The privileged world of Bloomsbury group is vividly evoked in this novel of a life shaped by devastating loss
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.
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