Two men, Drum (Drummond Moore, a worker from the Ford plant in Dagenham) and Carter (James Carter, an upper-middle class student sent down from Oxford), met in the 50s doing their National Service. The novel follows their lives marked first by the Cold War and other historical developments that will shape their relationship and lives for several decades... The story is told from the point of view of Drum and his family (wife and two children) and counterpointed by Carter´s parallel own family.

This is a story that deals with class, work, expectations, friendship, love, material interest etc in the UK in an ambitious and interesting way. The novel starts positing a mystery of action which will pique our curiosity and make the reading of the story not exactly a puzzle but an unavoidable interrogation: I questioned every event in relation to that beginning. The very particular style of the writing (a third person omniscient staccato voice effectively a sort of each of the main characters´ ´interior monologue, intersected with realistic dialogues) grew on me as a reader and I appreciated the elliptical, short-hand style which allowed compression of events, reflection and description in a very particular and to my mind beautiful prose, into an also believable timespan.

The Blind Light of the title resolves itself in many ways, from the ¨Doomtown¨ of the nuclear training facility to other more familiar instances to do with love, parenthood, friendship and, of course, death and-or the fear of death. Books are also a leitmotif throughout the novel (another added pleasure!) and their role is often humorous.

All in all, a rather ambitious novel full of interesting elements of form and content, that kept me reading and thinking about very human issues.