Perfect

Perfect
by Rachel Joyce

First published in Great Britain in 2013.

If you've been following this blog you will know that earlier this year I read The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.  I loved it and told everyone to read it.  When I walked past a bookshop and saw Perfect in the window, I immediately recognised the style of the cover as being similar to 'Harold Fry' and saw it was the next book from the author.  After I quick read of the blurb I bought it and eagerly started to read.

The story is that of Byron, an eleven-year-old in the summer of 1972, who finds out that two seconds are being added to time and struggles with this fact.  On the way to school one day, his watch seemingly shows the two seconds being added.  Whilst showing his mother, there is a terrible accident and Byron's world is turned upside down.  Blaming himself, Byron and his best friend come up with 'Operation Perfect' - a plan to save his mother.

Along side this story, and alternated in chapters, is one set in the present day.  In this one we meet Jim, a middle-aged man who struggles with OCD and has rituals he must perform every night in the van he lives in.  While he wipes tables in a supermarket cafe at his day job we are let in to his thoughts and slowly find out about his past and time spent in a psychiatric units.

I found that I didn't connect with Byron and James as much as I did with Jim, which surprised me.  Byron was just too simpering at times and so attached to James that even something as natural as James going through puberty shocks him.  James was a lot more likeable, having a sweet schoolboy crush on Byron's mother and having good ideas but then it seemed than Byron just didn't come up with the results.  Maybe in my mind Byron was older than eleven, but I wanted to go in to his house and tell him what he was doing wrong a lot of the time.

Jim was an interesting character and one who showed me that you never really know what people are going through.  I wanted to go and have a chat and a biscuit with.  There are enough details about his past that you feel a protectiveness towards him, but not too much that it detracts from the present day.

Throughout the story there is a feeling that the two stories are connected, but it is not clear how until towards the end of the book.  The chapter it is revealed in is very well written (I did cry) and it came at a time when I was basically plodding through just to get to the end.

The writing is very similar to that of Harold Fry, and the author clearly has a certain, strong style, which is good, but I just didn't love this one.  Part of me thinks that if I hadn't read Harold Fry first I might have liked this more, but to me Harold was a stronger character than any in this book and evoked more emotion from me.  I think part of the reason for this is the alternating chapters and joint stories in Perfect.  If the book had been longer there would have been more time spent with each character, but as it is I didn't get to know any of them enough.

I did like the idea of the two seconds being added being used as a plot point, as I didn't know this happened before reading this book.  It does make you realise the importance of time and that sometimes it only takes a few seconds for everything to change.