Everything the Light Touches is a quiet book. Very quiet. It has time-travelled from another world into the twenty-first century, where fiction often tries to match the breathless pace of action cinema in order to stay in the ring, as it were. Quiet is not the same as slow, though the narrative is not fast-paced. Quiet is restful, quiet is calm, and there is something deeply assured and assuring about the place of things that the light touches, even though there is not the least assurance that the natural world, particularly the green hills of the ‘wettest place on earth’, which is the true protagonist of this complex novel, will survive prospecting or mining for uranium, or the greed of developers. But this is not the only reason this book sits squarely in the twenty-first century too.
The novel does indee
October 2023, volume 47, No 10