This novel lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the life arcs of these five souls as they live through the unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London.
If anything, Light Perpetual is even bolder than Golden Hill while in no way resembling it. It is a new departure – a brilliant, attention-grabbing, capacious experiment with fiction ... The novel opens with a poised, detailed and audacious description of the bomb itself exploding. There is a sprightly life to the writing that is in contrast to the appalling devastation it describes ... His elegant structure allows time to pass rapidly, imaginatively leaping 15 years at a stretch, leading us, engrossingly, through history ... the evocation of period is skilful, the smell of London buses spot-on ... Spufford is an artful non-dodger. He gravitates towards describing, with vivid exactitude, what other novelists might be relieved to duck ... Spufford is so comprehensively convincing that you keep unreasonably suspecting him of having experienced everything he describes. Extraordinary and ordinary things happen. Happiness, in his hands, writes multicoloured. But the poignancy throughout is in being reminded that, in his characters’ lives and in ours, even inconsequential moments matter ... What makes the novel original is that we orientate ourselves in it in a new way. The usual suspension of disbelief is replaced by a back-to-front sadness in being compelled to keep remembering that not a single moment – exceptional or mundane – in this literary soap opera happened. The imagined afterlife was stalled before it started ... Spufford is a lay representative of the diocese of Ely and has, as a writer, a Christian heart without ever being off-puttingly pious. Light Perpetual is an exercise in gratitude, enhancing the sense that it is a fluke that we’re here at all. It is a meditation on death, too, with an entertaining warmth that does not cancel out its melancholy. It may be less uplifting than Golden Hill but its serious purpose dignifies it. Fiction depends on “what ifs” and in Light Perpetual, fiction is a form of mercy.
... resonant ... Out of contemplative pauses in front of that plaque, Mr. Spufford has created an extraordinary novel in terms of its variety of character, symphonic language and spiritual reach ... This plot structure can sound formulaic, plodding even. And, certainly, the pitfalls of sentimentality are many in a story that imagines 'what might have been' for five dead children...But Mr. Spufford is no Whittier, and his characters, as they move decade-by-decade through their imagined lives, are no mere static types ... Even to tick off these characters and their stories in this fashion renders them reductive in a way that Mr. Spufford never does. He’s such a beautiful writer, casually stunning in his language and perceptions ... Along with incisively and often wittily describing the imagined progression—and setbacks—of his characters’ lives, Mr. Spufford also conjures up an impressionistic history of six decades of London life ... It’s all so engrossing. And, then, inevitably, a shattering awareness intrudes: these lives are even more heartbreakingly imagined than is typical in works of fiction. Again and again, a reader is drawn into their mundane particularity and, again and again, one remembers the explosion that cut those five futures short in 1944. In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art but of encompassing empathy—it becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.
... a resonant novel about what 'might have been' for five young casualties of war, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss ... This plot structure can sound formulaic, plodding even. And, certainly, the pitfalls of sentimentality are many in a story that imagines the lives that five invented dead children might have led. But Spufford avoids those pitfalls and as he moves his children through their imagined lives they become so much more than mere reverent icons ... Even to tick off these characters and their stories in this fashion renders them reductive in a way that Spufford never does. He's such a beautiful writer, casually stunning in his language and perceptions ... Along with incisively describing the progression — and setbacks — of his fictional children's lives, Spufford conjures up an impressionistic history of six decades of London life ... Again and again, Spufford draws us readers into the mundane particularity of his maturing characters' lives and, again and again, we readers are jolted by the awareness that those five futures were cut short in 1944. In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art, but of encompassing empathy. The novel becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.
