Number 61 - Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

 

This month's book group book.  Francis Spufford is a brand new author for me and I had no idea what to expect from this. It's not a book I would have picked up under normal circumstances.

It's sold as a big high concept novel. The reviews talk about his originality. 5 children are killed when a bomb hits a branch of Woolworths in the London Blitz.  What might have happened if they'd lived? A sort of reverse It's a Wonderful life.

The problem is with reversing that is this. The original version of events takes up the first five pages and the alternate version takes up the remaining 300. There's no real links between their lives, they cross over occasionally but not often.  Basically, it's snippets from the lives of five people who were once in the branch of Woolworths on a day when it didn't explode.

 That's not a strong hook for a story.

We get glimpses into each of their lives with 15 year gaps, similar to the old 7 Up programme. I kept expecting there to be some kind of reference to the central conceit that these were just "what if" lives, but nothing concrete ever appeared. there was no joining thread between the narratives and it all felt pretty pointless.

The opening chapter was bloody awful.  poorly written, try-hard creative-writing-course-first-day standard. The rest of the book was an improvement.  In places it's actually very well written. The chapter with the 50 year old Alec taking his granddaughter to the park was beautifully done. However, there are also lots of places where I found myself skimming the text because he was waffling on a bit and not being all that interesting.

The characters were just about worthy of the title "Character".  None of them were particularly complex. Spufford's idea of depth of character is to have the dishonest property dealer a lover of all thing operatic, and making the skinhead nazi a closet gay.

There no real twists or turns.  A lot of it is entirely predictable if not cliched. I'm afraid the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that (after the first chapter) it's mostly quite readable. The most interesting this about it is that the names of the characters were taken from a list of the dead when a shop was blown up in the London Blitz. It's an easy read and I blasted through it in a couple of days.  I probably won't remember a thing about it by next week though.

A generous 6/10 for the occasional section with good prose.