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bookishjaja's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
The story itself is not bad as it stands. It follows the lives of a handful of characters, each flawed in different ways. The writing isn’t bad, and I did become invested with each character’s storyline.
But like many other reviews have said, the premise that these lives are merely hypothetical felt irrelevant. The basis that these are children who were killed at the Woolworths explosion and these stories are simply imagined “what ifs” was forgotten more and more as the story went on. The book could have just as easily been the actual lived lives described on the pages, no explosion ever need be mentioned or even happened, and there wouldn’t be a thing different about the story. I understand Francis Spufford wanted to honor the real life victims, particularly the children, who were killed in this real life explosion, and I appreciate and respect his empathy in that regard. But the book itself just didn’t emphasize this foundational plot point as much as I would’ve liked.
And though I typically like multiple main characters and the deep exploration of those characters, in this case, the movement from one character to the next felt a bit choppy and abrupt. I’d become interested then poof, on to the next. The characters weren’t connected in any way other than being classmates in grade school, so there was no overlap. With the book showing us glimpses of the characters during a particular year for each section, we’d see this glimpse and then see nothing until the next section which was decades later. It was jarring to become invested and then pulled away so finitely.
The final thing I’ll mention that is purely personal preference but did turn me off nonetheless was that parts of the book are pretty violent. A few characters experience some terrible things, and the writing was just too graphic for me. To each their own, but reader beware.
Graphic: Murder, Cannibalism, Racism, and Violence
jesshindes's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Anyway
I came to this book with reasonably high hopes but I was ultimately underwhelmed by it. I should say though that I think the opening chapter is great and very cleverly and skillfully written. It describes a bomb falling on a South London Woolworths during the course of WW2, and it renders the scene in a really effective slow-motion, so you see the building and all the shoppers (including a bunch of children) and the bomb powering towards them, crawling crawling and then suddenly it pulls back with the flash and the bang of the explosion. Really cinematic and great.
The rest of the novel, though, deals with the lives of those children in another universe in which the bomb hadn't fallen, so you trace the five of them effectively across the latter half of the twentieth century, up until old age and in one case death; and this was the part that just didn't persuade me so much. I can understand the concept - these five ordinary lives stand in for all the other ordinary lives cut short by war, you see these deaths as the end of all this possibility - but Spufford suffered for me by comparison to Kate Atkinson, whose Life After Life and A God in Ruins (a pair of novels) kind of look at something similar but do it in a way that for me was much more fully realised and did much more with the form of the novel. Light Perpetual has that great opener and then turns into basically just a straightforward novel skipping between these five protagonists - some of whose stories I enjoyed at points, some of whom I was less persuaded by (there's a guy called Vern who is a Fat Man and this is a key element of his character, which I always find quite annoying). By the end it sort of gestures back to where it started with but I just didn't think it did quite enough with the idea. Also this is a very minor petty point but it's set in a made-up area of South-East London called 'Bexford' which is somewhere between Catford and Lewisham and Deptford and New Cross and the imaginary geography of the thing drove me NUTS, the whole time I was like 'but where IS it', why could he not just set it in New Cross (where a real Woolworths really did get bombed) I do not know ahahaha
However this was a minor issue and the bigger thing for me was that I just felt like this didn't push its big idea far or hard enough for what I wanted it to do. But it was nominated for the Booker so obviously many people disagreed!
Graphic: Racism, Violence, Murder, and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
Moderate: Eating disorder
dasha_musa's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
I don't know how it couldve been done differently, but I'm a little disappointed because the beginning of the book gripped me completely, but then the rest of the book just proceeded as the stories of the lives of various characters (irrespective of the set up in the beginning).
I liked it, but it's missing something for me.
Graphic: War, Violence, and Murder
Moderate: Eating disorder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Homophobia, Rape, and Xenophobia
jiwiz's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
Graphic: Mental illness, Xenophobia, Violence, Toxic relationship, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Racism, Racial slurs, Antisemitism, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, and Hate crime
Moderate: Ableism and Eating disorder
Minor: Pedophilia and Sexual content
deedireads's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
TL;DR REVIEW:
While this book wasn’t for everyone, I found it to be moving and thought-provoking. Also, the audiobook is incredibly performed and I highly recommend it.
For you if: You like character-driven novels that take place over the span of a lifetime.
FULL REVIEW:
I read Light Perpetual because it was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, with my #BookerOfTheMonth book club. A lot of people who came to our discussion either didn’t care for it or felt neutral about it, but personally, I did quite like it.
The book starts with a sort of thought experiment: Take five young children killed by a bomb in London in 1944. What if they’d lived instead? What would their lives have looked like? We jump forward in time, dropping into their lives every 10–15 years from childhood to old age, getting a snapshot of what’s happening and has happened up to that point in time.
A lot of people at book club had a similar complaint (I don’t think this is really a spoiler, but if you hate knowing things going into a book, stop here): that the bomb, or the fact that none of them actually lives, doesn’t come into play again. The book doesn’t return to this fact at all — the no-bomb-alternative-timeline thing is truly just a thought experiment that launches these characters’ stories into motion. Readers had expected a kind of closure or meaning that never came, and it left them feeling like, what was the point? But personally, this didn’t bother me. I felt like the point was to show that all our lives have ups and downs, and they’re all different, but in that way, they’re also all the same; the alternating mundane and novel aspects of a human lifespan give us more in common than we think. Those who died, if they’d lived, would have found themselves on the same journey as the rest of us, with their own unique struggles and joys. Our lives are special, and also common, and it’s beautiful.
The last thing I’ll say about this one is that the audiobook was incredibly performed — more like a one-woman play performed than a novel narrated — and probably made the difference between me feeling neutral about this and loving it. I’ll be keeping an eye out for books Imogen Church reads in the future!
Graphic: Racism, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Hate crime
Moderate: Eating disorder
Minor: Misogyny, Abortion, Pedophilia, and Homophobia
lydia123's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
Read if you feel stuck in life or really like the television programme : Seven Up.
Graphic: Classism, Vomit, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Racial slurs, Pedophilia, Murder, Violence, Sexual violence, Eating disorder, and Racism
the_bitchy_booker's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Murder
Minor: Child abuse and Sexual violence
amberinbookland's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
3.25
Graphic: Eating disorder, Pedophilia, Child abuse, Murder, Sexual assault, and Sexual violence
leekaufman's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.5
Graphic: Hate crime, Murder, and Violence