Days of Light
by Megan Hunter
In her debut novel(la) The End We Start From, recently turned into a movie, Megan Hunter gave her personal poetic twist to the post-apocalyptic genre, imagining a near-future where waters are inexplicably rising, laying waste to towns and cities. In her second novel, The Harpy, Hunter ventured into “domestic thriller” territory, with a feminist tale about motherhood and patriarchy, laced with mythical elements and more than a twist of horror.
At face value, Days of Light, Hunter’s most recent literary outing is a “realist” novel, which follows the life of Ivy, a woman from an artistic, bohemian family, from her teenage years before the Second World War up to her death in 1999. We first meet Ivy on Easter Sunday 1938, a day marked by a perplexing tragedy that signals a watershed in the protagonist’s life. What follows is an intriguing character study, with elements of the historical novel, as Hunter and her protagonist deftly move from one momentous decade to another, each brilliantly evoked.
The novel may be imbued with realism, but the narration has a dreamlike element to it, where the mysterious and the Transcendent are never far away. In fact, Ivy’s story is a journey in search of a destination beyond the self – an inquiry for the “meaning of life”, perhaps – which Ivy alternately seeks in abandonment to physical and spiritual passion (which sometimes appear to her as two sides of the same coin).
While the novel makes for a satisfying arc, most of its pleasures lie in individual passages exploring themes of memory, love and faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment