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Chapter 1: What is Francis Spufford's latest novel, Light Perpetual, about?
I loved this book.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, his writing is so crisp, is so matter-of-fact.
Beautifully written. It's very stark in places. And I think she is the most extraordinary writer.
Not to get too, you know, invisible beret about this. And I love her books. I think they're brilliant. My parents read that book to me so many times. If anything, it's actually a time for poetry. It's a time for slow text. It's a time for difficult text. James Baldwin is someone that I consider my spiritual godfather. I could just hear his voice. He was singing this story to me.
hello readers and welcome to another podcast extra edition of abc radio nationals the bookshelf i'm kate evans and this is where i ask writers about their book recommendations as well as the books that somehow feed into their latest novel or sit in conversation with it More broadly, I ask them about the books that have made them. And this week's guest has put more thought into that than most.
Frances Spufford is an English writer whose books include The Child That Books Built. Just made for this segment, really. But he's also written books about ice and the English imagination, about the rise of the boffin, and a novel that remains high on my list of favourites. That's Golden Hill, set in the 18th century, and I'll get back to that one later.
But his latest novel is called Light Perpetual. You might have heard a review discussion I had about that with the writer Susan Johnson just a few weeks ago. I was surprised by the impact this book had on me. I feel tenderised and astonished thinking about it still. So the writer is Francis Spufford and we'll start by talking about Light Perpetual and move on to his larger bookshelf.
Francis Buffett, thank you so much for speaking to us on the bookshelf.
Thank you for having me.
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Chapter 2: What real event inspired the story in Light Perpetual?
But there's also a great reaching for, well, what by the end of it, I was thinking of salvation and beauty and almost glory. So what tradition is that that you're writing into there?
Don't know how I'd name it. You know, it's partly but not entirely a religious tradition. And I think of writers like Marilynne Robinson, for whom there is absolutely no contradiction between the most scrupulous realism and a sense of kind of redemption possible, redemption nearby.
So she's an important writer for you.
She is a very important writer to me. The series that began with Gilead are kind of touchstone novels for me. But her first one, Housekeeping, which I read in the 1980s when I was 20 or so, and was completely blown away by it and thought, I could never do anything like that. I still can't do anything like that. But you work out how to kind of swallow and digest your influences.
And with any luck, you work out how to do something that's a bit like you. Oh, what else goes into it?
Well, what else are the touchstone novels for you, even if it's not a sort of direct connection? I mean, you said Marilynne Robinson's one of those real touchstones.
Absolutely, Marilynne Robinson. Also, Penelope Fitzgerald, who is cheering in a different way because she didn't start writing fiction until she was about 60, and I started in my early 50s, so I'm ahead of the game. Penelope Fitzgerald, who demonstrated that you could do this kind of sly act oblique, perfectly balanced thing.
Often novels that made these beautifully concise visits to different bits of history. So The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow in 1910, and The Blue Flower, her masterpiece, is set in 18th century Germany, and Innocence is set in 1950s Italy. She likes travelling, but
But what she got when she went to all these places, as well as giving a kind of master class in how to realize different bits of the past kind of likely, was this kind of scrupulous balance between a very tough-minded sense of how wrong and clumsy and messy human lives were likely to be and and also a sense that that didn't banish the possibility of grace.
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Chapter 3: How does Spufford explore the lives of the characters in Light Perpetual?
More recently, Susanna Clarke's published another novel.
Piranesi.
Yes, Piranesi. Yes. Which I had, like everybody else, I've been settling comfortably down to thinking Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was such a good book that even if she never writes anything else, that will be sad, but still better life work between covers. But it's not. It turns out that she has been
brewing up something else, something artfully different and very narratively sly and full of completely different pleasures from that sort of beautiful flowing Regency thing that she came up with for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
And a ruined castle full of a whole sea is such a startlingly wonderful image.
It certainly is. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're just going to go, yeah, together for a while over that one, aren't we?
I think we are, and I suspect we could do it forever. So instead I'll ask, what else have you read recently that either startled you or took you somewhere else or surprised you?
Two things very recently, like in the last month. One of them must be out in Australia. I don't know if the other one is yet.
The one that's definitely out is an article called The Heavens by Sandra Newman, which is a strange kind of dark, beautiful, crystalline thing, which starts in a world happier than ours and is the most sweet natured and beautifully observed love story between two people who meet in the year 2000 at a party in Manhattan. Only one of them, when she sleeps, dreams her way into Elizabethan England.
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