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A review by sophronisba
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- 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
4.75
Light Perpetual is a novel with virtually no plot. In 1944, a group of Londoners at a Woolworths are killed by a bomb. Among them were children. What, wonders Francis Spufford, might have happened to these children? Light Perpetual is his answer to this question: in sum, they lead ordinary lives. Some of them marry and have children and grandchildren of their own. Some of them make terrible decisions. Some of them have painful problems. Some of them are happy, some are not. And in the end, they are old, left with their own memories of lives that they at least tried to make the best of.
What, then, is the point? Late in the book, Jo, now a teacher in her mid-fifties, conducts a classroom full of high-schoolers in singing practice. "She just watches," Spufford writes, "their mouths opening and closing effortfully, the gasps for breath, as for a whole ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds, Year 10 sustain the chord. Can they hear it, this immense organized sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don't stop till you must." That, then, is the point -- that the voices of the dead children were lost prematurely, that they were cheated of their opportunity to become part of the sustained chord, that -- perhaps even more than that -- we lost the opportunity to hear their voices in that chord. Yes, in Spufford's imagining, the children were ordinary -- they did not cure cancer or solve the crisis in the Middle East -- some of them were not even very good people. Some of them you might give a wide berth were you to meet them on the sidewalk. But still -- they should have been part of us, and they were not.
Fortuitously, I read this book the same week that a teenager murdered four of his classmates sixty-odd miles away from my house. As I read the book, I thought repeatedly of Tate, Hana, Madisyn, and Justin. Of course I did -- how could I not? Their voices stilled, never again to be part of the chord. They too should have been part of us, and now they are not.
It's a story that repeats forever -- senseless loss. You recover from one instance of it and another lurks around the corner. "It's a sad song," says Hermes in Hadestown, "but we sing it anyway/ Cause, here's the thing: To know how it ends/And still begin to sing it again/As if it might turn out this time."
Light Perpetual isn't a typical novel -- no plot to speak of, no real story arcs, no three-act structure with a payoff and denouement. Maybe in a different frame of mind, in a different world, it wouldn't have worked for me. But in this frame of mind, in this particular world, it was one of the best books I've read this year.
What, then, is the point? Late in the book, Jo, now a teacher in her mid-fifties, conducts a classroom full of high-schoolers in singing practice. "She just watches," Spufford writes, "their mouths opening and closing effortfully, the gasps for breath, as for a whole ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, forty seconds, Year 10 sustain the chord. Can they hear it, this immense organized sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don't stop till you must." That, then, is the point -- that the voices of the dead children were lost prematurely, that they were cheated of their opportunity to become part of the sustained chord, that -- perhaps even more than that -- we lost the opportunity to hear their voices in that chord. Yes, in Spufford's imagining, the children were ordinary -- they did not cure cancer or solve the crisis in the Middle East -- some of them were not even very good people. Some of them you might give a wide berth were you to meet them on the sidewalk. But still -- they should have been part of us, and they were not.
Fortuitously, I read this book the same week that a teenager murdered four of his classmates sixty-odd miles away from my house. As I read the book, I thought repeatedly of Tate, Hana, Madisyn, and Justin. Of course I did -- how could I not? Their voices stilled, never again to be part of the chord. They too should have been part of us, and now they are not.
It's a story that repeats forever -- senseless loss. You recover from one instance of it and another lurks around the corner. "It's a sad song," says Hermes in Hadestown, "but we sing it anyway/ Cause, here's the thing: To know how it ends/And still begin to sing it again/As if it might turn out this time."
Light Perpetual isn't a typical novel -- no plot to speak of, no real story arcs, no three-act structure with a payoff and denouement. Maybe in a different frame of mind, in a different world, it wouldn't have worked for me. But in this frame of mind, in this particular world, it was one of the best books I've read this year.