Light Perpetual

by Francis Spufford

From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an “extraordinary…symphonic…casually stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.

Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.

Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual “offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality” (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical, Book Club, Audiobook, Novels

336 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 2021

About the author

Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Then in 2023 I returned to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stood on the banks of the Mississippi. I was aiming for something like a classic black and white movie, except one you never saw, because it came from another history than our own. It won the Sidewise Award for alternate history. And now (2025/6) I've written a historical fantasy, "Nonesuch", set during the London Blitz, where as well as German bombs the protagonist Iris needs to deal with time-travelling fascists, and the remnants of Renaissance magic, preserved in the statues of the burning city. As writers of fantasy, I like C S Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley, Tamsyn Muir, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Addison. If you like them, you may like this.

Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to the Dean of an Anglican cathedral in eastern England, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London.

Reviews

[Paromjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the Booker Prize longlist 2021

The award winning Francis Spufford has returned with a stellar concept novel that begins in November 1944 in a crowded Woolworth's store in Lambert Street in the London Borough of Bexford. Everyone, including children, and many in the surrounding area and buildings are incinerated as the store is hit by a V2 German rocket. Amongst the dead are Jo, her sister, Val, Alec, Ben and Vernon, young children that Spufford resurrects in a parallel world, shining a beam of light on their lives that we glimpse at specific periods of time, lives that illustrate and embody the changing world in terms of changing social and sexual norms and attitudes, technology, employment, politics, and a ongoing transformation of London and the nation.

Each child has a distinct personality that we first encounter at their primary school, as they sing in class and as Ben attends a football match with his father. We see the first signs of what singing means to the bullying Vern, which later turns into a love of opera and opera singers, the power and magic of a music which reduces him to a puddle, which later almost derails his plans to dupe up and coming Millwall footballer, Joe McLeish, whom he wines and dines at the exclusive Cafe Royal. It is an act that returns to haunt him at the latter stages of his life at a corporate penthouse VIP package for a match, remaining unrepentent in an echo of the Millwall fans anthem, 'no-one likes us and we don't care'. We see them grow up as members of their families, becoming parents, grandparents, the marriages, separations and divorce, observing at close quarters, intimate family and personal relationships as the years go by, right up to the point they stare death in the face. They work on newspapers, as teachers, bus conductors, con men, musicians, developers, as mental health patients, serving time in prison, and in hospices.

The joys of reading this include the rich descriptions of the location which is a character in itself, the compulsive character developments, the highs and the lows of a group of individuals that comes across as so authentic. The intricate details, complexities and drama of the protagonists personal and professional lives are depicted with thought, care and expertise, I was riveted and captivated by a singing lesson that Jo gives to a diverse class of Year 10 pupils at Bexford Hill Comprehensive School, by Val's despair at ending up with a brutally violent fascist thug for a boyfriend, and the mental health issues experienced by Ben. As a reader, I know that these lives were snuffed out in 1944, but Spufford made me believe in the parallel lives that he conjures for them amidst the shifting cultural, social, political, economic change of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in London and Britain. A superb and memorable read that will linger in my mind for a considerable time to come. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Faber and Faber for an ARC.

[Marchpane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

Light Perpetual begins with the deaths of five children during the bombing of London in WWII. It then proceeds to tell the story of the lives they might have lived, had they not been killed.

This central conceit is really perplexing. Here’s why I think it doesn’t work: you need at least two timelines to tell an alternate timeline story. Alternate history uses our actual reality as the second timeline—so for instance a fictional ‘what if John Lennon lived’ story can be compared to the real history in which he didn’t.

But Spufford’s characters are made up, and he has only written the ‘what if they lived’ timeline, there’s no second timeline for comparison. Imagine the movie Sliding Doors, but we only follow the mousy Gwyneth who missed the train; or It’s a Wonderful Life, but the angel never shows George Bailey what the town would have been like without him. The ‘what if’ premise is nugatory without a second timeline.

Putting that gimmick aside, we have a conventional novel following five separate characters over 65 years, checking in with each at 15-year intervals. It spans from 1944 to 2009 and amazingly, there’s not much trace in this novel of the massive technological, social and cultural changes of the 20th century. Where is the cold war, or second wave feminism, or Thatcher, or WMDs, or, or, or… Not so much as a moon landing. One character has to reskill because his profession is obsolete; another profits from gentrification as a property developer; there’s a mixed marriage here and a gay son there—small hints that the times are a-changin’, but on the whole this novel is deeply uninterested in anything of historical significance. (Personally I think Spufford missed a trick not bookending the novel with the 2005 London bombings.)

So, its main gimmick doesn’t work and it’s a novel about the 20th century that wants to pretend the 20th century didn’t happen. Apart from that it’s just fine as a domestic drama… as long as you enjoy belaboured prose crammed with mixed metaphors and confused similes. Where London buses ‘wait in rows like clumsy racehorses’ and trains are like ‘pampered monarchs’ and the road is a ‘clogged valve’ and the trees look ‘defeated’ and exhaustion waits underneath ‘like a continental shelf’ and that’s ALL IN ONE BLOODY PARAGRAPH. My exhaustion was not submerged on a continental shelf, it was very much on the surface trying desperately to wade out of this word-soup onto dry ground.

There are times during the novel where the language is more restrained, where the story and characters step to the fore, and at those moments I almost found myself invested in what was happening, but it wasn’t enough to salvage this mess. 2 stars.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this book due to:
….there were raving reviews.
….I was a Woolworth’s counter french fries & coke pre-teen customer.
….I had never heard of the explosion at a Woolworths in London - that killed 168 people ….in November 1994

At first I thought the premises was really interesting ….
The author took a true-sad story - with devastating results and turned it into a happier tale.

But the longer I thought about the premises, I was not as enchanted….
and then I was again…
not
yes
not
yes

In the end I appreciated the spiritual-antidote to death…
but I almost would have preferred a more traditional historical fiction novel resulting from that horrific day in November of 1944
or….
simply read a fiction story about five interesting characters.

Around fifty percent into this novel — I thought to myself …. there are some funny scenes, some interesting tales, and some awesome musical/poetic lyrics….
but some parts were laborious and monotonous to me.

I started to question the entire purpose of the book.
And of course I question myself:
not smart enough,
not clever enough,
what’s wrong with me?…

But the truth is ….I wasn’t that excitedly into it.
I wasn’t moved by the execution-
but I did appreciate uniqueness of this story.

3.5 stars

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a thing for alternative life stories. Life After Life remains one of my favorites. So, I was drawn to Light Perpetual, especially since I enjoyed Spufford’s Golden Hill.
The story starts in 1944 London. A crowd has gathered at a department store to see a new shipment of pots and pans. When, boom! A German V-2 rocket hits the store and everyone is obliterated. The story then tracks what would have been the lives of the five children there with their mothers. We get to see them move through what would have been their lives, watching how the personalities first glimpsed in grammar school develop.
The chapters are vignettes of their lives, with large gaps of time between. And what we’re seeing isn’t just these five lives. Spufford is showing us the changing times of the 20th century. One of the strengths of this book lies in the descriptions of time and place. He also shows us it’s not just these lives lost but the future generations that were lost.
The book is beautifully written. Small bits, like Jo teaching her students to sing harmony, just grabbed me. This is a book that’s meant to be savored.
I hadn’t realized that the rocket that took out the department store was real and 158 people actually were killed.
My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advance copy of this book.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now winner of the 2022 RSL Encore Prize for second novels.

I re-read this book after its longlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize.

A book which starts with what I think is a flawed underlying concept (which makes me think it should not have been on the longlist), but one which has, again in my view, easily the best ending of any book on the longlist (one which even makes me hope it makes the shortlist).

I was also very impressed by this interview (https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/article...) and what the author was aiming to achieve, even if he did not entirely succeed. I would contrast this with say "The Promise" where the author did succeed in his aims but ones I felt were largely worthless.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

Francis Spufford has explained the real-life incident which lead to this book – a V2 rocket attack on a branch of Woolworths in New Cross in 1944 while killed 168 including many young children – and the idea he had of imagining a similar attack (in a fictional South London borough – Bexford) but then imagining an alternate future where the attack did not happen – and then following the course of the lives of the five dead children at 15 year intervals from 1949 to 2009 (following each character for a day) – as a way also of plotting London history over that time.

The publisher when it announced it had won the rights to the book said – in what serves as an excellent introduction to the book’s five key characters:

November 1944. A German rocket incinerates a south London household-goods store, and five young lives are atomised in an instant. Jo and Valerie and Alec and Ben and Vernon are gone. But what if it were possible to resurrect them – to let them experience the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the 20th century; to live out all the personal triumphs and disasters, the second chances and redemptions denied them? What kind of future would there be for clever, impulsive Alec? What would happen to Val in the world of men, beckoning beyond her all-female household? What would become of Vern’s greed – and his helplessness in the face of song? Would light or darkness fill Ben’s fragile mind? And where would Jo go, with the music playing in her head?"

The biggest problem with the book – is that this concept rather than adding to the book by adding an intriguing element to it – seems to distract from what is in essence a well told novel.

Conceptually this book starts after Atkinson but soon goes all Apted.

The author I think could have gone several ways with the concept – and chose none of them.

The first was to effectively run an alternate course of history – one or more of the children making a profound impact on history: I understand and respect why he did not do this - the aim of the book is to celebrate the ordinary as remarkable, to identify that any life cut short closes a world of possibilities for that person and their family.

The second was I think to write a story but with a subtle “butterfly effect” so that overtime, without any obvious explanation, the world diverged from our own – I think here the author very much wanted to write about the real post war history of London so this would not have worked.

A third, and perhaps what I had assumed, was more of a Kate Atkinson style playing with the idea of fate – either with repeated choices and forks of outcome, or with more of an unveiling revelation about what we are reading. I think this could have been done in a way which served the author's purpose and added a poignancy to the novel.

Instead the concept – other than a very brief passage at the end where one character has a sudden moment when passing the building which used to house the local Woolworths- is largely forgotten and really becomes irrelevant to the story. As an example – the very basic characters of the five as set out in the publishers blurb are not revealed at all in the opening chapter but instead in the 1949 chapter as four of them are at school together and one at a Millwall match.

It is very hard not to conclude that the book would have worked more genuinely if it had been represented as what it actually is: a story of five post-war schoolchildren and how their lives diverged (and occasionally intersected) in ways whose basic foundations were, in many cases, established in their childhood – something which is examined by revisiting them at regular intervals (a little like the 7-up, 14-up etc television series – the producer of who - Michael Apted - I found as I wrote my review died on the very day I started reading the book – 8 January 2021).

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now since I wrote my review I have seen several others that have referenced the same idea (I think I was the first to make the Apted link) and so I was interested that this has made its way to the author who has in an interview tried to explain what he was looking to achieve

Q: Could you have written the book without the counterfactual element, that is, without showing the reader the ‘actual’ deaths at the beginning? And simply having the ‘possible lives’ as ‘lives'?
A: I could and it would have been quite like the Michael Apted series, Seven Up!, which I have not actually seen, nor was I influenced by, but I am now aware of. If I hadn’t put in the bomb, and the death at the beginning, I’d have got the story of five lives, but I wouldn’t have got that provisional quality, and I wouldn’t have got that sense of the gratuitousness of life, and life being something to be rejoiced in just because it is, life with its kind of frame of death around it. I wanted something which gave you enough awareness of existence as being not inevitable, and that you could notice the kind of ‘feel’ of existence itself between your fingers a little bit.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Putting all that to one side – we do have a fascinating book and an fascinating history of London (and more broadly English) post-war society - including with a group of white characters (remember that the UK was something like 99%+ white post war, pre Windrush) dealing in different ways with an increasingly multi-cultural and politically evolving Britain.

Vernon mixes a life long love of opera with a lifetime of rather shady property development (taking in council house sales, the London property boom, the Global Financial crisis and my favourite scene which covers both a catered dinner at Glyndebourne with the Lloyd’s crisis) - for a lover of opera though he realises at the book's end that his theme song has its origins more on the terraces of the Den.

Jo – whose synesthesia seems to somewhat fade – initially escapes London and her life of domesticity for a West Coast US lifestyle (this for me was by far the most pointless and weakest of the storylines), only to be drawn back by the fate of Val who finds herself irresistibly drawn to a mod leader turned skinhead and racist agitator. Val's subsequent involvement with The Samaritans is one of the best scenes in the novel.

Alec takes us through the print unions (this part is particularly excellent), the Thatcher counter-revolution and later to the world of school deregulation (and a reminder of mental illness in the 21st Century).

And the most profound story is of Ben – with the most challenging and bravura scenes in the novel being two of mental illness (one in and one out of hospital) as well as a tremendously uplifting one of a brief period of family contentment and a peaceful ending.

For my tastes there is too much music in the book but the author has said that was a deliberate choice it is trying to be true to the way that music is the popular art. It’s the big serious thing which gets everywhere, and other than firework displays making everyone go ‘ooh’ I can’t think of anything, except music, which reaches into almost all lives I can sympathize with that but I just felt that the author did not find a way to write about music in this kind of universal sense or in a way which built my empathy or understanding for the individual experience of each character to music.

The author has talked of his Costa, RSL Ondaatje and Desmond Elliot Prize winning debut novel “Golden Hill” as a “brocade-embroidered waistcoat” – and this by contrast as a “Formica table” – and I think that is a little misleading: some of the novel is very down to earth – there is for example a lengthy examination of washing up – but some, particularly towards the end of the 2009 sections, is very descriptive, almost to the point of overwriting - particular I think as the author tries to link back to his motivating idea.

An idea is in his head, the mercury consenting to be chased slowly to a standstill. Who knows if it’s true. But if the different bits and pieces of his life, rising, lofted as if by a bubble of force from below, are arranged in a messy spiral of hours and years, then mightn’t it be the case, mightn’t there be a place, mightn’t there be an angle, from which you could see the whole accidental mass composing, just from that angle, into some momentary order you could never have noticed at the time? Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align?

And for me, perhaps no surprise given some of the author’s non-fiction writings (and his wife being in Church of England Ministry), the most refreshing part of the book was its positive attitude towards the consolation of religion – something in which both troubled souls in the book – Ben and Val find some sense of healing/peace and support respectively.

This final passage alone both I think helped the book get on the Booker longlist - with Rowan Williams as a judge - and in my view more than justifies its place there.

Praise him in all the postcodes, thinks Ben. Praise him on the commuter trains: praise him upon the drum and bass. Praise him at the Ritz: praise him in the piss-stained doorways. Praise him in nail bars: praise him with beard oil. Praise him in toddler groups: praise him at food banks. Praise him in the parks and playgrounds: praise him down in the Tube station at midnight. Praise him with doner kebabs: praise him with Michelin stars. Praise him on pirate radio: praise him on LBC and Capital: praise him at Broadcasting House. Praise him at Poundland: praise him at Harvey Nichols. Praise him among the trafficked and exploited: praise him in hipster coffee houses. Praise him in the industrial estates: praise him in leather bars. Praise him on the dancefloors: praise him on the sickbeds. Praise him in the high court of Parliament: praise him in the prisons and crack houses. Praise him at Pride: praise him at Carnival: praise him at Millwall and West Ham, Arsenal and Chelsea and Spurs. Praise him at Eid: praise him at High Mass: praise him on Shabbat: praise him in the gospel choirs. Praise him, all who hope: praise him, all who fear: praise him, all who dream: praise him, all who remember. Praise him in trouble. Praise him in joy. Let everything that has breath, give praise.

My thanks to Faber and Faber for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
Literature as revenge against the contingency of life? Yes!! I love how Spufford works with language, and how he employs the motifs of time and light to illustrate time dilation (yup, this writer plays with Einstein's special theory of relativity) and the butterfly effect: "Time pulls itself together with a start, and instead of passing as a series of frames held in dragging delay, suddenly consents to flow." In the text, the lights signify a heightened awareness of oneself within time, often combined with the color gold - when this acuteness of the senses is experienced, the moment becomes "a spinning golden carousel of lights".

On his way to work at the Goldsmiths College, Spufford has been walking past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. 168 people died that day - Spufford now tells the story of five children who shop there that faithful day, but in his alternative history, the attack doesn't happen. The five (fictional) characters live rather unspectacular lives, full of the trials and tribulations of average people, the happiness and tragedies of those who are neither heroes no anti-heroes. Much like Solar Bones, another experimental Booker contender, the text portrays average people in an engaging and empathetic way and gives them dignity, thus elevating their destinies to universal tales about the human condition.

So while Spufford does alter the course of history, you could also argue that this isn't an alternative history: The author eradicates the cause of death of his fictional characters, the attack, because literature has the power to safe these people, to correct a cruel and unjust faith. But the rest of the book is set in a world that is congruent with the real world during the time portrayed. We hear about them in 1944, 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994 and 2009: The sisters Jo and Val, one becomes a musician, one marries a racist; Alec, who becomes a typesetter and an activist; Vernon, who uses questionable methods as a businessman; and Ben, who suffers from mental illness (and who is unbelievably well-written). Frequently, the characters are confronted with the contingency of life: Everything could have been completely different - and, strangely, that is what keeps the narrative strands together, the way the stories underline how that is the beauty and the cruelty of life.

This novel openly displays how wonderful it is that an author has the power to safe his characters, to take revenge against the contingency of life - an aspect of literature that has recently become the focus of scientific research in the field of autofiction and even autobiographical (!) writing. This is a wonderfully engaging, playful experimental novel, and I hope it goes far in the competition.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

But if the different bits and pieces of his life, rising, lofted as if by a bubble of force from below, are arranged in a messy spiral of hours and years, then mightn’t it be the case, mightn’t there be a place, mightn’t there be an angle, from which you could see the whole accidental mass composing, just from that angle, into some momentary order you could never have noticed at the time? Mightn’t there be a line of sight, not ours, from which the seeming cloud of debris of our days, no more in order than (say) the shredded particles riding the wavefront of an explosion, prove to align?

Francis Spufford’s previous novel Golden Hill was deservedly much acclaimed, winning a number of awards for debut novels (which as an aside was slightly odd, as to me his debut novel was the fascinating Red Plenty, which was marketed as non-fiction).

His latest novel, Light Perpetual, to be published in 2021 (thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC), was inspired by the real-life V2 rocket attack in November 1944 which struck Woolworths in New Cross.  

See here for some eyewitness accounts: https://ww2today.com/25-november-1944...

Spufford explains the background to Life Perpetual:

For the last twelve years, I’ve been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century.

The book would have been finished sooner had I not taken a detour through the back of a wardrobe

(This last a reference to the fact that between Golden Hill and Light Perpetual he wrote a novel to fill a gap in CS Lewis’s Narnia series, but one that the estate of the author did not authorize and so which may only be published in a decade or so when the copyright on the novels expires)

The UK publisher hails Light Perpetual as ‘ingenious’ and the US one as a ‘boldly inventive novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives.’   Which, unfortunately, I think it to missell it.  

The novel’s concept is to imagine 5 children who might have died in the attack (we actually get very little detail on them pre their death) and then to imagine their lives if they hadn’t died.   

But it doesn’t really work - what we get is an account of the lives of 5 people who were children in 1944 in New Cross (which oddly becomes the fictitious Bexford in the novel, rather incongruous with an otherwise detailed recreation of London) but one where the link to the bombing isn't really relevant.  Kate Atkinson this isn't.

The story itself is a beautifully written sketch of London life during the period 1944-2019 (the story skips decades giving us snapshots of the five protagonists in different eras, their stories only occassionally overlapping except for two who are sisters) albeit one that was a little sentimental for my taste (perhaps an odd comment in a book with drug addiction, bulimia, mental health issues and a racially-motivated murder but the book has a strong and compassionate heart at its core).   It also has a strong musical flavour that may work for other readers but which didn’t click for me.  

Overall for me rather a disappointment but largely as I was expecting something more formally ambitious and what the novel was, although executed well, isn't my style of novel.  

3 stars for me although approached as what it is, I can see other readers appreciating this far more.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Usually historical fiction isn’t my thing, but I read this after it was longlisted for the Booker prize. I found it problematic. The novel follows the lives of five (white) people from South London, with chapters spaced 15 years apart, so that we check in with the characters at roughly ages 10, 25, 40, 55, and 70. Various domestic themes are addressed as well as societal issues - racism, classism, Thatcherism, etc. Whatever the merits this might otherwise have, I can’t get over framing a historical narrative of post-WWII Britain told solely from the perspective of a bunch of white people. Longlisting this for the Booker seems particularly tone-deaf at best.

[Peter Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francis Spufford makes a bold move at the beginning of this impressive novel. In the first few pages, he kills off the five main characters. The year is 1944 and the protagonists are children, shopping in a London Woolworths with their parents, when a German bomb obliterates the building and everyone in it. One minute they exist, the next they do not. Spufford then imagines what their lives would have been like had the explosion never happened, visiting the characters at 15-year intervals.

Two of the five are twin sisters, Val and Jo. Val is obsessed with boys when we first meet her, and they are the cause of much strife throughout her existence. Jo displays a love of music at school and this becomes one of her main purposes in life. Vernon's greed manifests in his eventual role as a ruthless property developer, though he shows glimpses of humanity through his fondness for opera. Alec is the class clown, a mischievous fellow whose gifts of persuasion earn him a job as a typesetter. And troubled, delicate Ben tackles some mental difficulties before taking up a position as a bus conductor.

I thought of Kate Atkinson's work while reading this book, specifically the wartime efforts of Life After Life and A God in Ruins. Spufford exhibits a similar level of enterprise in this novel, submitting the idea that it's a miracle we're here at all, and giving his story so much heart with its authentic, believable characters. We follow their triumphs and setbacks throughout the years, and marvel at the fact that lives could have been lived so fully, when they could so easily have been snuffed out before they had properly begun.

I was a huge fan of Spufford's previous novel, Golden Hill, and while this latest work didn't thrill me in the same way, it left me with a lot more to ponder. Themes like the nature of time, what constitutes a happy life, the impact one individual can have on a multitude are all examined with a grace and clarity that showcase this author's unique talents. It's a brilliant, ambitious book and the unanimous praise being showered upon it is completely deserved.

Favourite Quotes:

"The bride and groom are sitting up at the top end, she in cream silk with eyelashes the size of escaped caterpillars, he hollow-eyed and the worse for wear from his stag night, but both grinning helplessly, the way you do; both shining with the astonishment of being, themselves, this moment, standing on the magic pivot, the trampoline of transformation, where your life is being changed and for once you know it. Right then, right there, as you feel the dizzy hilarious bliss of it, the change is underway."

"Chance, that she came back to London, chance that she met Claude, chance that she taught for twenty years at Bexford Hill. 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."

"Nobody chooses who they love. Possessing something, being somebody, loving anyone, it rules the rest out, and so it’s quieter than being young, and looking forward, and expecting it all, that’s all. The world calms down when your choice is made."

"It’s that she chafes, secretly, like this; that she is finding, just now, when things are hard, how sharply it seems she can still regret the lives not had, the music never recorded, the fame not gained. Old sorrows she thought were long worked through– no, more than that, which she thought were actually abolished by her having had different desires fulfilled– turn out to be still capable, still bitter, able like ghosts to billow up and start talking, if given a drop of blood to feed upon."

"People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that."

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

I loved the humanity and normality of the story. It could be called pedestrian, not revolutionary in any manner nor using its opening chapter later on in a meaningful way. Still I found Light Perpetual worked in a wholesome kind of way.
Why this life, and not another, why this ending and not another?

Light Perpetual feels like an ode to London; while reading it I definitely wanted to go there again. The book starts with a literal bang, a very strong opening focussing on the microsecond that a V2 missile from Holland hits, and kills 5 children. The rest of the book claims to be a fictional history of the lives that could have been, but in all fairness this premise is not used much and doesn't add much as well. Francis Spufford writes with a lot of metaphors, and doesn't seem to care much for interweaving the 5 lives he follows with steps of initially 5 years and later on 15 year steps, which is something that I normally love while reading interconnected stories.
Themes like gentrification, class awareness, psychological problems, interracial relations, white supremacy, loss of a job due to technological changes (and Thatcher government) and more are incorporated in the book. In the end I most liked Ben his story, which also goes furthest at the end, although the common theme of humanity and dealing with ageing, mortality and the consequences of one's choices comes back in all the five lives.

Brief summary for the 5 lives being followed:
T+5
Jo and Val the twin
Vernon the bully who likes to sing
Ben at a sporting match
Alec the smart one

T+20 and beyond
Alec smartmouth who tries to get a job while being a young father
Val on drugs and horny with the wrong man
Vern the real estate scammer
Ben the stutterer at a psychiatric hospital, in a terrible session with students who examine his case
Jo the aspiring singer and apparently enstranged sister of Val

The class awareness is all pervasive, as is sexism

T+35
Ben the bus conductor having a breakdown on a filmposter about cannibalism, quite claustrophobic
Wish I could take my head off and wash it with a hose.
An interesting chapter full of mental angst and tension

Alec the aging married guy with his recently starting to work wife and puberty son.
Death of blue collar unions, presciently predicted in T+20
I need some kind of background on this whole strike/labour dispute involving Germany.
In any conceivable future the paper still be needing people doing the printing Well guess what....

Jo in LA using her skill of seeing sounds as color as a background vocalist.
Oke writing about music is not as well done as in Utopia Avenue, my only comparison for this setting. Abortion for celebrity/being a background singer with benefits feels rather sad.

Vern divorcing and having his second real estate bankruptcy, meeting Alec in a new scam attempt, gentrification in action.

Val with Mike who is a mess and a real ass nazi, who possibly threatened Ben earlier.
Mrs Mike, wtf is that of a title.
Is Mike gay? like how in the hell did she end up with him?
Jezus how awkward and repugnant this whole skinhead British Movement thing is

T+50 -1994
Ben (An albino fucking spiderman according to her kids) married to widow Jamaican Marsha and being in a better state of mind after a demon drive out in church
Oke I could have lived without the sermon and in my audiobook narration it feels kinda racist in the whole accent, near to Russian even?
As the pastor reaches his climax Well that sentence was a choice...

Val doing the emergency hotline?
Why is cup of tea the response for everything.
Please don’t do the trembling/breakdown voice audiobook.
So her theme is bad boys in all sections of the book?
Oh god, child abuse and selfharm, really?
I didn’t know she is the other side of the line till 2/3 in the chapter.
Very engrossing after I realised that and the gay priest is a nice touch.

Vern at a fancy place, loving opera consistently again and apparently becoming bigger and bigger due to foie-gras and Beef Wellington.

Jo as a music teacher back in the UK, overly reflective on social class and development of her schoolchildren (By the time they are 30, life will have stumped all over them) and building up the relationship with Val again.

Alec plastering houses and trying to spread socialism to trainees of his son while working for the new firm of Vern? Taking care of his grandchild.
Class war and bourgeois, but still wanting to become a teacher.

T+65
Vern being surprised by his daughter after a bypass and the financial crisis.
Being on crutches and having to lose weight (After a year in smoothie purgatory).
The first man who he scammed coming back when he visits the skylounge of his old club.

Alec back from a conference as head teacher, what is the whole academizing going on with schools?
Divorced and remarried, and in a whole other social class. Bolemic grandchild

Jo and Val having some banter, with one of them having a son with an interracial gay relation.
Nice enough reflections on loss and ageing: Missing what you still possess

Ben dying in a hospice, quite touching. The sermon repeating at the end is something I didn't like.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

This was my 11th of the 13 books on the Booker shortlist - I have been saving the Cusk and have no means of getting Powers before September. I have seen quite a bit of negativity about this one, and was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

The book was inspired by a real event, a 1944 bombing of the New Cross branch of Woolworths in which many children died. This incident is described in the first chapter, after which Spufford explores the lives five of the young victims (three boys and two girls) could have led had they survived the bomb, in 15 year intervals from 1949 to 2009. This creates an episodic structure in which the focus of the story frequently changes, as they experience many of the formative events of post-war Britain.

I had no problems accepting the book's structure, and found it interesting and enjoyable, but it is not as striking as Golden Hill, a book I reread earlier this year and was just as impressed by second time.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Based on an actual event, the book begins in 1944 with the bombing of a Woolworth’s in London. Everything else in the book is imagined. The book traces the lives of 5 fictional children (Jo, Val, Ben, Vern and Alec) killed at Woolworth’s and speculates about how their lives would have turned out. That’s an interesting premise, but it turns out that the bombing was completely irrelevant and I found tying these children to a bombing was pointless. The director Michael Apted already thought of following the lives of a group of real children born in 1956 by visiting them at 7 year intervals. He didn’t need the drama of an explosion to begin his series.

The book visits each of the children in 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994 and 2009 during which period they adopt careers and form families. Really, nothing exciting happens. The children aren’t special in any way. Nevertheless, I wound up enjoying this book. I liked the author’s previous book “Golden Hill” but I thought that it elevated style over substance. It certainly elevated writing style over plot. When I started this book I was already annoyed by the whole bombing thing, and then when I realized that again there is no plot I thought “here we go again”. However, the author’s beautiful, densely descriptive writing gradually won me over. But you have to really love descriptions. The description of the operation of a printing press is clever, but goes on forever. This is about a tenth of the total description: “ But he’s not paying attention to that, having long since typed the next line, then the one after that: not paying attention, that is, except to the complex and variable symphony of noises the machine makes when going at full tilt the click-rattle-chink-chunk-scree-hiss-whirr-treadle-jangle it lays down constantly, in rhythms far more overlaid and syncopated than can be set down in linear order. A womb of mechanical noise, to be monitored with some spare fraction of a busy mind, because a variation or blockage in it could be a sign that Mama Linotype is about to squirt molten metal at your legs.”

There are very nice glimpses of a personality or situation. “... Marcus‘s solution to the indignity of being the offspring of two teachers at his own school has always been a resolute pretense that she and Claude have got nothing to do with him from the moment he goes through the gates in the morning, head high, impervious, lips together in a clamping pout of irony.”

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Imogen Church. She did a wonderful job. I am sure that I will read the author’s next book. At least now I know not to expect a plot.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a big fan of Spufford’s debut novel, Golden Hill, and was really looking forward to his follow-up. While I loved the premise here, the execution didn’t live up to my expectations. I’d heard a bit more about the genesis of the novel from seeing him speak at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature last month. He got the idea on his frequent walks to his teaching job at Goldsmiths College in London. A plaque on an Iceland supermarket he passes commemorates a World War II bombing that killed 15 children in what was then a Woolworths. He decided to commit an act of “literary resurrection” – but of five imaginary people in a made-up, working-class South London location. The idea was to mediate between time and eternity: “All lives are remarkable and exceptional if you look at them up close,” he said. The opening bombing scene is delivered in extreme slow motion and then the book jumps on in 15-year intervals, in a reminder of scale.

I read about the first 90 pages and skimmed the rest. My problem was that these particular characters don’t seem worth spending time with; their narratives don’t connect up tightly, as I imagined they might, and they feel somewhat derivative, serving only as ways of introducing issues (e.g. mental illness, sexual assault, racial violence, eating disorders) and trying out different time periods. The writing is good – that goes without saying – but I wasn’t convinced that each of these stories was anything more than an experiment in ventriloquism (the slang/regional accents, for instance, are kind of cringe-worthy). Jo’s time as a rocker in Los Angeles was reminiscent of Daisy Jones and the Six; Alec is a journalist and union man who doesn’t get along with his son; Vern is a would-be property tycoon; Val turns her own trauma into compassion as she fields phone calls for the Samaritans.

When I saw Spufford as part of the online festival, he read a passage from the end of the book where Ben, a bus conductor who fell in love with a Nigerian woman who took him to her Pentecostal Church, is lying in a hospice bed. It contains a beautiful litany of “Praise him” statements, a panorama of everyday life: “Praise him at food banks,” etc. It made for a very moving moment. Ben’s story of drug addiction and mental illness was the most worthwhile for me; I would have gladly taken a whole novel about him, rather than this somewhat fragmented narrative about arbitrarily chosen people.

Note: The title comes from an Anglo-Catholic prayer for the dead: “Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them.”

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 stars]

Longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The novel begins by turning the literal into the theoretical. A bomb goes off in a 1944 Woolworth's department store killing dozens of people, including five small children. These children become our protagonists as we go on to see what may have happened to them had they not died in the bombing but instead live through the rest of the 20th and into the 21st century.

There's Alec, a typesetter and family man; Jo and Val, sisters with very different trajectories but raised by their mother and aunt; Ben who struggles with his mental health; and Vern, a tough nut to crack who makes some questionable decisions for financial independence.

Over the course of a 65 or so years, we see how these characters grow and change and occasionally converge. Truthfully, I would've preferred their stories to overlap a lot more. The premise of the novel led me to imagine there being more of a connection between these five characters. Really, the only minor connection they share is in one of the earliest chapters when they are in a primary school classroom together. We see their distinctive personalities from a young age which is explored in the novel's subsequent sections.

And I do think the strength of this novel lies in its characters. As much as there isn't any plot, besides simply following their lives, and no propulsive quality to their own narratives besides the curiosity that comes with wanting to know how they end up in the next decade or so, Spufford is a great character artist. He sketches and then fills in their lives really well that I was genuinely moved by some of the scenes of this novel. Whether its the delicate description of a man looking down the nape of his lover's neck in the morning light of the bedroom, or the joyous choir of a bunch of school children harmonizing together, Spufford does a great job with capturing and illuminating the beauties of life through the eyes of his characters.

There's also some interesting motifs about music, trees and the city of London that are something that I felt could be analyzed in a classroom and what I feel makes this 'Booker'-ish.

I have some mixed feelings about this book because while I never wanted to give up on it, I wish it did have some more plot or a stronger connection between all the characters after the inciting incident. It had potential but I felt that the characterization being its greatest strength wasn't enough to make this a stand-out read for me. Nevertheless, I'm excited to see what other people think about this as they make their way through the longlist and discuss it!

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In November 1944 a German rocket exploded in a working class area of South London killing many civilians. It's haunting to wonder what would have happened if those lives hadn't been lost. Francis Spufford takes this as the basis of his novel “Light Perpetual” where he imaginatively “rescues” five children from this fate and fictionally builds the full trajectory of their lives complete with all their respective triumphs, failures, passions and disappointments. Each section leaps forward in time by fifteen years to give snapshots not only of how their lives have changed but how our culture and society has evolved over time. I immediately felt sympathetic to this structure as it's very similar to my favourite novel “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf – though Spufford's fiction uses a more straightforward prose style and focuses on a class of people Woolf didn't often represent in her fiction. Not only does this consistently compelling alternative history spotlight the varied lives and concerns of this working class area of London, but it queries the way in which our social circumstances affect or determine our choices and views in life.

I admire the statement the author makes by nobly filling out five lives which aren't memorialised in any way other than as part of a number that perished during a WWII attack. However, a concern I had while reading was that if you took off the very beginning and very end of this book it wouldn't be any different from a straightforward historical novel following a group of people over the course of their lives. I wondered if this meant its central concept is more of a gimmick than something which is artfully woven into the texture of its story. But I think Spufford is making an interesting point in these lives which interact with historical events and other lives to subtly change the state of the world in ways we wouldn't necessarily notice. Many alternate histories such as “The Alteration” by Kingsley Amis or “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth imaginatively construct a story based on vast political changes involving famous figures. What Spufford does is more subtle and challenging because it asks in what way unsung figures alter and influence the world.

Read my full review of Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford on LonesomeReader

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 5 out of 5]

Award-winning author Spufford returns with a mesmerizing and boldly inventive novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London. Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.

Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the life arcs of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs, disasters; of second chances and redemption.

This is a captivating, richly-imagined and immersive piece of historical fiction that perfectly evokes time and place through exquisite descriptions and wondrous prose. It explores the beauty of life through actions, opportunities and feelings we often take for granted and reminds us of the fleeting impermanence of our lives but also the miracle that we are even living at all. Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory and expectation, and the preciousness of life. Highly recommended.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Set in an imaginary London borough called Bexford, this novel has its genesis in a historical event. In 1944 a V2 rocket hit the New Cross branch of Woolworths. One hundred and sixty-eight people died, including fifteen who were under eleven. Spufford has chosen five imaginary five year olds who could have been in the shop and assumed that instead of dying they lived: Vern, Alec, Ben, Jo and Val. We get a snapshot of their lives at 5 years after 1944 and then every 15 years until 2009.
It’s inevitably experimental and the jumping around takes some getting used to, it’s a bit disjointed, but the snapshots, evocations and descriptions are very good. There is also a strong religious thread running through the whole, something I didn’t particularly appreciate, but Spufford does dispense his own justice. The Nazi thug and the property developer get their comeuppance, the vulnerable with mental health issues find some comfort and resolution. If only real life were like that. I’m not sure that the device that underpins the novel was absolutely necessary, why not pick five ordinary lives? Spufford is, I think, influenced by Woolf: the structure is similar to The Waves. The themes of mental illness and mortality tally with this as well. Another theme is from Spufford himself and is called HPtFtU (Human Propensity to Fuck things Up): that I can relate to!
Other reviewers have described reading this as a juggling act and I understand that. There is a flow and a move to the book, but it is a flow towards death, towards disintegration: “Come, dust”. There are instances of deeper thought. Alec is contemplating his fellow passengers at rush hour on the tube:
“Every single one of these people homeward bound, like him, to different homes which are to each the one and only home, or else outward bound, to different destinations at which each will find themselves, as ever, the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble. So many whole worlds, therefore, packed in together, touching yet mutually oblivious. So much necessarily lost, skated over, ignored, when the mind does its usual trick of aggregating our faces.”
I have mixed feelings about this one, there are points of interest and some wonderful descriptions but the structure I found irritating and some of the religious aspects I could have done without. But on the whole it’s humane and some of the snapshots were spot on.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
I did debate on whether to round up or down – a 2.5 is exactly how I feel.

I would have easily chucked this novel early on if I wasn’t determined, as I always am, to complete the Booker longlist. For the most part I found it overwritten, wordy and often tedious. There were exceptions, some sections were better than others. Overall, it was a bumpy ride - a few ups, many more downs. It did, however, surprise me with a strong finish. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the last 90 or so pages cannot make up for what preceded it or that, until the end, reading it was more a chore than a pleasure.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

“We are so many… Every single one of these people homeward bound…to different homes which are to each the one and only home, or else outward bound, to different destinations at which each will find themselves, as ever, the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of many whole worlds, therefore, packed in together, touching, yet mutually oblivious. So much necessarily lost, skated over, ignored, when the mind does its usual trick of aggregating our faces.”

This novel is about time. It portrays what could have happened in the lives of five young children had they not been tragically killed in a V-2 bombing in WWII. It starts with the explosion, describing it in minute detail, as if in slow motion. It then jumps forward to 1949 and fifteen-year increments thereafter, until we reach 2009.

It reads like a series of short stories, with only occasional interconnections. The kids grow into ordinary people living ordinary lives. I enjoyed several of the period vignettes – descriptions of football matches, talking to a caller on a suicide hotline, a character’s appreciation for opera, another character teaching a group of students to sing, property development in London. The characters face challenges that many of us encounter during our lives – addiction, mental health, ethics, family disputes, unhealthy relationships, etc. There are also a few violent scenes, with one character witnessing a murder.

I am not convinced this is a true “multiverse” story, a theme I have been reading quite a bit recently. There is only one timeline for each character after the initial split. It portrays how events and lives are touched by the absence of a single person. It hints at the various courses our lives can take based on the decisions we make. I liked certain sections but found it difficult to remain consistently engaged.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Booker Prize Longlist 2021. In 1944, a V-2 rocket slammed into a Woolworths and killed 168 people, including children. Spufford imagines the lives not lived by five such children. He visits each of these children for the next 65 years for one day starting in 1944 and then for every 15 years until 2009. They all attended the same school in a working-class district and since the U.K. was nearly all-white in 1944, they are white too. There is Jo and Valerie (twins with separate lives), Alec, Ben and Vernon.

Spufford’s nonfiction background shows up in the rich descriptions of places and historical detail of the periods visited in 15-year increments—print union battles, the skinhead movement, Britain’s pop music explosion, gentrification, and more. They comprise a series of vignettes and do not contribute to an over-arching plot narrative. These ‘short stories’ do follow the five main characters as they take jobs, marry, procreate and age.

Spufford is a lay representative of the diocese of Ely and it is interesting that many of his characters struggle with mental health issues in the vignettes—experience with parishioner counseling perhaps? Ben clearly has a fragile mind and is institutionalized at one point. Valerie becomes involved with a violent skinhead and Alec has a granddaughter suffering from bulimia.

It is clear that Spufford has compassion for his characters and bends them towards redemption in the end.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating 4.5/5 stars.

I am an ambassador for Hay Festival and this was the Hay Book of the Month for February 2021. I am so grateful to be part of such a great scheme, that introduces me to such educational and diverse reads on a whole range of topics. Usually they are titles I have not heard of before, like this one, with synopsis that hint they are not inside my regular reading tastes, like this one, but prove incredibly informative, hard-hitting and enjoyable, like this one.

Light Perpetual begins with a paused moment in time. It is mid-day on a Saturday in 1944. The streets of London are teeming and a crowd has gathered outside Woolworths. They are moments away from being obliterated. But what if they weren't?

What if the bomb heading for them altered its course and harmlessly passed overhead? These lives could be saved and could go on to experience everything the rest of the century, as well as the turn of it, has to offer.

The novel follows five of the children in this crowd. Their continued existence is granted and they go on to experience heartbreak, regrets, tragedies, and pain. There are also moments of joy, laughter, awe, and pleasure. In short, Spufford has allowed them to live, with all the nuanced emotions and rollercoaster occurrences that this entails.

Most years, of the lives of these five individuals, aren't touched upon, and, instead, a seemingly random handful of them are focused upon. What occurs in-between isn't featured and so this reads almost like a collection of short and interconnected tales, instead. We get to witness the five age, grow, and fade away. We get to witness to world around them alter in the same fashion.

This was an incredibly moving story and the altered setting of each scene created a fast-pace that, again, was also mirrored by the quickly changing industrial, technological, political, and societal advancements always being made. The characters at the heart of it remained largely the same, despite also achieving their smaller series of alterations in appearance, role, priorities, and mindsets, too. This provided a moving account of these five random lives as well as a whistle-stop tour of a modifying Britain, during this time.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, Francis Spufford, the publisher, Faber and Faber, and Hay Festival for this opportunity.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read Spufford's equally lauded first novel, Golden Hill, so had no preconceptions coming into this, except for its Booker nomination giving it some cachet. And it's certainly a competent, and occasionally engrossing, sometimes moving read. But I just found the whole conceit and structure rather off, and not terribly thrilling. Sections that were intriguing and quick moving were followed by ones dull as ditchwater and plodding.

Others have mentioned how this is somewhat a literary equivalent of Michael Apted's brilliant '7 Up' docuseries, and while it doesn't really have the sociological scope of that, it's an apt comparison. Citizens of the UK, especially Londoners, might have had more luck seeing parallels to their own lives in Spufford's fictional Bexford borough, but little of it resonated for this Yank. And thank goodness I read it on a Kindle, so I could make frequent use of the 'search' feature when my addled brain couldn't keep the plethora of characters straight, and I could easily backtrack to remind myself.

Haven't a clue whether the judges will deem this worthy of moving to the shortlist, but I somehow doubt it - there are much stronger contenders this year.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

At the sentence level, Light Perpetual feels kind of remarkable — the language is lyrical, the scenes rich in specific detail, fates ebbing and flowing like the roar of a crowd at a football match — but overall, as a novel, it feels kind of pointless. I understand why Francis Spufford wrote this book (daily walking past a memorial plaque at the site of a London Woolworths that had been bombed during WWII — killing 168 people, including 15 children — Spufford decided to bring a fictional five of those children back to life and explore what those lives might have been had that bomb never landed), but beyond the satisfaction of playing God and resurrecting dead innocents, there’s really no literary payoff in this novel. Spufford imagines five ordinary, often unhappy, fates for these children — none of them goes on to cure cancer or prevent 9/11; the world seems utterly unaffected whether they live or not — and with just the one timeline given, with no contrast with how the world would have looked if they had died as children, the central concept feels like a big so what? (By contrast, Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 describes four different lives that might have played out for one character had small differences occurred in his surroundings; and while I might have found it a bit dull and self-indulgent, I understood the point of it.) This book is fine; I didn’t find it literarily strong enough to have been a real contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize, am not surprised it didn’t make the shortlist, and I could have skipped it without feeling poorer for it. Had some lovely sentences, though.

He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is evolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.

There’s a truly surreal prologue in which the destruction of the Woolworths is described and then we are invited to imagine an alternate reality in which some hiccup, failure, some tiny alteration, sent that bomb off course. The novel then starts properly five years later, in 1949, with a class of schoolchildren having their Singing Class and we are first introduced to the five: Jo has a beautiful singing voice, and synaesthetically, sees music as colours; her twin, Val, is more interested in boys than singing; Vernon is a piggish bully who wishes he had a good singing voice because he is helplessly in thrall to music’s beauty; Alec is clever and smart-mouthed; and in a separate scene, we meet poor little Ben, undersized and scatterbrained, as he attends the footie with his Da. From here, the timeline jumps ahead fifteen years at a go (to 1964, 1979, 1994, and 2009), and in each period, the characters’ basic traits are pretty much what they had been as children. Spufford does add some incredibly detailed scenes that must have been the result of extensive research — the operation of a linotype machine at a major newspaper, the mechanics of writing a song and laying down multiple tracks, the routine of a double-decker bus conductor in London’s core — but they were more like impressive vignettes than scenes integral to the story. And Spufford introduces a bunch of issues — schizophrenia (which can apparently be cured by the love of a good woman, and an exorcism), labour strikes during the Thatcher era (but are we honestly meant to support the typesetters’ right to do their job forever at the dawn of the digital era?), neo-Naziism (but does anyone buy the explanation for Mike’s need to crack skulls or Val’s inability to leave him?), and bulimia (and honestly, this granddaughter seemed written into the plot just so Spufford could make her sick. Why?) — but these seemed more for colour than as points of entry into exploring the changing social scene over the decades. There are stories here, but not a satisfying novel.

People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.

Einstein said that we can live our lives as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is, and that may have ultimately been Spufford’s intention with Light Perpetual: He writes five incredibly ordinary lives here, maybe daring me to say that these lives were not important enough to write about. Either all of our lives matter or none of them do; we are either all miracles or none of us are. We all amount to dust in the end and the world is poorer for it. There’s a nugget of something interesting there, but it didn’t carry the novel for me.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first experience of Francis Spufford. I had seen a lot of praise for Golden Hill but not read it myself, so when I saw Light Perpetual on NetGalley, I decided it was a good opportunity to try his work. My thanks to the publisher for an ARC provided that way.

I find myself very conflicted at the end of Light Perpetual. There are several things about the book that I really enjoyed and several that I found aggravating and that rather spoiled my experience of the book. Hopefully, both those views will become clearer over the next few paragraphs.

The first chapter of Light Perpetual is explained in the book’s blurb: London, 1944 and a V2 bomb explodes when it hits a Woolworth’s store and instantly kills the shoppers in it, including five young children. As the blurb goes on to say, Light Perpetual then runs “another version of time” in which those children did not die but get to live out their lives. The first thing in the book that didn’t work for me is this first chapter: it sets an expectation that is never even close to being realised because, basically, that chapter is then ignored for the rest of the book. I know that this is because of the author’s overall intention. In an interview with The Bookseller, Spufford says:

”It struck me that those children were perched on the threshold of enormous change, and that you couldn’t really take in what had been stolen from them by one German rocket unless you reconstructed what they might have got. But of course, I didn’t want to play biographical games with real dead children, so I invented my own London borough [Bexford] and my own similar, but not quite the same, V2, so I was free to weave forward in time what they should have, might have, could have had.”

So, the idea is to show us ordinary lives, and that is exactly what the book sets about doing. But it really does make you wonder how the first chapter helps with that. For me, if that first chapter was moved to be the final chapter of the book it would have a lot more emotional impact and make the point of the book a lot more poignant.

Once the book picks up the threads of the lives of Ben, Jo, Val, Alec and Vern, it becomes a very interesting social history of a generation. We spend a day with each of the five in each of 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994 and 2009. This fifteen year gap between sections is a very deliberate choice. In the same interview as quoted above, Spufford says:

“I wanted a big enough gap so that you got moved onwards, not just through the decades but through the phases.”

(He is referring to the phases of life we all go through).

There are good things and bad things about this large gap between chapters. The changes in society are emphasised by the jumps in time, but the fact that there are hardly any flashbacks included to fill in any details means that the book feels a bit disjointed: not only are we following five different lives (with some minimal overlap), but we are just getting isolated snapshots of those lives.

However, what these isolated snapshots do well is build a picture of life, mainly London-life, through the second half of the twentieth century. This is the aspect of the book that I enjoyed the most. Anyone who, like me, grew up in Britain through this period will recognise or remember a lot of the events, culture and attitudes on display. Some of it makes you less than proud to be British. My personal abhorrence for all things racist meant that some of the sections were difficult for me to read, especially one near the centre of the book, but that is balanced by other sections that actually brought tears to my eyes. People will respond differently to the five different lives presented to us here, but the ones I found most affecting were Ben and Jo, Ben struggling with mental health issues and Jo with her synaesthesia. Val’s story also has some powerful moments.

Overall, I found the beginning and end of the book relatively weak but, even though the episodic nature of the book makes it feel a bit disjointed, I did enjoy the central stories of five lives, the story of a generation.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow I have retained an interest in the V2 rocket/bomb, including visits to the Imperial War Museum in London. I read Robert Harris’s V2 earlier this year on publication. So the advance publicity for Light Perpetual, and many of the national reviews further whetted my appetite for intelligent writing around the subject in Francis Spufford’s hands. The scene is set as a German V2 rocket bomb makes a direct hit on a Woolworths store in London’s New Cross. (this true event took place on 25th November 1944 at 12.26pm on a busy shopping Saturday).
So far so good, but the imagining of the lives of five imaginary children who perished; Jo, Valerie, Alec, Ben and Vern, has little actual connection to, or follow on from, the Woolworths blast. They could have been killed in a car, or in a swimming accident, or victims of murder.
Spufford regularly walks past the Woolworths memorial plaques on his way to work, and hence the trigger for his novel; alas his story adds nothing new in my interest in for V2 historiography.

Once the V2 bomb is removed from the equation what is left in the book? For me it was an extraordinary mix of the sublime; parts I absolutely loved, with parts whose deeper philosophies were rather too convoluted.
The book covers a sweep in time from 1944 through 2009, and the reader follows the lives of five main characters from age nine through to their seventies. This is very redolent of the magnificent ITV television Up series of documentary films following the lives of ten males and four females in England beginning in 1964, when they were seven years old, which has reached 63 up (the most episode from 2019).

The stories are largely stand alone (n adulthood (Val and Jo are sisters). I really enjoyed the individual stories for the most part, and my main criticism is that the author is very ambitious in writing a book which knowingly identifies and highlights major trends, and the changing nature of society over a sixty year period in the twentieth century, across five equally central characters. A number of the acute observations could have been better developed across fewer ‘lead’ characters, of a shorter time frame.
As the book draws to a close and the protagonists are entering their seventies, Spufford turns to reflections on the lives lead, and to regrets (mostly).

Highlights

Light Perpetual is a paean to London and the continuing development of this great city since World War Two. That setting, and many of the cultural changes during this time reflect my own life very closely, so I was pretty well bound to like the book.

• Football. As somebody born in Bournemouth and as a lifelong supporter of (AFC) Bournemouth football team I had to smile when hardcore Millwall bemoan “an easy 2–0 victory for the Lions against Bournemouth, and maddeningly good-tempered throughout, because who can be fucked to hate bloody Bournemouth.” . I guess I would have been at that match, and on other visits to the Den I was always surprised that the reputation of latent hostility seemed to have been exaggerated.
A follow up account of visit to the (now, NEW) Den by Vern mirrored my own experience with my mother in her later years and the joys of a VIP football package (lower league variety), complete with guest ex professional.
“off goes McLeish into fluent footballer-bollocks, the lads are playing with a lot of heart; the lads need to give it a hundred and ten percent; et cetera” (270)
Spufford certainly captures the full match day experience (from the acknowledgements his brother is a lifelong Millwall fan)

As for the assessment of the lower league football fare served up at the time, Spufford is spot on: “down on the pitch the Millwall strikers and the Yeovil strikers miss chance after chance” (269)

• Property Development. Working in Shoreditch in the late 1990’s I knew (the late) James Goff- RIP and he, a property man, set up Stirling Ackroyd Ltd. I recall chats with him about the association of a formal name, and in property the kudos and assumption. In Light Perpetual, developer Vern, a convincingly venal portrayal of the landlord and developer, calls his various companies Albemarle Investments, Grosvenor Investments and Featherstone Estates.
The more establishment or ‘posh’ sounding the property company, the more suspicious and sceptical I have always been.

• Opera. Vern is a man of low morals, and generally base instincts. He also dines in style at Glyndebourne, overlooking the Downs, with personal butler, and like Alex in A Clockwork Orange there always lurks below the surface a part of him that is drawn to high culture; in his case, opera. Vern was my favourite character.

• The Print industry. Fleet Street, Wapping; NATSOPA; linotype machine printing (ETAION SHIDLU). You don’t find too many references in literature to these movements and monuments to the past. Spufford did his research very well… and it took me right back.


• Music. Madness and the Electric Ballroom. That intro to One Step Beyond. I remember the Electric Ballroom; I saw Madness in the early eighties and a few years ago as a middle age (effectively) reunion band. The section in Light Perpetual which Pete and his skinhead mates violently disrupt the Madness concert with racist aggression was an ugly face of the new wave music in the late 1970s. Again well covered by Spufford.

Author background & Reviews

Francis Spufford cannot be accused of being a one trick pony in his output. His best known novel Golden Hill is a work of historical fiction which won both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. He is also a garlanded political writer, Red Plenty was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2010, and a potential children’s writer (subject to the CS Lewis estate). Its impressive versatility, with Light Perpetual now long listed for the 2021 Booker Prize. Not sure this is a winner in waiting, but a short list place would not surprise me.

Recommend

I can think of several friends who will love this book and immediately recognise themselves in the individual stories.

[Katie Long · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm, this is a tricky one for me. I was ready to give up after about 50 pages, but I stuck with it and while it certainly improves toward the end, ultimately I can’t forgive the set up that goes absolutely nowhere. 2.5 rounded down.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something highly operatic about Francis Spufford's latest work of fiction. Not only does he incorporate a great deal of actual opera into Vernon's storyline (Callas at a posh restaurant, Sutherland's mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor, Te Kanawa's 1986 Tosca recording under Solti), but the novel itself ranges from pianissimo solo utterances to high-volume ensembles and back again. There are moments of over-the-top histrionics but I viewed most of those episodes as displays of grand passion. In general, they worked for me.

Ironically, I liked the book despite the author's premise for it. Spufford explains that he wished to envision the lives that could have been lived by children killed during a 1944 London bombing; all that lost potential when those pre-schoolers were robbed of their futures. What he actually shows is just how messy, painful, complicated, and disappointing life can be. Death in childhood is always tragic and feels unnatural. Such deaths are grieved anew each time the next milestone goes uncelebrated: a license to drive, that first kiss, prom, graduation, weddings, and childbirth. Whether intentionally or not, Spufford shows us that those lost children are also spared such miseries as failed marriages, chronic unemployment, domestic violence, terminal illness, and addiction. For me this has the ring of clear truth about it and so the novel was successful in this regard as well.

The one storyline that confused me a bit was Ben's. The only way it makes sense is if his initial diagnosis of schizophrenia was incorrect and what he in fact had was major depressive disorder with psychotic features. Those suffering from schizophrenia never fully return to their previous baseline after a psychotic break and sadly deteriorate as they age. So this cannot be Ben's issue. Unfortunately this is never addressed.

Even so, I somehow fell into this book and was quite captivated most of the time.

4.5 stars

[Darryl Suite · Rating 4 out of 5]

FINAL REVIEW: I’m confused by this book. So confused. Hmm, guess I should start at the beginning, huh?

During WWII, a bomb goes off in a London department store killing everyone inside, including five young children. The bombing is a real-life event, but these particular children are fabrications of Spufford’s imagination. The hook for this book is this: what if the bomb didn’t go off and these children were able to continue on with their lives? What would that look like? The book proceeds to take us through the goings-on of the twentieth and early twenty-first century following these characters as they move toward adulthood and make their marks into society. And then, that’s it. The description of the bomb and its eventual detonation is about 9 pages at the very beginning of the book. The children are mentioned in about two sentences during those 9 pages!!? Uhm, no. And that’s one of the problems: we never got a chance to know any of the children while they were actually alive. The other thing is that after these 9 pages, we are never referred back to the fact that this is all a make-believe scenario. You could easily forget that you’re reading a “what-if” scenario, and perhaps that’s the brilliance of it all, but to me, it felt like a missed opportunity: it did not really do anything (creative, poignant, experimental, daring) with its premise. There are no alternating chapters exploring what life was really like after these children died, nothing about the people they left behind, the ramifications of the loss, nada. I’m puzzled/baffled by how little the “what if” element seemed to “matter,” it never being addressed again. It’s an alternate reality story that forgot it was an alternate reality story. Without those 9 pages, the book is ultimately about five children growing up in the 20th century. So, it makes the premise feel less like an adventurous writing project and more like a gimmick to provide the story with more urgency, to have it labelled as being “different” when it is really anything but.

But hey, my purpose isn’t to give this book the hatchet job treatment. The far-out thing is that I really enjoyed the hell out of it, even if I think it’s main purpose didn’t work for me. Maybe I’m a bit like Spufford’s novel here; not really sure about what I’m trying to be. I kid, I kid. But seriously, Spufford can write. His prose is so frenetic, bustling with so much energy. His characterizations were outstanding (especially Ben, Jo, and Vern — I want a full book about Vern; make it happen, Spufford). He’s got a creative flair that made me very excited to be in his world: there's a chapter that’s told through the lens of a full-on telephone conversation, and damn is it a genius way to create growth for a particular character's narrative arc. And woof, the 2009 section is magnificent from beginning to end. So, I feel good forgiving it for its shortcomings, and look forward to reading more of his work. Entertaining, moving, touching, disorienting, sometimes chilling, and downright hilarious at times (gimme more Vern). Shortcomings, be damned.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CSzapqtL7...

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual takes as its starting point an actual event when a bomb exploded at a Woolworth’s store on Bexford High Street in London in 1944, killing 168 people, 15 of whom were children.

The novel’s opening is astonishing. Spufford gives an intricately detailed, clinical description in slow motion of the bomb as it detonates and explodes. He suggests an alternative reality by inviting the reader to explore the lives of five children who died in the explosion. He gives them fictional names and offers an alternative trajectory of their lives, a what might have been had they lived. The five children are Jo and Val (sisters) Vern, Alec, and Ben. Spufford develops the narrative thread of each character’s progression in fifteen-year intervals. He begins with section t+5: 1949 and concludes their narratives with t+65: 2009 when they are in their 70s.

The structure is very original. Against the backdrop of the shifting cultural, economic, political, social, and physical changes in London, we witness the characters as they grow, make choices, and struggle with their inner and outer demons. They experience tragedy, setbacks, and triumphs. The characters are distinct, authentically drawn with rich and varied lives, their interior struggles skillfully depicted, their narrative threads compelling. The seeds of who they are as children forecast who they become as adults. We see them grow up, marry, become parents and grandparents, separate, divorce. We see them as bus conductors, musicians, teachers, con artists, union organizers at a newspaper, construction workers, mental health patients, and criminals.

The most outstanding quality of this book and what makes it such an incredibly powerful read is the luminous prose. It soars and lifts. Its intricate, tactile details create immediacy. Even the most mundane task, like washing dishes or working with a machine, are endowed with significance. Some of the descriptions are breathtakingly riveting. The pace varies, sometimes slowing down, other times speeding up. Spufford’s brushstrokes are masterful whether he describes Ben’s crippling anxiety or Val’s guilt, Jo’s synesthesia or Vern’s scheming. The interiority of the characters is handled with a delicate empathy. What emerges from this powerful story is the imagined lives of five children in all its thorny and poignant detail.

The writing is beautiful, perceptive, stunning, and threaded with compassion and tenderness for the lives cut short in 1944. The tone of melancholy throughout extends far beyond the knowledge that these children never lived long enough to experience a future. It extends to the complexity, fragility, finitude, and interconnectedness of all that pulsates with life.

Highly recommended.

My book reviews are also available at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Ann Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Radiant with hope and grace and courage ... I loved it" - Sarah Perry

I'm not sure we read the same book. Not that there was no light, no beauty in this novel, because there was, but honestly, for most of it, I had the horrible thought that these characters didn't miss much by dying young. Of course, that's not true. Lives can't be measured in that way. Our negative experiences do not make the good ones not worth it, and a life that seems too depressing to some, may have been filled with moments that made it worth living. Almost all humans want life, and even in the worst of situations we often continue to fight for it.

But there are two main reasons why this novel just didn't work for me. Firstly, we follow characters who all die in early childhood, and we get to read about their lives as they could have been, had they lived. This is an interesting concept, and I like that we get snippets from their imagined lives at different stages, from 1949 to 2009. The problem I have with it is that it feels like we're reading about these people's lives, not their imagined lives. There isn't much that ties the premise of the book with the narrative we're following. It would be easy to forget the first chapter, forget that they didn't get to live, and finish the book without giving any more thought to the fact that these five characters were all killed during the war. They are made up characters with made up lives anyway, both the ones that die and the ones that live. It would have been more impactful if the fact that they died had been revealed at the end of the novel, if there had been some discussion or a red thread tying the premise together with the story, or if the author had continued the stories of real children who died during the blitz. That way you get a real sense of what's been lost, instead of reading a book where. you're told at first that they die as children and then spent 300 pages reading about their lives and then the book ends.

Secondly, I simply didn't like that many of the snippets we get. It took my a long time to connect with the characters, and I felt impatient, and frankly a bit bored, through a lot of it. I feel like this is a book that should have worked for me, but didn't. Getting glimpses of a lifetime through small snippets can be highly impactful when written by a great author. Though I don't think this book was badly written at all, it just wasn't for me, I think. A bit more humor might have helped with the boredom and the bleakness. My favorite chapter was when one of the characters was a samaritan on a helpline and had a conversation with someone feeling very low (for good reason). It was heartbreaking, and at the same time genuinely funny.

In other words, not one I hope to see on the Booker shortlist.