IT IS Easter Day 1938, and 19-year-old Ivy and her beloved brother Joseph, down from Oxford, are waiting impatiently for his girlfriend to join a party of family and friends. It will be Frances’s first visit to Cressingdon, the sprawling house in the beautiful Sussex countryside where the siblings have grown up in an unconventional household, populated by painters and writers. They are concerned about how she will cope with their bohemian parents, separated and both living with new partners, and more interested in their art than their children, or dull practicalities such as providing meals.
The household is held together by the loyal domestic servant, Anne. Ivy, meanwhile, is on the cusp of adulthood, restless and full of longings. In a household populated by prodigiously talented people, she has been made aware that she has no discernible talent, and she has little idea of what her future holds. The First World War is a recent memory, and the dread of a new war looms. An enchanted and innocent afternoon gives way to an evening that ends in a tragic accident. The events of the day will shape the rest of Ivy’s life.
What follows is a series of snapshots of Ivy’s life as it unfolds, a mosaic-like story told through the events of five more days: in April 1938, April 1944, April 1956, April 1965 and, finally, Easter Day 1999. The novel offers a meandering exploration of art, love, loss and faith, all painted against the backdrop of 20th-century England. In spite of her mother’s scorn of religion, Ivy finds unexpected solace in faith as she attempts to find her place in the world.
The description is lush and lyrical (and, goodness, the book’s cover itself is a thing of beauty). The author paints her words with confident, if sometimes extravagant, brush strokes. There is, at times, an almost dreamlike, kaleidoscopic quality to the narrative. As one reviewer has noted, it is as if One Day were written by (and starred) Virginia Woolf. And the echoes are obvious: although Megan Hunter makes it clear that her characters are fictitious, the spirit of Charleston and its inhabitants loom large, casting a spell over the entire novel.
Sarah Meyrick is the Editor of the Church Times.
Days of Light
Megan Hunter
Picador £18.99
(978-1-5290-1018-3)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09