 children. As god-novelist, he undoes death and gives five young victims an escape clause, "some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be." It's a device that might recall Kate Atkinson's Life After Life but with only one-time reincarnations. After we get a school-days view of the quintet in 1949, they are shown in their separate adult lives--with occasional intersections--every 15 years through 2009. Jo has a moment of pop stardom, Alec endures the union struggles on Fleet Street, Val finds love and darkness with a skinhead, Vern plays con man and real estate mogul, and Ben teeters on the edge of mental collapse. The precis doesn't do it justice. While the view is fragmentary and full of gaps, the characters are complex, engaging, memorable. Spufford does indeed bring them to life. He also brings depth and detail to every vignette, from a boy's view of soccer to hot-lead typesetting, a neo-Nazi concert, or a trip on a double-decker bus. There's a subtle theme on the war's legacy woven from references to building and rebuilding. The bigger threads are people and family, change and time, how we hurt, love, and use each other and find or lose ourselves while our brief lives evolve in "a messy spiral of hours and years." Entertaining and unconventional.

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May 15, 2021
Five children die in 1944, but imagined glimpses of their unlived lives generate powerful moments of reflection and redemption. A German V-2 rocket obliterates a London department store, instantly killing young Alec and Ben, sisters Jo and Val, and pudgy little Vern with his finger up his nose. "Come, other future," pleads our narrator. And so we witness Alec attain and lose his job as a newspaper typesetter. Jo's musical aspirations fizzle into teaching and self-doubt, while Val becomes an accessory to violence. Ben struggles with mental illness, and Vern ventures unscrupulously into real-estate development. Meanwhile, the fictitious South London borough of Bexford gentrifies around them. By 2009, members of the group will have weathered divorce, bankruptcy, and prison, but they will have also known the joys of grandchildren, late-life romance, and forgiveness. Their lives are full, dynamic, and ordinary, their twists and turns tied to the turbulence of the late twentieth century. What is extraordinary, the author implies, may be the fragile miracle of life in the first place. Spufford's second novel swells with the same lively, intimate prose as his celebrated debut, The Golden Hill (2017). But its unconventional framing and larger, more contemporary themes makes it an even stronger book.

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