The Royal Society of Literature’s award of this year’s Encore prize for the best second novel of the year has an appropriately counterfactual relationship with history, going, as it did, to a writer – Francis Spufford – who had five well-received works of nonfiction behind him before he embarked on his second life in fiction.
Light Perpetual had already been longlisted for the Booker prize, so this is not a writer who has struggled in obscurity to complete that difficult follow-up. It is especially apt, however, given the subject of his winning novel, which imagines the potential afterlives of five children whose actual lives ended in November 1944 when a German V2 rocket struck south London. The author has said that the idea came to him when he spotted a commemorative plaque on his way to work.
“How can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time?” asks the novel. It is not alone in posing this question. The recent BBC adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life pursues a similar line through the story of Ursula Todd, who repeatedly dies and reappears to live a different story, restorative versions of which carry her through historic events including the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and the London blitz.
The award-winning Netflix series Russian Doll also progresses through a series of deaths, while a wave of time-loop novels is coming down the line, raising the question of what this particular structure represents and why it should be in vogue right now.
Ask a pub quiz team to name a time-loop classic and most will come back with Groundhog Day, which has become a fixture in lists of great films. However, in American fiction, the trope can be traced to a 1892 short story by William Dean Howells, about a girl who spends an entire year reliving Christmas. There is a separate tradition in Japanese anime attributed to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1965 novel, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
Though the urge to rewrite history is a recognisable response to grief, it would be simplistic to say that the current vogue is simply a response to the monstrous “what ifs” raised by the handling of the Covid pandemic: what if particular super-spreader events hadn’t happened, for instance, repeating the role of the 1918 victory celebrations in the spread of Spanish flu? For every historical interrogation such as Atkinson’s and Spufford’s, however, there are a dozen time-loop romcoms and many more time-loop video games, in which snippets of background information gradually emerge to point players in the right direction.
It is a phenomenon that speaks both to a general sense of powerlessness and to an appetite for fixes particular to each individual player in the game of life. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods”, wrote Shakespeare in King Lear, an earlier, tragedian wisdom that many 21st-century societies have been primed to resist. Time-loop fiction is a symptom of this resistance, displaying both a wilful optimism and a refusal to accept any such common fate.
