And all of a sudden with the last mug in her hand, a message comes through loud and clear from her psyche: this is an accident. There is no need for her life to have worked out like this at all. So many other possibilities . . . How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen . . . Surely the real thing has yet to come along.
Light Perpetual is a “what if?” novel, an intimate version of alternative history where the only variables are personal. In this case the “what if?” is “what if these five children had not been killed by a V-2 rocket in 1944?” What might their lives have been like if they had unfolded across the rest of the 20th century instead of being cut so violently short? “What has gone,” Spufford observes, after a harrowingly specific and vivid account of the bombing,
is not just the children’s present existence—Vernon not trudging home to the house with the flitch of bacon hanging in the kitchen, Ben not on his dad’s shoulders crossing the park, astonished by the watery November clouds, Alec not getting his promised ride to the Crystal Palace tomorrow, Jo and Valerie not making faces at each other over their dinner of cock-a-leekie soup. It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?
Those lost futures are what Light Perpetual chronicles, in sections titled both to tell us where we are now and to remind us that they didn’t really get there: “T+5: 1949”; “T+35: 1979”; etc.
As with all such fictions, a lot depends on our accepting the initial premise. Thanks to my philosopher husband, I have learned enough about determinism over the years to know that Spufford is not being particularly rigorous: for any one of the alternative scenarios he mentions (“some altered single second of arc . . . a guidance failure . . . a hiccup in fuel deliveries”) to have spared the children’s lives, a lot else (perhaps literally everything else) would have had to be different also. But, for me anyway, that’s OK, not just because that’s not really a novelist’s problem but because I too have spent a lot of time, however irrationally or unphilosophically, laying an absence against an imagined future: that is exactly one of the ways most of us measure loss.
The premise or gimmick once initiated, the next question is what the writer does with it: how good is the storytelling, how well is it written, what is the pay-off, artistically or emotionally? On these grounds I was really impressed with Light Perpetual, though the first few pages of the novel initially made me a bit worried. They are very writerly, self-consciously so, and I wasn’t sure I would like a whole novel in that style; luckily, the whole novel is not in that style, and so the passages that are in that register felt striking, impressive, often moving, rather than tedious. I’m not sure I can give a single example that would show what I mean, because it’s the contrast between the more straightforward and fast-moving narrative parts and these more elevated ones that worked for me, but here’s a taste:
As the chorus comes around, Jo throws her head back, straightens the soft tube of her windpipe, and harmonises. Solo harmonies for two. Her voices soar, Marcus laughs out loud, and her brown-and-silver song winds away into the night, over the roofs of Bexford, past the scarlet light on the unmoving crane, past the grand houses of the Rise and the hipster coffee shops on the hill, over the burger joints and the takeaways, between the towers of the Park Estate and out over the treetops; voice and bassline and drum break chasing leaves and fried-chicken wrappers, echoing from the surfaces of brick and concrete on which love makes its always temporary claim; from which we constitute a home, we who life our voices and pass through, pass through.
Is it just me, or is there something there reminiscent of the third-person narrator in Bleak House, who also likes to rise above the landscape, giving an almost cinematic effect, and whose voice also rises in such moments into a visionary or prophetic tone? “Come, other future,” exclaims Spufford’s narrator; “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light”; “Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this!” exclaims Dickens’s. (I also heard a strong echo of Middlemarch in a passage about everyone finding themselves “the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble.”)
The other thing that worried me about the novel’s set-up is that a story of children’s lost futures could easily lead to idealization and sentimentality: instead of killing Hitler, the alt-historical fantasy of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, maybe Spufford would save the doctor who finds a cure for cancer or a radical leader who ends poverty or something. But Spufford’s five protagonists are flawed, ordinary, and often unsuccessful; the lives the novel imagines they might have lived are, like most lives, often hard, sometimes happy, occasionally beautiful. They do harm, or are complicit in it (one of them serves time in prison for her role in an act of horrific violence, for example, while another cheats someone out of all of their money); their ambitions are thwarted; their relationships often falter or fail altogether. In other words, the “might-be’s, could-be’s” are realistic, not idealistic; it is even possible at points to wonder if in some cases the future was not a loss worth grieving after all.
Spufford could have told his five life stories without the framing device of the bomb: once they get underway, they are, on their own terms, effective devices for chronicling the upheavals and challenges of life in London over many eventful decades. Politics, labour activism, changing demographics and communities, technological changes, music and theater and sports and education: the novel engages us with all of these facets of modern life. As I read, I was interested enough in every character’s story that I often forget that I wasn’t following their “real” life. When I reached the last chapter (t + ∞), I found myself wondering what would really have been lost from the novel if Spufford hard written it straight—a question I also had about Atkinson’s A God in Ruins. I wasn’t annoyed with Spufford the way I was with Atkinson: at least he is clear from the outset about his game, for one thing, whereas Atkinson’s airy “Pouf” still irks me, all these years later! But in both cases I sense some distrust of “old-fashioned” novels, a desire to highlight and even excuse the artifice of fiction by layering an apology for it into the novel itself. I thought A God in Ruins was (would have been) a good enough novel, even a better novel, without the twist. I’m not so sure the same is true of Light Perpetual: its final words—”Come, dust”—have the power they do because we have committed for so long to other possibilities.
Novel Readings 