Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford Alex Clark
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Francis Spufford’s first novel, Golden Hill (2016), was structured around the withholding of a secret until nearly the end.
His second gives us a searingly painful climax before we’ve got through the first dozen pages. Both books play loving, imaginative games with the idea of what fiction is and what it’s for. Both recreate, alongside intricate human dramas, dazzling portraits of cities – 18th-century New York and London from the Second World War onwards – and the passages of history that made and unmade them.
The opening of Light Perpetual is about unmaking of a particularly devastating kind. It is 1944 and, in a branch of Woolworths in the fictional south-london borough of Bexford, shoppers are jostling over a new delivery of saucepans. The V-2 that plunges through the store’s roof arrives so quickly that there’s no time for its image to travel from the retinas of its victims to their brains; the ten-thousandth of a second such a journey would take is too slow for the kind of death rockets bring.
And too slow for Spufford’s pointillist description, which blends terrifyingly dispassionate technical information – the 910 kilos of amatol, the air shock that also kills all the passengers on a nearby tram – with a meditation on the nature of time and its apprehension.
Among the dead are five schoolchildren: twin sisters Jo and Valerie, clever Alec, timid Ben and bullish Vernon. But, a few pages later, they are resurrected, their lives restarted and their stories – told in chunks that skip a few years each time, until we reach almost the present day – ready to begin.
For the reader, the question is: if one were to remove the novel’s opening salvo and allow oneself the immersive pleasure of following these characters’ lives without thought of their paradoxical premature deaths, what would be lost?
There is, perhaps most obviously, the question of tension. It’s impossible to follow Vernon’s dubious progress as an unscrupulous property dealer, Jo’s musical career or Ben’s harrowing mental illness without the occasional jolt of remembering that they are dead – and that Spufford has invented not only their deaths, but their reprieves, too.
The sensation of repetitive undercutting creates a peculiar form of empathy, which we can guess is the point – especially when it comes to their suffering, painfully elaborated on so that we might speculate on whether, after all, a life might be happier unlived.
Nowhere is this starker than in the compelling episodes detailing Ben’s tortured inner life. One particular instance, when we follow the bus on which he is a conductor throughout its route, accompanied by his mental contortions to try to escape the terror that imprisons him, is one of the most extraordinary depictions of insanity I can recall reading.
Such minute attention to individual interior landscape is in contrast to the novel’s other predominant mode, the panoramic. Spufford takes us through episodes in postwar Britain – the rise of the skinhead movement or the revolutions in newspaper printing that saw compositors become, almost overnight, dinosaurs in our midst – with detached compassion.
The contemporary novelist he calls to mind most strongly is not an overt state-of-the-nation writer such as John Lanchester, but one with a miniaturist sensibility, Tessa Hadley.
There are moments when this can feel like an uncomfortable juxtaposition; the shove of time marching on, just as you’re becoming gripped by a specific psychological moment. But marching on is what time does, mercilessly, demanding that we view it at such close quarters that we can barely make out the pattern, and then from a blurry distance that makes us question what we’re seeing.
Spufford achieves something else. He imbues his stories with immanence: an apprehension of the profoundly spiritual that encompasses both the mundane and the timeless. The novel’s title evokes a Christian belief in eternal rest. As well as a brief allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins, there’s an unmentioned kinship with T S Eliot’s Four Quartets – an atmosphere of constant recirculation.
It is, in a way, a novel about faith; in the value of such a precarious life, its fissures, its connective tissue and our dispensability. And, in the midst of that fragility, it’s a restatement of the value of reimagining lives so that we might better understand them.