Lucasta Miller

Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Five working-class children are killed by a V2 in south London in 1944. But what might their destinies have been?

Devastation caused by a V2 attack on London in the second world war. Credit: Getty Images

Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in 2016. Set in 18th-century America, it was a tour de force of historical imagining, its prose skilfully suffused with the writerly tics of that era yet not overly so, leaving it pedantry-free and compulsively readable.

His new book, Light Perpetual, is also a historical novel, but with a difference. It follows the arc of the 20th century through the stories of five working-class Londoners, but its central conceit is a clever counterfactual. The opening scene sees all five, then young children, being killed in an air raid during the second world war. How, asks Spufford, might their lives have panned out had they lived?

Fiction that plays tricks with time has a pedigree, from Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819) to Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) to the many 20th-century children’s classics in which characters go back or forward in history. Here we begin in what almost seems like the world of sophisticated, philosophical sci-fi fantasy, as a V-2 rocket races towards a branch of Woolworths on a south London high street on a November Saturday morning in 1944 and time stands still:

Matter has its smallest, finite subdivisions. Time does not. One ten-thousandth of a second is a fat volume of time, with onion-skin pages uncountable… Each of the parts is as limitless as the whole, because infinities don’t come in larger and smaller sizes.

‘Apologies for the delay — your newspaper is now only available online, so I took the liberty of printing it out.’

Yet the purpose of the book is not to boggle our minds with the outer reaches of the space-time continuum but to engage our humanity in precise and empathetic prose.

It’s moving to discover from the acknowledgements that Spufford was inspired by a plaque in the New Cross Road commemorating the victims of an actual V-2 attack on Woolworths.

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