Family matters
In her enticing new novel Days of Light, English writer Megan Hunter offers two innovations that distinguish the book from most other current works of fiction: there are no surnames given for any of the characters, and dialogue is not only minimal but is presented in italics, with no quotation marks. These two differences only add to the appeal.
Also appealing is the structure: the novel is broken into six chapters, each of which takes place in a single day. Each day is in the month of April; the first two are two weeks apart in 1938, the others in 1944, 1956, 1965 and 1999.
Hunter is the author of two previous novels, 2017's The End We Start From and 2020's The Harpy.
Annie Dressner photo
Megan Hunter is the author two previous novels, 2017's The End We Start From and 2020's The Harpy.
One of Days of Light's major settings is an English country estate called Cressingdon, where Marina is a middle-aged artist. Chapter 1 takes place there on Easter Sunday, 1938. Marina's husband Gilbert has left her, but she has a live-in man-friend, Angus, who is also an artist. Marina's son, 21-year-old Joseph, is home from Oxford for Easter, and her daughter, 19-year-old Ivy, is there too. While Days of Light is told in the third person, it is entirely from the point of view of Ivy, who gradually becomes the lovable main character.
Included in the gathering are Rupert (nicknamed Bear), a 44-year-old who is apparently interested in Ivy; Genevieve, Marina's sister; Hector, Genevieve's husband; and Frances, Joseph's girlfriend. Looking after the food and drink is Marina's full-time maid, Anne.
As darkness comes, Joseph decides to swim in the nearby river. Ivy goes too, but Marina talks Frances into staying behind. At the river, Joseph disappears.
The second chapter takes place two weeks later, at Joseph's funeral. No body was found, leaving the worry about what exactly happened to him hanging over the family's lives. Here Hunter once again shows her knack for handling a large gathering. Ivy and Bear go out to the walled garden to be alone together; their intimacy is sensed by Marina, who takes Ivy aside to tell her, 'Anyone but him.'
Whether or not Marina's dislike of Bear only makes Ivy want him more, when Chapter 3 begins it's six years later and they are married, with two daughters, Artemis, 4, and Pansy (nicknamed Baby), 2. Bear has a job in London, but they live in the country. It is 1944, with the Second World War seemingly under control, and Hunter makes her characters' domestic life seem alive, real, three-dimensional.
Frances is now married to a fellow named David and they have a young daughter named Rose. Frances and Rose come to visit Ivy and the girls. 'Oh! How lovely!' Ivy says, when Rose lets Ivy pick her up and hold her.
'And it (was lovely): the foreignness of someone else's child, the different texture and weight in her arms,' Hunter writes. 'It felt somehow intimate, to be holding Frances's daughter like this: she could smell their home, the layering of life that made their particular atmosphere, so different from hers. And there was something like approval, or even blessing, in the way the little girl wrapped herself so tightly around Ivy's body.'
The five of them go to visit Marina; threatening rain causes them to hurry home, an hour's walk away, but they get drenched. The war is still on and they go up onto the roof to watch buzz bombers, Frances having accepted Ivy's invitation to stay overnight, and see a bomb hit Cressingdon. Juxtaposed with this is a gradual feeling of attraction, one woman to the other, 'the imperfect contact of their lips somehow inevitable, perfect, making them reach for each other.'
The sight of fire at Cressingdon causes Ivy to believe she should go there — for the reader, news of the recent fires in Manitoba makes this part of the novel even more vivid. Ivy finds Marina's studio on fire, many paintings destroyed. After an ambulance has taken the Cressingdon people to the local vicarage, Ivy walks home. Everyone is asleep — Frances not in the guest bed but in Ivy's, exactly where Ivy wants her to be.
The novel takes many twists and turns, all natural, sensual, believable. Ivy becomes a nun, but she does stay in touch with Frances. Though what follows — and the ending — may well be expected, it is still perfectly satisfying.
Days of Light should certainly establish Megan Hunter as a writer whose work can be enjoyed by readers of all ages.
Dave Williamson is the Winnipeg author of six novels, a collection of short stories, four works of non-fiction and over 1,000 book reviews.
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