Light Perpetual
As seen:
By Francis Spufford
avg rating
3 reviews
1944. It’s a Saturday lunchtime on Bexford High Street. The Woolworths has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans, and a crowd has gathered to see the first new metal in a long time. Everything else has been melted down for the war effort.
An instant later, the crowd is gone. Incinerated. Atomised.
Among that crowd were five little children. What future did they lose? The only way to know is ‘to let run some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be. still may be’.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual is a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting – a sweeping and intimate celebration of the gift of life.
‘Radiant with hope and grace and courage…I loved it.’ – Sarah Perry
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The first chapter of "Light Perpetual" begins with the explanation of how a powerful bomb works and presensts us with the imagining of lives continuing in another dimension, perhaps the dark space between atoms. As children we play and imagine that when I do this with my toy (doll, truck, whatever toy) this will happen. This book is that childhood manner of playing only using the lives of five children who were vaporized by that bomb exploding.
The manner in which the author writes is beautiful however it becomes convoluted and difficult to follow the hopping from time to time and child to child. I found myself having to stop and figure out the who and how long very disruptive and distracting. It took away a lot of the enjoyment and was frustrating.
Additionally, I kept expecting the life stories to begin to intertwine and was disappointed that they didn't.
After the intriguing first chapter I felt let down by the remainder of the book.
I found this book disjointed and not easy to follow. A promising start then the book just went downhill.
There is some beautiful writing in this story. A bomb falls on a Woolworths store in a fictional borough of London (based on a true story) killing many and in particular these 5 children whose stories we then follow in terms of what might have happened in their lives had they lived. Their lives unravel in a spasmodic sense. I think I had imagined that we might be checking in on them all at a set interval and initially this seemed to be the case but after a while that structure appeared to fall away. Not all of the characters were likeable and their lives not grand or startling in terms of what they contributed to society BUT that said there are some very strong observations and difficult issues that are encountered - such as the existence of the National Front and the unforgiving attack on a medical student. It is humanity warts and all.
