Megan Hunter's third novel, Days of Light, is an elegant exploration of love and loss in the life of an Englishwoman from the 1930s to the 1990s.
Ivy grows up among bohemian artists in Cressingdon House, Sussex, which Hunter modeled after the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of upper-class painters and writers. Her mother, Marina, and Marina's lover, Angus, are painters; other relatives and hangers-on are writers. On Easter Sunday in 1938, 19-year-old Ivy is wooed by a 44-year-old author, Bear--yet fascinated with Frances, her older brother Joseph's girlfriend.
The novel's six chapters each capture a pivotal April day, revealing wider cultural shifts and temporary states for Ivy--for instance, in 1944, her mindset is "babies and bombs." Hunter evokes wartime and postwar London and the countryside effectively, whether the specific setting is a jazz club, convent, or deathbed. That the chronology twice coincides with Easter allows for a sensitive tracing of Ivy's spiritual journey. Hers is a numinous world where a river might offer baptism or danger, and a light in the sky could be a divine sign or a fatal distraction.
Days of Light is something of a departure for Hunter after an environmental dystopia (The End We Start From) and a mythology-infused contemporary-set tale of betrayal and revenge (The Harpy). But Hunter's three novels are linked by keen insight into marriage and motherhood. Here, again, the language is the star: it's lyrical, precise, and reminiscent of Tessa Hadley's. Imagery of light counterbalances the somber message that grief never diminishes. This is ideal for readers who enjoyed Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep, and a leap forward for Hunter. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck