Mind Picker: Light Perpetual

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

At the sentence level, Light Perpetual feels kind of remarkable — the language is lyrical, the scenes rich in specific detail, fates ebbing and flowing like the roar of a crowd at a football match — but overall, as a novel, it feels kind of pointless. I understand why Francis Spufford wrote this book (daily walking past a memorial plaque at the site of a London Woolworths that had been bombed during WWII — killing 168 people, including 15 children — Spufford decided to bring a fictional five of those children back to life and explore what those lives might have been had that bomb never landed), but beyond the satisfaction of playing God and resurrecting dead innocents, there’s really no literary payoff in this novel. Spufford imagines five ordinary, often unhappy, fates for these children — none of them goes on to cure cancer or prevent 9/11; the world seems utterly unaffected whether they live or not — and with just the one timeline given, with no contrast with how the world would have looked if they had died as children, the central concept feels like a big so what? (By contrast, Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 describes four different lives that might have played out for one character had small differences occurred in his surroundings; and while I might have found it a bit dull and self-indulgent, I understood the point of it.) This book is fine; I didn’t find it literarily strong enough to have been a real contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize, am not surprised it didn’t make the shortlist, and I could have skipped it without feeling poorer for it. Had some lovely sentences, though.

He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is evolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.

There’s a truly surreal prologue in which the destruction of the Woolworths is described and then we are invited to imagine an alternate reality in which some hiccup, failure, some tiny alteration, sent that bomb off course. The novel then starts properly five years later, in 1949, with a class of schoolchildren having their Singing Class and we are first introduced to the five: Jo has a beautiful singing voice, and synaesthetically, sees music as colours; her twin, Val, is more interested in boys than singing; Vernon is a piggish bully who wishes he had a good singing voice because he is helplessly in thrall to music’s beauty; Alec is clever and smart-mouthed; and in a separate scene, we meet poor little Ben, undersized and scatterbrained, as he attends the footie with his Da. From here, the timeline jumps ahead fifteen years at a go (to 1964, 1979, 1994, and 2009), and in each period, the characters’ basic traits are pretty much what they had been as children. Spufford does add some incredibly detailed scenes that must have been the result of extensive research — the operation of a linotype machine at a major newspaper, the mechanics of writing a song and laying down multiple tracks, the routine of a double-decker bus conductor in London’s core — but they were more like impressive vignettes than scenes integral to the story. And Spufford introduces a bunch of issues — schizophrenia (which can apparently be cured by the love of a good woman, and an exorcism), labour strikes during the Thatcher era (but are we honestly meant to support the typesetters’ right to do their job forever at the dawn of the digital era?), neo-Naziism (but does anyone buy the explanation for Mike’s need to crack skulls or Val’s inability to leave him?), and bulimia (and honestly, this granddaughter seemed written into the plot just so Spufford could make her sick. Why?) — but these seemed more for colour than as points of entry into exploring the changing social scene over the decades. There are stories here, but not a satisfying novel.

People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.

Einstein said that we can live our lives as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is, and that may have ultimately been Spufford’s intention with Light Perpetual: He writes five incredibly ordinary lives here, maybe daring me to say that these lives were not important enough to write about. Either all of our lives matter or none of them do; we are either all miracles or none of us are. We all amount to dust in the end and the world is poorer for it. There’s a nugget of something interesting there, but it didn’t carry the novel for me.