What is the value of two seconds? For one inquisitive eleven-year old Byron, it is “the difference between something happening and not happening.” Rachel Joyce’s second novel Perfect explores the meaning of time in its most condensed form: how even just a moment can completely shatter a person’s life. In two juxtaposed stories, Joyce highlights the harrowing nature of routine, and the sacrifices we make to reach seeming perfection.
It is 1972 in the conservative English countryside, and Byron Hemmings is finishing up the school year at the elite Winston House. His smug classmate, James Lowe, has just informed him that two seconds will be added to the year – but the change in time will not be announced by the government or any other authority. Paralysed by anticipation, Byron fears missing the split-second change. He realises it is too late after he distracts his frail mother, Diana, from controlling her new Jaguar on the road. A car accident inevitably results – but the consequences are eerily unexpected. A girl on a red bicycle is hit in the leg, but no serious damage has been done other than a scratch to the Jaguar. Rather, the fear of being exposed and blamed begins to haunt both Byron and Diana. In a flurry of coffee mornings, husbandless weekdays, and sheer isolation from the other private school mothers, it is outspoken yet self-conscious Diana who lets the mistake splinter her existence.
Posed alongside this narrative is the bumbling Jim, who lives in a campervan by council flats in Cranham Village in the present day. After stumbling through his daily job of cleaning tables at the supermarket café, fifty-year-old Jim is crippled by nightly obsessions of sealing and re-sealing his van with duct tape, and endlessly greeting inanimate objects so he feels safe. Jim is a sympathetic figure but one who also demands the upmost of patience. His life is dismally routine until the arrival of fiery Eileen into the workplace: a boisterous woman whose confrontational exterior somehow harbours a sensitivity for Jim. The romance between them is clunky and slightly unbelievable, yet it is the tenderness of this empathy that provides a glimmer of hope in otherwise gloomy circumstances. The pace of the novel as a whole sags with the slow account of Jim’s daily toils at the supermarket, but otherwise it is a brisk read.
Perfect addresses issues of class realistically and unashamedly. The friendship that blossoms between Diana and the injured girl’s working-class mother, Beverley, features a few questionable moments but ultimately still captures both the friction and potential between social divisions. In addition, Joyce’s writing style is curiously engaging through her unconventional perspective. Even though the language is simplistic, the prose bears an airy and often brooding quality: a dark tone that is complementary to the unsettling questioning of time. Joyce’s construction of character is overall commendable, despite Diana’s slightly predicable fragility. The social shortcoming of both Byron and Jim is well-crafted and bears subtle resemblance to Christopher in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Although Joyce smoothly reintroduces the reader to the switch in narrative after each chapter, at points the two stories seem appear to stray from each other.
Yet Perfect is definitely one of those books in which one does not realise the enormity of the storytelling until the very end. Joyce has created a satisfying account of the mysterious displacement of time that simultaneously underscores the intricacies and challenges of maintaining social relationships. Captivating and memorable in its haunting resolution, this novel will make you stop and think for well more than a second.
by Celia Watson