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. This spilling of time becomes palpable on the day that Byron believes he witnesses the addition of the two seconds. Yet her perfection, like time, cannot be contained, or even controlled. 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."īyron 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. She operates her life with precision, expertly managing the minutiae of motherhood and domesticity in a uniform of slim skirts and pointy heels. "It's the difference between something happening and something not happening."īyron's mother, Diana, doesn't have the time to worry about something as insignificant as mere seconds. "Two seconds are huge," he tells his mother. 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.
The novel begins in the summer months of 1972, in the English countryside setting of Cranham Moor. 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. 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.
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