LIGHT PERPETUAL by Francis Spufford

A German bomb demolishes a London Woolworth’s in 1944, and five of the victims are children.  The substance of this novel is what might have been for these kids, but the premise is lost as the author chronicles their what-if lives over the succeeding decades.  In fact, the Blitz is never mentioned again, and, although this novel honors the bombing victims, it becomes just five separate stories that barely intersect.  Alec is a typesetter for the London Times and outlives that technology but reinvents himself in pedagogy.  Vern is a serially bankrupt real estate developer who stoops to swindling an unsuspecting potential investor.  (We feel that the world would have been a better place without him.)  Ben is a diminutive schizophrenic man who works as a double-decker bus ticket-taker.  His mental illness limits his options until he meets a woman who changes everything.  The two girls, Jo and Val, are twin sisters who veer off in completely different directions.  Jo becomes a backup singer and girlfriend to an American rock star, while Val marries a homicidal neo-Nazi who goes out every night looking to pick a fight with any random person of color.  Yikes!  My problem with this novel is its lack of cohesion.  It is like reading five novellas concurrently or like layering lasagna ingredients until they run out.  We are introduced to each of the five characters, and then we revisit them a decade or so later, then again, and so on and so forth.  I get that it would not have been realistic for them to have been in and out of each other’s lives, but I would have preferred some overlap rather than five parallel storylines with almost nothing in common.