9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Days of Light' Review: Lives of the Artists
Set during six consequential days scattered over six decades, from the late 1930s to the late 1990s, Megan Hunter's third novel, 'Days of Light,' chronicles the life and times of the directionless but searching Ivy (so named because she was born on Christmas).
The family seat, Cressingdon, which Ivy's profoundly and proudly Bohemian mother, Marina, once described as 'the most secular house in England,' will feel familiar to anyone versed in the Bloomsbury group. Marina, a renowned painter, lives there with her lover Angus, also an artist, who is frequently visited by current and former male companions (for the record, Marina isn't boho enough not to be bothered by this). Ivy's father, Gilbert, a notable writer and a man of many girlfriends during and after his split from Marina (the two never divorced because how bourgeois would that be?), puts in occasional appearances.
Ivy, 19 when the novel opens—Easter Sunday, 1938—had, over the years, tried to dance, act, sing and write. Nothing took. 'She was a dilettante; she knew it as soon as she heard the word, at one of her mother's dinner parties.' Perhaps this is why she is given to aimless flitting about and to self-dramatizing musings. 'Sometimes she felt that she would have preferred to live as a flower, or a tree, to grow in increments, never be expected to move or create beyond her natural cycle.'
What begins as an idyllic holiday ends in horror when Ivy and her adored older brother, Joseph, go for an evening swim in the frigid river on their property. Transfixed by a strange light whose source remains a mystery, Ivy doesn't see Joseph disappear under the surface of the water; his body is never found. The tragedy upends Ivy's life, leading to her hasty marriage to one of Angus's former lovers, to motherhood, to an intense relationship with Joseph's former girlfriend and to a search for God.
