[In the following review, Todd discusses the unconventional structure of Pieces of Light, praising the novel as “strongly plotted and a pleasure to read.”]

Retrospection anchors Adam Thorpe's work. His first novel, Ulverton (1992), an account of a fictional English ur-town, reconstructed 300 years of England's cultural history through a set of interlinking narratives. Still (1995), his second novel, was an exiled film director's retrospective on his life and failed career. Thorpe's talent for picking the telling detail and resonant historical voice was evident in both novels. Pieces of Light, his exhilarating third novel, re-examines two of the twentieth century's shaping forces—colonialism and war. The story centres on the protagonist, Hugh Arkwright's effort to reconcile his memories of his mother, who disappeared into the African jungle in the 1930s, with his later life in England. As in the previous novels, the story doesn't unfold conventionally.

The novel is told in three parts. The first is an evocative memoir of Hugh's childhood in Africa and his transposition, at age seven, to Ulverton. The prose here is gorgeous and compelling: “All around us the forest spoke, and a bright three-quarter moon rose. I made it huge and blinding with my father's heavy field binoculars.” Thorpe tracks Hugh's developing emotions with skill and subtlety, carefully documenting the boy's growing awareness of the themes that will resonate in his life: sacrifice, ghosts, ritual, the powerful force of nature and the duplicity of language. Hugh, who becomes a famous Shakespearean actor and director, is constantly pondering the meanings of words; he learns his father's tour as a district officer in Africa is “statutory”:

“Statutory” made me think of statues. I was stuck in a kind of block of marble, and couldn't find the hole that would let me out. This block of marble grew thicker with thick clothes, and although I felt the cold more than the others, I would deliberately underdress.

This section is strong enough to stand alone; an entire novel could be made of this lyrical, accessible voice. But rather than pursuing the delicate boy's growth into adulthood, Thorpe abandons Hugh at the moment his mother disappears, and makes a six-decade leap to his return to Ulverton at the age of seventy. The voice changes completely. The old Hugh's stream-of-consciousness narration is hard-edged, verging on the psychotic, embedded with references, unreliable, Joycean: “Thumped the skip as I passed and it sounded hollow. By dawnlight from my window it is. Even the awful polka-dotted lampshades. I feel dispersed.” What seemed to be a memoir about Africa between the wars turns into a study of a colourful, though troubled, contemporary English village. In order to solve the mystery of his mother's disappearance, Hugh has to confront the mysticism and violence that are as implicit in Ulverton as they were in Africa. The third section makes a similar leap, moving back to Africa before Hugh's birth where Hugh's mother writes letters filled with echoes of Conrad.

This somewhat jarring triptych works like a jigsaw puzzle, slowly allowing a strong narrative to emerge. Repeated images and motifs link the three sections, giving the novel—and Hugh's life—shape and direction. Images and motifs recur. African rituals metamorphose into millennial conspiracy theories, violent crime and pagan ritual; the traumas Hugh's father and uncle suffered in Africa during the First World War resonate with his own experiences on bomber planes in the Second; the jungle reappears in Ulverton, as the vestiges of an ancient forest. Africa and Ulverton inform each other; ghosts and images pursue Hugh from place to place. History and memory aren't linear processes confined to one country or another. Rather, they can occur in brief flashes, separated by vast distances. A whole history may be derived from an item of clothing, a word, or a letter—and the important story in a man's life may not be his career or love, but rather a few brief moments at the beginning and end of his days.

Pieces of Light is boldly unconventional yet also strongly plotted and a pleasure to read. The reappearance of Ulverton is significant: has it now become Thorpe's fictional territory—a Wessex or a Yoknapatawpha County for the millennium? One senses a grander plot at work.