Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford’s 2021 novel, begins with a V-2 attack upon a department store in London – inspired by the real-life bombing of a Woolworths in 1944. Five young lives are destroyed in an instant, which the author describes in a few short pages: we have seen only the briefest glimpse of spindly-kneed Alec and twins Jo and Val before their deaths.
“What has gone is not just the children’s present existence,” he observes. “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 … ?” Spufford attempts that greater reckoning by writing the lives they might have lived: in many regards inconsequential, full of hopes and disappointments and failures, petty school cruelties, love, dodgy dealings, violence and mental illness – yet inherently valuable. What might have seemed a literary conceit reminds us, devastatingly, what is lost when a life is cut short.
