The romance between them is clunky and slightly unbelievable, yet it is the tenderness of this empathy that provides a glimmer of hope in otherwise gloomy circumstances. His life is dismally routine until the arrival of fiery Eileen into the workplace: a boisterous woman whose confrontational exterior somehow harbours a sensitivity for Jim.
Jim is a sympathetic figure but one who also demands the upmost of patience. After stumbling through his daily job of cleaning tables at the supermarket café, fifty-year-old Jim is crippled by nightly obsessions of sealing and re-sealing his van with duct tape, and endlessly greeting inanimate objects so he feels safe. Posed alongside this narrative is the bumbling Jim, who lives in a campervan by council flats in Cranham Village in the present day. In a flurry of coffee mornings, husbandless weekdays, and sheer isolation from the other private school mothers, it is outspoken yet self-conscious Diana who lets the mistake splinter her existence. Rather, the fear of being exposed and blamed begins to haunt both Byron and Diana. A girl on a red bicycle is hit in the leg, but no serious damage has been done other than a scratch to the Jaguar. A car accident inevitably results – but the consequences are eerily unexpected. He realises it is too late after he distracts his frail mother, Diana, from controlling her new Jaguar on the road. Paralysed by anticipation, Byron fears missing the split-second change. His smug classmate, James Lowe, has just informed him that two seconds will be added to the year – but the change in time will not be announced by the government or any other authority. It is 1972 in the conservative English countryside, and Byron Hemmings is finishing up the school year at the elite Winston House. In two juxtaposed stories, Joyce highlights the harrowing nature of routine, and the sacrifices we make to reach seeming perfection. What is the value of two seconds? For one inquisitive eleven-year old Byron, it is “the difference between something happening and not happening.” Rachel Joyce’s second novel Perfect explores the meaning of time in its most condensed form: how even just a moment can completely shatter a person’s life.
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