I had to make two attempts, one several months ago, but I read Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual this week. I can’t say why, but the fist time around I just couldn’t grab on to any of the characters. Even the second time took a little effort and a hundred or so pages. And that lag getting into the book came as a surprise, since the opening chapter is such a completely gripping start.
I don’t think it would be a spoiler to say that every character dies in the first chapter (it says as much on the inside jacket) when a German V-2 rocket explodes at a Woolworth’s in London in 1944. What follows and what makes up the rest of the book is a series of snapshots from the lives that would have gone on had a bomb not gone off when and where it did.
Shoppers, saucepans, ballistic missiles: what’s wrong with this picture? No one is going to tell us. Jo and Alec, as it happens are looking in the right direction. Their gaze is fixed on the gap between the shoulders of Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Canaghan where the rocket is gliding into view. But they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for the human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. Or brains. This instant—this interval of time, measurably tiny, immeasurably vast—arrives unwitnessed, passes unwitnessed, ends unwitnessed. And yet it is a real moment. It really happens. It really takes its necessary place in the sequence of moments by which 910 kilos of amatol are delivered among the saucepans.
In one sense, the opening chapter is meaningless to the story and the characters whose lives play out on the pages that follow, since at no point do we revisit what really happened. In another sense, however, much like with the whole of any story, or poem, when you close this book at the end, you can’t help thinking simultaneously about the beginning, about how the stories of these characters have never actually taken place, the lives of each as a child violently cut short. This makes what is otherwise a fairly simple novel into something much more moving—and haunting.
I’m reminded a little of how I felt—or in the inverse of how I felt—at the end of Adam Makos’s A Higher Call. Makos tells the true story that revolves around two pilots, one American B-17 pilot named Charlie Brown, and one German Bf-109 pilot named Franz Stigler. Because Stigler chose not to shoot down a nearly crippled B-17 after a bombing of Bremen, Brown and his crew live to see the future and the families they would never have known because that future and their families would not have existed.
Makos describes the scene at a filmed meeting between Charlie Brown and his crew and Franz Stigler in Massachusetts in 1990:
From above it must have looked funny, the circle of people crowding around one small man in the center, hugging him and one another amid the sounds of tears and laughter. But everyone that day owed something to Franz Stigler, the man in the middle. Because of him, twenty-five men, women, and children—the descendants of Charlie, Blackie, and Pechout—had the chance to live, not to mention the children and grandchildren of Charlie’s other crewmen. . . .
From above, the circle of people blended as they hugged near the [B-17] bomber’s wing, becoming just one mass, bigger and greater as the gaps between them vanished.
That, of course, was a true story all the way through, while Spufford’s story is only based on a true event. (There really was a Woolworth’s in London destroyed by a V-2 rocket in 1944.) But the effect of each story is nearly the same. Somehow, deep down, the thankfulness of the one story is nearly interchangeable with the lament of the other. The fact is, I can imagine, for individuals and for the world, a moment like this—a circle viewed from above as people hug and blend, give thanks and reconcile—for all the lives that went wrong as much as for the ones that went right.
One of the things I like most about Light Perpetual is how Spufford so humanizes each character. This is not a sob story about simply wonderful lives that never got their chance. Though it might be a little overdone at times, each of his characters has as much trouble and tragedy as anything, but each still has some chance for meaning, joy, redemption. Each life is set on some trajectory in a way that we all know as both intimately chosen and yet vastly uncontrollable.
As one character, Jo, is observing a group of young students later in the book, she wonders about the glories and the harms that await them:
But you can’t warn them, any more than you can tell them in terms that would make sense to them that their transformation is glorious. Youth isn’t visible to them, any more than air is. It’s the condition of their lives, but it isn’t a thing that they could imagine not having, and therefore could imagine as being desirable in itself.
In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes puts this eclipsed, front-loaded sense of childhood quite powerfully:
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
And yet, out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic sludge comes all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”
Jo again, reflecting on that same group of students as they sing together:
Can they hear it, this immense organised sound they are making together? Can they hear the organ that they have briefly become, whose separate pipes are all those sticky pink organic tubes in teenage bodies? Imperfect pipes, made of damp twisted cartilage without a single straight line, pumped up by weird fluttering bladders, and yet capable of sounding a chord that seems to lay hold on some order in the world that already existed before we came along and started to sing. Making an order that matches an order. Music is strange, she wants them to see, and one of the things that is strangest about it is that it comes from our messy bodies. Sing, Hayley. Sing, Tyrone. Sing, Jamila, Simon, Samantha, Jerome. Don’t stop till you must. Notice if you can that your temporary orchestra of hormones and still-digesting Big Macs from lunchtime can be coaxed into playing the music of the spheres. If you let yourself be the instrument.
Then the bell goes, and they clatter away laughing.
I think what I would like to see is a book like this, with almost the exact same introductory chapter, but written for characters in the Middle East—say, a family in Afghanistan, killed by a U.S. drone strike. Zamir, Faisal, Farzad, Arwin, Benyamin, Hayat, Malika, Sumaia—what lives might they have lived, “those particles, flecks, shreds, lumps and pieces that, previously, were parts of people; people being missed, waited for, despaired of . . .”? Isn’t this worth wondering, too?
But what has gone is not just the children’s present existence . . . It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?
Which is to say, how can that loss be measured except by the standard of its own existence in time? How can the loss of life be known except by remembering it and lamenting its loss? In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, when she visited Ground Zero in Hiroshima:
I was moved beyond words, even beyond tears, to think of all that can be lost or gained in the gulf between any act of will and its consequences. In the course of every failure of understanding, we have so much to learn.
There is more than enough in any given day’s newsreel, public or private, to provoke this kind of lament, to plead a deep humility, and to warrant a corresponding hope.
It seems right to end where Spufford begins:
Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.
Come dust.