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In Megan Hunter's novels, maternity is a precarious state, sometimes ungrateful, but often wonderful. And that's – with the disorder of marriage – the central theme of Hunter. In its beginnings in 2017 The end that we start (Adapted for the screen in 2023), a woman takes care of her newborn son while Great Britain is engulfed in the floods. Three years later came The HarpieA story of a woman (and a mother) who deals with her husband's adultery by adopting the holder – avenging and dangerous personality -.
Hunter is skillful to draw the undulations caused by disturbances. After having approached the effects of the environmental disaster and infidelity in its previous novels, with Light days It focuses on the lasting consequences of unexpected death. He opens a sunny Easter Sunday just before the Second World War, while Ivy, 19, sails the family dynamic in Cressingdon, their disjointed Sussex farm – as well as a surprise sex alarm.
The family practices what Ivy calls “a new way of life”. Her mother, Marina, is a famous painter, like the bisexual lover of Marina Angus; While Ivy's father, Gilbert, lives in London, where he entertains the friends and walks in the British library. His aunt writes novels, his uncle writes pieces.
Ivy herself lights up in a non-common way between various artistic activities (a little poetry, a tour on stage) and is pursued in a romantic way by the former friend of Angus. His only constant is his older brother Joseph, a golden child who arrives from Oxford with his new flame, Frances.
The scene – English eroticism intertwined meets the modernist Aga Saga – recalls Mary Wesley The lawn of chamomileAlthough Hunter lacks sharpness of Wesley. Instead, she leans towards the concerns of Virginia Woolf: Cressingdon is a barely veiled version of Charleston, the country retreat from the Bloomsbury group, and the novel is imbued with the spirit of Woolf of convention feminism (as in the previous novels of Hunter, the male characters remain peripheral and rather cattle).
This critical Easter evening, Joseph disappears by swimming at night with ivy in the local river. His body is never found. The family is left deeply and definitively unmarked. Marina gets lost in her paintings and Frances, the now bereaved girlfriend, becomes a kind of post-scriptum living for the lost son. Ivy, on the other hand, embraces religion, finding confusing and contradictory signs in his search for enlightenment.
The novel is structured by six individual days covering Ivy's life, starting with this fateful Sunday in Sussex and ending with a clear morning in London at the end of the century. This narrative skimming stone – presenting Ivy as his daughter, then the mother and finally grandmother, via the blitz and the 60s, is carefully manipulated. During a large part of the story, Ivy lacks a personal agency but she is completely credible as a malleable protagonist, who always flows with the currents of others: the first parents, then the lovers and finally God.
Several author's fulfillments are starting to grate. Hunter likes the stylistic novelty (in its beginnings, the characters were only known by their initial first). Here, the use of the dialogue in italics without trace of quote is at best an unnecessary characteristic, at worst confusing. And prose is overworked when emotional questions are at stake. Tea conversations are imbued with high passion, the corridors are full of whispering declarations. And the constant references to light – see the light, go to light – feel laborious.
The hunter is more effective in evoking the poetic mysteries of the physical world. The clouds of a brewing bubble “as a trial in a saucepan”, while the river lit by the moon which swallows Joseph has “the low sound of a long journey”. Likewise, she captures the strangeness of artist studios. In his mother's workshop, Ivy set in front of an unfinished work. “Seeing a painting like this was always prohibited,” she admits, “as a glimpse of a man's stomach under his shirt when he raised his arms.”
I left this novel about Ivy and his family like me about the Bloomsbury Bunch: I wanted them to paint more, write more, do more. . . But feel less.
Light days by Megan Hunter Picador £ 18.99 / Grove Atlantic $ 28 (from June), 288 pages
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