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A review by rbreade
The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield
Lyrical, sharp, beautiful writing in the service of a disturbing story. Bradfield takes the risk of stretching the voice of his eight-year-old point of view character, Phillip Davis, and Phillip's adolescent friends--none of them sound like any kids you ever heard, I don't care how precocious. He pulls it off; he pulls off this dialogue because it's spoken by kids, not in spite of. It was a great risk to take, and he nailed it.
The language is amazing, and all in the service of the story and Bradfield's narrative goals; in fact, the language, being so at odds with the creepy and downright horrible images and episodes recounted by Phillip, creates an extra layer of dissonance and discomfort. I notice some of the Goodreads comments mark Phillip as a young psychopath, though he seems more like a sociopath to me, or, to quote the psychiatric diagnosis from near the novel's end, "paranoid schizophrenic, with delusions of grandeur and competitive reality disorder."
It's remarkable how destabilizing and claustrophobic it is to be locked into Phillip's point of view for the duration, which made it difficult at crucial moments to distinguish what was conventionally real from what was Phillip's reality. The novel nicely doubles as a Lost Planet guide to late 1980s Southern California, particularly that aspect of suburbia that can seem deficient of almost everything that makes life vital and interesting. The cigarettes, booze, and drugs consumed by young Phillip and friends is stunning.
Phillip's obsession with the fundamental forces of the universe serve to structure the book, with sections titled Motion, Light, Sound & Gravity, and so on. Here is where Bradfield's prose achieves escape velocity time and again. Even when he's using his gift with language to show the emptiness and tautology of Phillip's mother's dialogue, it's a thing of brilliance:
"In those days I thought light was layered and textured like leaves in a tree. It moved and ruffled through the car. It was gentle and imminent like snow," captures part of Phillip's early fascination with what he calls the history of luminous motion.
When he and his mother finally stop driving away from Phillip's dad and settle in one place, he goes to school. Rather than a simple statement of this fact, Bradfield colors it with Phillip's perception and vocabulary: "It was interminable day after day of vacuous and unremitting childhood, unrelieved by any useful information whatsoever. The world had closed itself around me, and threatened to teach me only what it wanted me to know."
Finally, when it comes to the gruesome, Bradfield understands the secret Hitchcock knew so well, that there is no need to hold the camera on the blood and gore.
Note the attention Phillip pays to the fact that Pedro's toolbox contains "gleaming new replacement hacksaw blades. He's not using them to build a birdhouse, but that is never articulated, because we are in Phillip's point of view the whole way. He's using them on Pedro, though Bradfield leaves it to the reader to infer this. Gorgeous language, disturbing story.
The language is amazing, and all in the service of the story and Bradfield's narrative goals; in fact, the language, being so at odds with the creepy and downright horrible images and episodes recounted by Phillip, creates an extra layer of dissonance and discomfort. I notice some of the Goodreads comments mark Phillip as a young psychopath, though he seems more like a sociopath to me, or, to quote the psychiatric diagnosis from near the novel's end, "paranoid schizophrenic, with delusions of grandeur and competitive reality disorder."
It's remarkable how destabilizing and claustrophobic it is to be locked into Phillip's point of view for the duration, which made it difficult at crucial moments to distinguish what was conventionally real from what was Phillip's reality. The novel nicely doubles as a Lost Planet guide to late 1980s Southern California, particularly that aspect of suburbia that can seem deficient of almost everything that makes life vital and interesting. The cigarettes, booze, and drugs consumed by young Phillip and friends is stunning.
Phillip's obsession with the fundamental forces of the universe serve to structure the book, with sections titled Motion, Light, Sound & Gravity, and so on. Here is where Bradfield's prose achieves escape velocity time and again. Even when he's using his gift with language to show the emptiness and tautology of Phillip's mother's dialogue, it's a thing of brilliance:
"In those days I thought light was layered and textured like leaves in a tree. It moved and ruffled through the car. It was gentle and imminent like snow," captures part of Phillip's early fascination with what he calls the history of luminous motion.
When he and his mother finally stop driving away from Phillip's dad and settle in one place, he goes to school. Rather than a simple statement of this fact, Bradfield colors it with Phillip's perception and vocabulary: "It was interminable day after day of vacuous and unremitting childhood, unrelieved by any useful information whatsoever. The world had closed itself around me, and threatened to teach me only what it wanted me to know."
Finally, when it comes to the gruesome, Bradfield understands the secret Hitchcock knew so well, that there is no need to hold the camera on the blood and gore.
Spoiler
Glance at it, rather, elide the violence, and let the reader's imagination work for you. After his mother moves in with a man--a pretty good sort, it should be said, whom Phillip refers to as Pedro--Phillip arms his Oedipal complex for murder, and goes about his work like this: he doses the man's beer with Seconal and "after a while I pulled Pedro's toolbox out from under the bed where it waited for me like history....The toolbox contained hammers, screwdrivers, ratchets, Allen wrenches, hacksaws and spare, gleaming new replacement hacksaw blades....All that long night as I feverishly worked, what I wanted to do more than anything was build something for Pedro that would last forever."Note the attention Phillip pays to the fact that Pedro's toolbox contains "gleaming new replacement hacksaw blades. He's not using them to build a birdhouse, but that is never articulated, because we are in Phillip's point of view the whole way. He's using them on Pedro, though Bradfield leaves it to the reader to infer this.