Welcome back Betty, good to see you. And thank you to everyone for reviews above which I haven't had a chance to read properly (am supposed to be at work not doing this!)
Thank you also for the kind comments after my Ishiguro review - it's the first time it's hit me how similar his books are, despite their superficial differences.
From one marmite read to another...
Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford
This got a bit of a pasting further up the thread, where Chessie chucked it onto the DNF pile, while Remus "finished it so you don't have to"
Well, this goes to show that one woman's "Fuck me but this ws boring" can be another's "enjoyably understated celebration of the small things". It's true that this is a rather wordy, mainly uneventful book, but I really enjoyed it.
Perhaps it helps that this is MY south London. If I close my eyes I can summon up the exact smell of the top deck of a 36c routemaster (although mid-80s for me, when that was my bus to school, rather than 1979 as in the book). The wide boy with the secret high brow leanings? Could be one of my uncles. The feeling of driving in from Kent and the estuary towns, back into London proper, seeing the roads and the style of the buildings change, becoming simultaneously more modern and more ancient, while a voice in your head says "I'm home"? Yes, yes, yes; I can read about this all day long if it's well-written:
Past Eltham, and the traffic lights begin, puddled red-amber-green on the glass before him. Red-brick walls and closer trees channel the grey light descending from the sopping air, and darken it. As he stops, goes, stirs trough sheets of water where the drains have overflowed, the familiar matrix of the city closes around him. The 1930s semis with their triangular raised eyebrows, the Edwardian schools and the brutalist ones,; the corner shops now selling lentils and fenugreek; the railway arches filled with little garages; everywhere the plane trees, the sycamores, the horse chestnuts, so wet now they stand like pulpy chandeliers, dribbling and drooling, filtering the light away so that the pavements are dim beneath. He's back under the eaves of his London.
The conceit of the book is to take the names of 5 children who died, in the real world, in Britain's worst V2 attack; 168 people killed in 1944 when Woolworths in New Cross was hit. Spufford sets out to explore the lives that they might, potentially have had: lives that brush up against some of the big upheavals in post-war London (print strikes, racial violence, gentrification). I really wasn't sure about the conceit initially, but it works - for me, it works, because Spufford's point is that life is precious, that life is hard sometimes but a chance to live is better than no chance. And he weaves his lives full of small, quiet moments - intimacies between lovers, between siblings or parent and child; a piece of music; the prettiness of a tree. There are overlong descriptions of prosaic things, which surely are deliberate - "Look!", the book says, "Look at how beautiful life is and how lucky you are to have all of this around you".
(I found out after reading the book that Spufford is a Christian, married to an Anglican priest and a lay member of the General Synod).
I dunno - it very obviously doesn't work for everyone. You might not want pages of descriptions of a man doing the washing up, or the faces of literally everyone on a tube carriage, or the experience of using a type-setting machine ("the complex invariable 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"). But it worked for me, the ordinariness, the sense of history and of time passing, and - yes - the message of how unpredictable everything is, and how lucky we are to be alive *
She stumps up the hill and the unquiet ghosts say: Why only this? Why this life and not the other? Why this ending and not the other?
It did strike me that this is like a more literary Matt Haig book, so interesting to see him reviewed by Stokey* above