There’s a deep and pleasurable Britishness to the novel, from the Health Service spectacles the children wear in 1949 to state school bureaucracy in the final years of New Labour via the top deck of a London bus on Saturday night. Spufford can evoke what it feels like to drive through LA at night – “hot gusts, sage-smelling” – and, a few pages later, a rainy traffic jam between the Swanley and Sidcup bypass. Still, the novel teems with life experience. Vern becomes a millionaire, though it’s Jo, with her rock star lifestyle in Los Angeles, who travels the farthest culturally. But there are positive changes, too: shifts in attitudes to mental health help Ben to recover Jo’s gay son is able to live openly with his Sri Lankan boyfriend.Ĭuriously, given this was a time of great social mobility, Spufford sends none of his five to university. Vern’s business suffers with every boom and bust Val’s partner is increasingly incensed by black and Asian immigrants. We witness their failures as well as their epiphanies. Ben succumbs to schizophrenia Vern wheels and deals his way in the world of property development Alec fights for his typesetting job at the Times Jo pursues a musical career Val confronts the horror of being in a relationship with a neo-fascist. In the first section, set in 1949, we see the children lining up in the school playground: “The colour of the hush is a hard grey, thinks Jo, like a tarnished spoon.” Spufford checks up on his characters in intervals of 15 years: 1964, 1979, 19. I couldn’t help feeling the concept undermined the book rather than strengthened it, especially since the rest of the novel is a powerful reminder of the virtues of invention. Moreover, they lead lives so ordinary that their continued existence in no way changes the alignment of real-world events. It’s a neat framing device, but why does Spufford need the V2 deaths when he could just write a story about five people living through the second half of the 20th century? Isn’t life unpredictable enough without the hypothetical of a violent death? The individuals at the heart of the novel are not real, nor is the London borough of Bexford where they are raised. Spufford goes on to imagine how the lives of the five working-class children would have panned out: “All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come.” The novel opens by slowing down time to track the carnage, and then asks us to picture a world where there was no bomb, or where it landed instead in the park, killing only pigeons. In his acknowledgements, Spufford says that the inspiration came when he was walking to work at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and noticed a plaque outside a branch of Iceland on New Cross Road in south London commemorating a similar attack in 1944 that killed 168 people. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.

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Like they’ve all, together, turned into one big animal, angry or sad.

Here, Spufford gives us a singing lesson in a primary school, a racist attack in a car park, a picnic at Glyndebourne opera, a wedding reception, a Millwall game turning edgy: “An enormous deep disappointed Oooooo comes up out of every throat on the home stand. It is slow burning where Golden Hill was fast and impetuous its action ranges across the second half of the 20th century as opposed to a few madcap weeks and it has five ordinary protagonists in place of one extraordinary hero.īoth novels, however, are tessellated together from vivid social scenes. It is, for the most part, a quiet, contemplative book about the imagined future lives of children killed in a German V2 attack in the Blitz. It leapt from riot to rooftop chase to banquet to duel – with not one but two scenes of coitus interruptus.Īt first glance, Spufford’s second novel, Light Perpetual, couldn’t be more different. The result, Golden Hill (2016), was a larky, lusty, picaresque caper set in mid 18th-century New York. When he began writing his debut novel at the age of 52, he wanted, in his own words, to “throw in everything I liked, and then the kitchen sink”. He spent the first 20 years of his career producing narrative non-fiction on eclectic subjects, as if testing his range: polar exploration, children’s literature, the 1950s Soviet economy. His great skill is to breathe life into almost any scene. Francis Spufford is a master of the set piece.

Perpetual light