Golden Hill. That novel, set in 18
th century New York, was plot-driven and twisty.
Light Perpetual is cyclical and symphonic. It follows the fates of five characters, all from the fictional London neighborhood of Bexford, by sampling one day from their lives at 15-year intervals, beginning with their wartime childhoods and stretching to the end of the first decade of this century. But before the novel can do any of that, they must die.
Advertisement
Light Perpetual opens with the vaporization of a Woolworths store by a German V2 rocket in 1944, a scene rendered in exhaustive detail and based on a real bombing that killed 168 people, 15 of whom were age 11 or under. As Spufford explains in the novel’s acknowledgments, he walks past a plaque commemorating the tragedy on his way to his teaching job, so he’s had plenty of time to think about what that bomb did to that building and to all the human beings inside. For