Francis Spufford - Light Perpetual

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review: Flawed but rewarding 

 

In the end I enjoyed Light Perpetual a lot, but I did have my reservations – especially about the beginning. The narrative consists of snapshots of the lives which five children might have lived if they hadn’t been killed in an air-raid in 1944. It is, in effect, both a sort of social history of London and also a set of character studies as Francis Spufford develops his protagonists through childhood, the formative years of early adulthood and then, with increasing intervals between vignettes, into their seventies.

Frankly, I hated the beginning so much that I very nearly abandoned the book altogether. It is verbose, self-regardingly pretentious and in the end wholly irrelevant to the subsequent development of the book. I’m glad I persisted, though, because this subsides so I did become very involved with the characters’ lives and found Spufford’s analysis of their characters and the background events very shrewd much of the time. There is a fine line between really good, inventive writing and pretentious showing-off; Spufford begins on the wrong side of that line by a long way, in my view, but later I found the book readable, involving and with some important things to say. There are stories of opportunities missed and taken, of second chances and of the sort of unexpected turns that lives may take. I found some passages quite remarkably evocative, like the experience of being in hospital drugged on largactyl in the 60s or of the hateful, vicious bigotry of the far right in the 70s for example. Even though I think Spufford does stray into show-off territory sometimes, as a whole I found this a very rewarding novel.

So, not perfect but enjoyable and thoughtful in spite of its flaws. Recommended.

(My thanks to Faber & Faber for an ARC via NetGalley.)