Wintry mix spreads across Minnesota

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

At the end of his new novel, “Light Perpetual,” Francis Spufford describes how he was inspired by a London plaque: 

Out of his contemplative pauses in front of that plaque, Spufford has created a resonant novel about what "might have been" for five young casualties of war, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss. 

“Light Perpetual” opens with a slow motion reimagining of the V-2 rocket falling through that Woolworths on that long-ago Saturday. The lunchtime crowd, which has gathered to see a new delivery of aluminum saucepans (a rarity during the war), is instantaneously transformed into "a dome of debris." Spufford's omniscient narrator ticks off some of the cloud's component parts: "Knitting Patterns. ... Wooden table. Pans. Much-darned brown worsted hand-me-down served-three-siblings horned-buttoned winter coat. Skin. Bone." 

Spufford checks in on his characters at intervals of 15 years, beginning with their deaths in 1944 and ending in 2009 when the "children" are about 70. This plot structure can sound formulaic, plodding even. And, certainly, the pitfalls of sentimentality are many in a story that imagines the lives that five invented dead children might have led. 

But Spufford avoids those pitfalls and as he moves his children through their imagined lives they become so much more than mere reverent icons. For instance, the class bully, Vernon, dubbed "Vermin" by his classmates, grows into a crooked property developer; another, more delicate child named Ben grows up to hold down jobs as a kitchen porter and bus conductor; he also has to be institutionalized for a time for schizophrenia and persistent nightmares of cannibalism. 

Alec, who from the get-go, is one of the most compelling of the children, must surrender his dreams of going to university because of his father's early death. Alec marries young, becomes a leader in his printer's union, and, at bedtime, devours heavy tomes like Robert Tressell's 1914 Socialist classic, “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.“

Even to tick off these characters and their stories in this fashion renders them reductive in a way that Spufford never does. He's such a beautiful writer, casually stunning in his language and perceptions. Here, for instance, Spufford captures the middle-aged Alec's thoughts after an argument with his teenaged son: 

Along with incisively describing the progression — and setbacks — of his fictional children's lives, Spufford conjures up an impressionistic history of six decades of London life. Here's Jo who grows up to become a member of a "girl group" called the Tearaways during the Swinging '60s. Spufford describes Jo standing next to a Beatles knock-off band in the wings of the Pelican Club, listening to an older blues musician. In a few quick sentences, Spufford nails the era's signature style and sexism: 

Again and again, Spufford draws us readers into the mundane particularity of his maturing characters' lives and, again and again, we readers are jolted by the awareness that those five futures were cut short in 1944. In resurrecting lives that never were, “Light Perpetual” is a miracle, not only of art, but of encompassing empathy. The novel becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.    

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Maureen Corrigan

Author

In 1944 an attack on a London Woolworths killed 168 people. In his new novel, Francis Spufford explores what "might have been" for five young casualties of war.

'Light Perpetual' imagines adulthood for 5 fictional kids killed in WWII attack

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox