Byron’s mother, Diana, doesn’t have the time to worry about something as insignificant as mere seconds. She operates her life with precision, expertly managing the minutiae of motherhood and domesticity in a uniform of slim skirts and pointy heels. Yet her entire life centers around caring for her children and preparing for weekend visits from her estranged husband Seymour, who keeps her confined in Cranham Manor, their Georgian home that sits in the isolation of “winds, sky and earth.”
Byron has a habit of watching his mother closely, and imagines her mind as a “series of tiny inlaid drawers with jeweled handles so delicate his fingers would struggle to get a grip.” She makes everything looks so effortless, but that is largely because her life is an act that she assumes with the same efficiency as her tightly guarded wristwatch. Yet her perfection, like time, cannot be contained, or even controlled.
This spilling of time becomes palpable on the day that Byron believes he witnesses the addition of the two seconds. Diana is running late getting Byron and his sister to school, so she decides to take a shortcut down Digby Road, a decrepit social-housing project. When her Jaguar swerves under the heavy morning mist, it isn’t clear to Diana what has happened, yet Byron is sure that the two seconds are responsible for setting off a chain of events that destroy more than one life.
In the present day, we find Jim, a man so crippled by his OCD that he must enact a series of rituals to feel any sense of ease with the world. Jim has spent most of his life in Beasley Hill, a mental hospital that became a sanctuary, protecting him from the passing of time. Readers will wonder how Jim is connected to Byron Hemmings and the two seconds. And while the mystery of Jim is eventually discovered in a revelation as shocking as the truth about Harold’s son David in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the tedious pacing of Jim’s story feels like a series of road blocks disrupting the more absorbing story of Byron and Diana.
The repercussions of single moments reverberate throughout Perfect. And by the end of the novel, past, present and future surge together, as time loses all sense of meaning for both Byron and Jim. Yet it is Diana who loses the most in Perfect. Joyce builds up her ivory tower only to tear it down, revealing the shell of woman that is a victim of time and the limitations of English class structures.
In a note to readers, the author confesses that the novel had initially come out of her own feelings of helplessness. After the birth of her third child, Joyce struggled with the demands of motherhood, reaching a shortfall between meeting the needs of her children, and her will to keep up appearances. With Perfect, Joyce not only questions whether true perfection can ever actually exist, her exploration of its causal relationship with time exposes both as liquid concepts that, as hard as one can try, cannot be contained.
Safa Jinje is a writer and editor living in Toronto.
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There are three distinct realms in the conception of time: the subjective present, which cannot be contained and therefore may not actually exist; the past, which has already happened, so it ceases to be; and the future, which hovers away at a distance, never actualizing into being.
This notion of time as manifold becomes essential when reading Rachel Joyce’s new novel Perfect, a dark follow-up to her highly celebrated debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The novel begins in the summer months of 1972, in the English countryside setting of Cranham Moor. Byron Hemmings, an imaginative boy of 11, becomes anxious when he learns that two leap seconds are going to be added to time to balance it with the irregular movement of the earth. Byron insists it isn’t safe. “Two seconds are huge,” he tells his mother. “It’s the difference between something happening and something not happening.”
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LEAP SECONDS
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Rachel Joyce's 'Perfect' A Flawed, But Hopeful Novel : NPR
www.npr.org/2014/01/17/.../rachel-joyces-perfect-a-flawed-but-hopeful-novel
Jan 17, 2014 - Rachel Joyce's new novel offers two parallel narratives: the 1972 story of Byron, an anxious schoolboy, and the present-day account of Jim, ...
Review: Perfect, By Rachel Joyce | The Independent
Perfect: Rachel Joyce's new novel considers the weight of two extra ...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/.../perfect-rachel-joyces.../article15484038/
Perfect by Rachel Joyce, review - Telegraph
www.telegraph.co.uk › Culture › Books
Review by Elena Seymenliyska
Jun 24, 2013 - So her second novel has quite a hard act to follow. Perfect opens in June 1972, in England. Byron is 11 and he is terrified because, later that month, in order to bring the clocks back into line with the movement of the Earth, two seconds will be added to time. “Two seconds are huge,” he tells his mother Diana.
Book review: 'Perfect' by Rachel Joyce - The Boston Globe
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/...review-perfect-rachel-joyce/.../story.html
Jan 9, 2014 - Fatimah Namdar. Rachel Joyce centers her second novel around an unpopular 11-year-old boy. Byron Hemmings is nobody's idea of a hero.
'Perfect: A Novel,' an Eerie Look at Life Via a Child's Eyes - The New
Jan 22, 2014 - Perfect” by Rachel Joyce covers a lot of ground: a beautiful, obeisant mother, two kids, a car accident and maybe a scam.
Summary and reviews of Perfect by Rachel Joyce - BookBrowse
https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview.../perfect
A spellbinding novel that will resonate with readers of Mark Haddon, Louise Erdrich, and John Irving,Perfect tells the story of a young boy who is thrown into the .
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This spellbinding novel from Rachel Joyce, the author who brought you The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, will resonate with readers of Mark Haddon, Louise Erdrich, and John Irving. Perfect tells the story of a young boy who is thrown into the murky, difficult realities of the adult world with far-reaching consequences.
“Perfect is a poignant and powerful book, rich with empathy and charged with beautiful, atmospheric writing.”—Tana French, author of In the Woods and Broken Harbor
We have the book club questions to get your chat started. Trust us, you’ll have a lot to talk about with this one!
1. The attempt to achieve perfection is central to both Diana’s and Byron’s behavior. Has the novel changed your perception of what it may mean to be ‘perfect’?
2. Rachel Joyce portrays time as a slippery and unpredictable concept. Has this affected your attitude towards the ways in which we measure the paths of our lives?
3. Responsibility is a theme that plays a key part in the novel. Who do you believe holds the greatest responsibility for the accident?
4. Is Jim’s mental illness the inevitable result of the events of his childhood?
5. Diana says, ‘I’m beginning to think chaos is underrated.’ Do you agree?
6. Byron identifies the moment at which he no longer considers himself to be a child. How does the novel question traditional definitions of childhood and parenthood?
7. Rachel Joyce writes beautiful descriptions of Cranham Moor and the English landscape. What is the significance of the natural world in the novel?
8. What is the significance of class in the relationship between Beverley and Diana?
9. Several characters struggle with depression and obsessive-compulsive behavior in the novel. How effectively do you feel mental disorders are portrayed?
10. Diana believes that the course of her life is determined by destiny. What part does spiritual belief play in the novel, and do you agree that our actions cannot influence our own fates?
11. Seymour and Andrea Lowe express strong views about feminism. How does Rachel Joyce represent the role of women in the novel?
12. How does Rachel Joyce represent the different time periods of the novel? Are there echoes from 1972 in the present or is it a world and time that has disappeared without trace?
13. Diana is lonely despite having a family and friends; Jim experiences intense loneliness. What do you think makes people feel connected to each other, and what creates fulfilling relationships?
14. Byron and James Lowe are best friends as boys, and the employees at Mr Meade’s café form bonds of kinship. How does Rachel Joyce represent friendship, and what do you think it means to be a true friend?
Who is the most powerful character in the novel, and why?
15. Eileen and Jim are damaged, in different ways, by their pasts. To what extent do you feel their private pain is transformed through the act of sharing?
Q&A WITH RACHEL JOYCE
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry began as a radio play and then developed into the novel it is today after many years of writing and revising. But Perfect was written within a shorter space of time. How did your process differ in writing the two novels?
The truth is, I have been thinking about Perfect for even longer than The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The idea about the cost of perfection and an accident that changes everything, as well as the central characters, have all been loitering in my head for many years. I could always see Byron and Diana and I knew I needed to find out more about who they were and what happened to them. Sometimes I have even tried fitting them into other stories, but it never felt right because this is where they belong.
As with most things, the story has grown over time. New characters have stepped in. Things I couldn’t understand have become clearer. I have played with different versions until I found this one. It was only as I began to write it this time around, for instance, that it dawned on me that it wasn’t a contemporary story and neither was it an urban one. It was only this time, too, that I thought about splitting the story between two tenses and two periods in time.
Otherwise, the writing process was very similar with both books. I sat here every day and I wrote and rewrote and rewrote.
How much of the novel is based on real places and people?
The moor setting is fictitious. But – as with Harold Fry’s story – I stepped out of our house and drew on what I saw. I am lucky enough to live on the brow of a valley. I write about the things I see when I look out of my writing shed or walk through the fields. It’s the same with characters. I write about people I glimpse and then I imagine the rest. I think I tend to find people in my head that I want to explore and maybe all of them have an element or two of me in them. I don’t know. In researching the character of Jim, for instance, I spoke to a number of people about OCD and whilst it is not a condition I’ve experienced, it reminded me of other things I’ve felt that had similar beginnings or resonances. For me, writing is about finding the links between myself and the outside world. It’s a way of better understanding.
You have written that Harold Fry was inspired in part by your father. Was there someone or something specific that compelled you to write Perfect?
It is difficult for me to know why I choose to write certain stories. Often I don’t understand until many years later. But I do remember vividly when the first nugget of this story came to me. It was just over twelve years ago, after the birth of my third child, and I was driving my oldest daughter to school. My second daughter was telling me she was hungry, the baby was crying, and on the passenger seat beside me was the plate of cakes I had got up at dawn to make for the very competitive children’s bake stall. I was driving slowly. Traffic was heavy. I had barely slept for days. And then I had one of those moments when you lift out of yourself, when you see your life from a new perspective, and it occurred to me that if I made a mistake, if someone ran into the road, if anything unexpected happened, I did not have the energy, the space, the wherewithal, the presence of mind even, to deal with it. I was stretched as far as I could go. I began writing the story as soon as I got home.
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