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Winnipeg Free Press
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
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.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Days of Light by Megan Hunter review
Megan Hunter's remarkable debut, The End We Start From, was a dystopic novella about an unnamed woman navigating new motherhood after an apocalyptic flood (Jodie Comer starred in the 2023 film adaptation). Written in staccato fragments and interspersed with excerpts from creation myths from around the world, it was spare, precise and often startlingly beautiful, a kind of prose poem that held much of its horror and tenderness in the silences Hunter opened up between her sentences. Set over six separate days that span six decades, her third novel, Days of Light, is also structured around the spaces in a story. Stylistically and in spirit, however, it owes less to the work of Jenny Offill and Angela Carter than to the shattered English idylls of novels such as Ian McEwan's Atonement or Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday. It is 1938 and 19-year-old Ivy is living with her artist mother, Marina, and Marina's mostly homosexual and openly unfaithful lover, Angus, at Cressingdon, a charming farmhouse on the edge of the South Downs. Hunter was loosely inspired by Bloomsbury group stalwarts Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and their Sussex home, Charleston, and, while she does not cleave to their histories, echoes of their lives ripple through the book. Bell and Grant's daughter Angelica was, like Hunter's Ivy, born on Christmas Day 1918. Grant's former lover David 'Bunny' Garnett was there and wrote to Lytton Strachey marvelling at the baby's remarkable beauty. 'I think of marrying it,' he mused. 'When she is 20 I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?' Bunny and Angelica married in 1942, when she was in her mid-20s. These disconcerting events are referenced in Days of Light, with Ivy's parents' old friend (and Angus's one-time lover) Bear, a handsome writer with the 'hair of a matinee idol', but Hunter does not set it at the heart of the story. Instead, the novel is driven by a devastating – and entirely fictional – tragedy that unfolds in its opening pages. It is Easter Sunday and Ivy's extended family has gathered at Cressingdon for lunch. War rages in Spain and a second war with Hitler's Germany looms, but in Sussex the horrors of the world seem very far away. The weather is glorious and Joseph, Ivy's beloved older brother, is in love. He glows as he introduces Frances to his family. That evening, he and Ivy run down to the icy river to swim. 'They had not gone to church but would do this: lower themselves into water, immerse themselves in it, their own kind of baptism.' Bewitched by a strange light, Ivy does not see Joseph disappear under the water. He never resurfaces. How does so shattering and inexplicable a loss shape a life? Over five more April days, starting with Joseph's funeral, Hunter chronicles Ivy's struggles towards a reckoning with it and with herself. The early parts of the novel are a vividly immersive delight. The world of 1930s bohemian privilege is well-trodden literary ground, but Hunter summons it afresh, evoking with exquisite precision this vanished world and the devastation of loss. The food at Joseph's funeral, 'tiny sea creatures … suspended in jellies', is as carefully particular as Ivy's disorientation, 'the air of the world seeming to hold her too briefly before passing her by'. As the years pass, though, the book loses some of its early momentum. Novels like David Nicholls's One Day may make it look easy, but a satisfying narrative that contains itself to only a handful of days is extremely hard to pull off. It demands the rigour that Hunter displayed to such striking effect in The End We Start From, in distilling a story to its purest essentials and in trusting the reader to imagine what comes in between. The passing of time becomes itself a vital part of the plot. In Days of Light, Hunter chooses days that seem at first glance unremarkable, but turn out to be the pivots on which Ivy's life turns. The most ordinary of tasks – caring for small children, shopping for gloves – can, as Virginia Woolf proved with Mrs Dalloway, contain multitudes, but Hunter's carefully accreted detail too often clogs the narrative. Ivy, a perspicacious observer, is a frustratingly passive protagonist, at least on the page. It is never quite clear how the young woman we meet at the start of the novel, a self-confessed nobody in a family of exceptional somebodies, a girl content to float along on a current of other people's making, grows into the kind of person who will upend her life in profound and transgressive ways. Though it is Ivy's eyes through which we see this story, her heart remains elusive, always just out of reach. Days of Lights by Megan Hunter is published by Picador (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
