FINISHED READING - Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

In November 1944 a V2 hit the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. One hundred and sixty eight people died. Fifteen of them were children, lives cut off from all the fascinating and tragic things the second half of the 21st Century would bring. Francis Spufford teaching at Goldsmiths College on his way to work, passed every day a plaque that marked the place and date that doodle bug fell to earth, and its obliterating consequences for all those lives, robbed of the unfolding of their lives.

Out of this single adopted tragedy he has created the entirely fictitious lives of five children who died on that November day. Inventing a life for them, ordinary lives with ocassional flashes of the extraordinary. Lives filled with significance and insignificance, joys and mistakes, moral incident and immoral ones, aspirational and thwarted dreams.

Through this authorial slight of hand he takes us on a multifaceted journey through the edited highlights, the significant peaks and troughs of their lives and the last half century we simultaneously journey through. Those moments, the ones with greatest emotional significance, frequently dashed with the stinging vinegar of regrets and remorse. They are all here, richly embellished, but different in their essential trajectories.

One character struggles all their life with the consequences of mental ill health. Another has success as a rock star only to fall back to earth as a teacher in a local comprehensive. Hiding her past life from everyone, including herself. Another is a bit of a wide boy, an ethically dubious chancer who swindles people, stomping over the lives of others on his way to a fleeting success, who loses it all in the end. There are infidelities, both real and imagined. Relationships turned sour and abusive as a partner becomes embroiled in the brutal politics of the far right. A families inability to help their bulemic daughter. One man struggles to make a success of his life, stymied again and again by the rapid advances of economic change.

These can only ever present you with small glimmers of the flavour of this wonderful book. Spufford's writing has a uniqueness of voice, deceptively light, but with great lyrical dexterity, a sense for the colourful detail and the incidental but significant landscape within which everything takes place. None of the characters are quite able to escape the circumstances of the place of their birth. 

As all these five people approach the end of their entirely fictitious lives, we see them reflecting on what has passed, with all the mixed feelings that a looming point of demise will inevitably summon. The usual recipe for life, is a meal of paths followed and not followed, actions with consequences, decisions and indecision, obstacles overcome and flows gone with. How often the memories of our past are so discoloured by our emotions at the time. Misremembering there significance entirely.

This book is founded upon the strength or otherwise of its origin story. All of it arising out of the conceit of a 'what if.' This allows Spufford to take us on an evocation of periods and events. Events that these five people travel through and become ciphers for, in a much larger comment on the way people have adjusted to the changes wrought, for good or ill, upon this country. The consequential damage to people's lives, the malformations of spirit in everyone who lived through them.

I couldn't quite find my way out of the nagging question, of what the framing of five tragic deaths with imagined future lives brought to the table. How different would the book be if the sentiment of its origin story was removed ? I wasn't convinced that it mattered enough. The significant power of the book would remain and stand up well in the telling.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8