Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford - review

---

Title: Light Perpetual

Author: Francis Spufford

Genre: Historical fiction

Pages: 336

My rating: ★★★☆☆

Other notable works by author: Golden Hill; Red Plenty

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

---

I was really excited to start Francis Spufford's new, brilliantly titled, novel: Light Perpetual. The cover was alluring, the synopsis was titillating, but unfortunately, for me the story fell a little flat.

Set in the fictionalised borough of Bexford, in south-east London, the novel follows the lives of five individuals as they live through the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The novel poses a question that many people think about daily: "what if?" What if this had happened instead of that? What if I had done that instead of this? In this case, Spufford asks (and answers): What if a rocket attack that had obliterated a Woolworths and the lives of five small children within, one Saturday in 1944, had not happened, and those five children survived?

The answer, in my opinion, is: they went on to lead miserable and boring lives.

The story spans from 1944 to 2009, with gaps of about 15 years between each chapter. The book is written using very descriptive prose. To read it is to flip through a photo album, the images briefly coming to life as you focus on them. Each character chapter is like a series of snapshots taken from the same day. So we don't get a continuous and flowing story, but rather, a disjointed series of moments, suspended in time. From these fragments we piece together the story of their lives.

Spufford makes use of this stylistic choice to emphasise his skillful writing, which is the saving grace of this novel. He writes soulfully, as if to a lover, and I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of south-east London as it changed throughout the century, as I've lived in that area for the last five years myself.

But the writing alone doesn't make up for the lackluster, two-dimensional characters. In my opinion, five lives were too many for Spufford to handle and he should have narrowed it down. The odious Vernon and the melodious Jo were the two more well-rounded characters, though Val had some of the best moments descriptively, during her relationship with Mike. My biggest problem is that, despite spanning more than half a century, most of the characters remained completely single-minded, which I don't find very realistic. Val and Ben were just extremely pitiful, but not in a way I could empathise with because Spufford skimmed over their lives, making it hard for me to connect or understand them. Vernon was odious from birth to seemingly death and Alec, though initially my favourite, turned out to be quite forgettable.

If there was any deep meaning about the intransigent passage of time or the fragility of human destiny, as some of the characters seemed to suggest every now and then, I must admit it didn't move me, as these subjects are usually wont to do.

Rounded up I give the book three stars, with an extra star awarded just for the writing. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't inspirational either, and I'm grading harshly considering it's on the Booker Prize longlist.