Something is moving visibly, though, even with time at this magnification. Over beyond the table, by the rack of yellowed knitting patterns, something long and sleek and sharp is coming through the ceiling, preceded by a slow-tumbling cloud of plaster and bricks and fragmented roof tiles. Amid the twinkling debris the tapering cone of the warhead has a geometric dignity as it slides floorward, the dull green bulk of the rocket pushing into sight behind, inch by inch.... they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for a human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. [loc. 61]
I very much enjoyed Spufford's first novel, Golden Hill, set in 18th-century New York: this one was less engaging for me, perhaps because the period it spans -- 1944 to 2009 -- encompasses much of my own lifetime, though not necessarily my own experience. That said, Spufford's prose is often intoxicating, and he has a knack for showing us the littleness of human lives against the history of the great city of London.
The novel opens in 1944, with a tour-de-force account of the sudden arrival of a V2 rocket in a branch of Woolworths in the fictional London Borough of Bexford. (Reading this scene was enough to persuade me to buy the novel.) Spufford was inspired by the 1944 V2 strike that destroyed Woolworths in New Cross, killing 168 people including 33 children. He imagines the lives of five of those children if the bomb had had a very slightly different course.
Light Perpetual gives us vignettes of Vernon, Alec, sisters Jo and Val, and Ben, at fifteen-year intervals: five working-class Londoners living through years of social and personal change. Vernon is a rapacious (though not very competent) property developer, somewhat redeemed by his love of opera; Jo is synaethetic, seeing music in colour, but her musical career is blighted by her lack of confidence; Val takes up with a beautiful but violent young man who turns out to be a far-right activist; Alec achieves a career in newspapers, only to find himself obsolete after the technological advances and industrial disputes of the 1970s; Ben is plagued by mental health issues, but finds peace.
These are all very ordinary people living through times that, with hindsight, are extraordinary. Our five protagonists are not paragons: their happinesses seem to happen at random, though perhaps likelier with a degree of open-mindedness, of willingness to seize opportunities. And their miseries, whether personal or professional -- they all work: their jobs matter to them -- are equally random. It's not just character that shapes a life.
I was reminded, at times, of Kate Atkinson's Life after Life, though that's much more about a single life reiterated. Light Perpetual did have a particular appeal to me, living within a couple of miles of fictional Bexford; I was fascinated by the snippets of history, and the sweeping sense of social change that the area has undergone over the last three-quarters of a century. However, I didn't find the protagonists especially likeable or relatable (I'm not a real Londoner) and, though there's an underlying sense of the numinous, it didn't counteract the bleakness of these unlived lives.
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