A crucial 2 seconds

~ Perfect, by Rachel Joyce ~

Joyce’s distinctive writing style (from her bestsellers, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Henessey) is immediately apparent in her latest novel, Perfect. It is so named because two great friends, Byron Heming and James Lowe (both Winston House school boys studying for their scholarship exam) in the summer of 1972, launch a secret project they code Operation Perfect. 

Operation Perfect comes into being when Byron’s beautiful, brittle mother, Diana, nervous driver of the Jaguar her dominating husband, Seymour, has gifted her, takes a detour into a disreputable area of town, on Digby Road, where surreally, she may or may not have run over a little girl on a red bicycle. Byron is convinced she did, because he believes 2 seconds are added onto world time at that very moment – a fact imparted to him by his clever best friend, James, whom Byron trusts, whole heartedly. James, who adores Byron’s mother, comes up with Operation Perfect to try to protect Byron’s mother from the consequences of her actions. However, when Diana goes to visit the scene of the accident, she meets the little girl’s mother, Beverley, and the little girl herself, Jeanie, who is unhurt except for 2 stitches on her knee. Jeanie seems unaware of having been run over, but the hubcap of the Jaguar has a tiny red mark on it. (This reviewer does not attempt to pretend she comprehends the magical realism element of the novel.)

Byron lives a very comfortable, upper class life in a large house, Cranham House, on the moors, with his parents and little sister Lucy. Theirs is a life of privilege, compared with residents of Digby Road. The school Byron and James attend is clearly an exclusive one, where the mothers who meet for coffee are particularly snobbish. Joyce writes some beautiful commentary of the British class system through the characters she creates in this novel, and their interactions, which are so painfully class conscious.

“The future for the Winston House boys was mapped out. Theirs was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. […] They would speak with the right accent and learn the right thing and meet the right people. […] They would pursue careers in law or the City, the Church or the armed forces, like their fathers. One day, they would have private rooms in London and a large house in the country, where they would spend weekends with their wives and children.” P15-16

The novel oscillates back and forth between the present, and the summer of 1972. In the present, we meet Jim, who is clearly suffering with mental health issues, who has had to be a patient in Besley Hill and treated for mental conditions more than once. He stutters, he is terrified by many normal things in life, he cannot manage a normal life. He finally finds a job wiping tables in a café. Jim near-obsessively performs many seemingly meaningless rituals, which he believes on one level, will keep him safe, though on another level, he knows they are meaningless. Laughed at by his work colleagues at first, they grow used to him and kind to him, and he strikes up a particularly good relationship with one, who seems more understanding than the average. 

At some point in the novel, the past and present catch up with each other, and Jim’s background is ‘revealed’. This is not a suspense novel, but it does seem to imply the events of summer 1972 affected a boy’s life in such a way to have derailed it entirely. Told this way, it sounds rather grim, but the novel is anything but grim. Like Joyce’s other novels, there is something innocent, even ingenuous, about her characters, and in its tone and telling. A good read from Joyce, once again.