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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F EVERS | 31478010149335 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION EVERS | 31330008954673 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | FICTION/EVERS | 33934004357563 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library | EVE | 32118001030230 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC EVE | 31549004800800 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | FIC EVERS | 31481005481705 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC EVERS S | 32128003878890 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
England, 1959: two young soldiers--Drummond and Carter--form an intense and unlikely friendship at "Doom Town," a training center that recreates the aftermath of atomic warfare. The experience will haunt them the rest of their lives. Years later, Carter, now a high-ranking government official, offers working-class Drummond a way to protect himself and his wife, Gwen, should a nuclear strike occur. Their pact, kept secret, will have devastating consequences for the families they so wish to shield.
The Blind Light is a grand, ambitious novel that spans decades, from the 1950s to the present. Told from the perspectives of Drum and Gwen, and later their children, Nate and Anneka, the story brilliantly captures the tenderness and envy of long relationships. As the families attempt to reform themselves, the pressures of the past are visited devastatingly on the present, affecting spouses, siblings, and friends.
Stuart Evers writes with literary flair and intellect without ever abandoning the pleasures and emotional intensity of great storytelling. He explores the psychological legacy of nuclear war and social inequality yet finds a delicate beauty in the adventure of making a life in the ruins of the one you lived before.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This engrossing tale from Evers (Your Father Sends His Love) revolves around two men, Drum Moore and Jim Carter, who meet in 1959 at a civil defense base known as Doom Town, where they work on nuclear war simulations. The men's friendship begins during a game of cards and extends over five decades as they each marry and have children. In the 1970s, they arrange to live on adjacent properties and share a bunker in event of nuclear war. Over the course of this long setup in which the families are brought together, Evers explores the lives of Drum's wife, Gwen, and their children, Nate and Anneka. Gwen's ache is palpable on the page as she considers an affair with a writer. Anneka, meanwhile, leaves home in her late teens in 1980, following an incident involving James's son in the bunker, which Drum tries to make her believe was a dream. Later, Nate, now in his 20s, has relationships with men and women. Evers's narrative strategy often asks readers to recalibrate and fill in the gaps--divorces and other pivotal events happen off-page--but the effort is worthwhile. With its slow burn, Evers's vivid, perceptive chronicle of secrets and desperation satisfies. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Stuart Evers's hefty second novel was written before Covid-19 upended our lives but it is a vivid reminder that, while the current crisis might be unprecedented, the existential terrors it inflames are not new. For 40 years, from the advent of Soviet weaponry in 1949 to the collapse of the eastern bloc, the threat of nuclear war loomed large over the world. In a survey in the late 1950s, 60% of American children reported suffering nightmares about nuclear apocalypse. Evers's protagonist Drummond Moore is a shy, unassuming lad fresh from two years in the Ford factory at Dagenham in east London; he meets Jim Carter in 1959 when they embark on national service. Carter, wealthy and well connected, has just been sent down from Oxford. Their fellow conscripts are being posted to South Korea, Cyprus, Ireland, Sudan, but after Drum saves Carter from being fleeced in a card game, Carter returns the favour and secures them both cushy jobs in the Catering Corps. It is Carter, too, who fixes their transfer to a civil defence base in Cumbria in the final months of their service. Nicknamed Doom Town, the base is a training ground for a new kind of war, a painstakingly simulated facsimile of a town after an atomic strike. While the other men seem unaffected by playing war on this "two-square-mile playground", the place grips Drum and Carter with a deep and sickening terror. It also marks the beginning of a bond that will define their lives. Theirs is a complicated and frequently unsatisfactory friendship. From the beginning there are failures, small but deep betrayals. Carter humiliates Drum. Drum steps in too late to keep Carter from being beaten up. But an understanding grows between them all the same, that they will stick together. A decade later, and owing at least as much to Carter's self-interest as his decency, Drum swaps the Dagenham picket line for a dairy farm and becomes Carter's neighbour. Their lives and the lives of their families entwine. A 544-page doorstopper, The Blind Light has been trumpeted by Evers's publishers as a state-of-the-nation novel. Its range is certainly ambitious, a 60-year span from the Cuban missile crisis to 9/11 and the present-day war on terror, but rather than an overarching sweep, the author has distilled his narrative into a series of distinct vignettes years apart, each one set over a few days. His focus is close, even deliberately claustrophobic. Evers is excellent on the fine grain of friendship. He carefully unpicks the complex and often uncomfortable relationship between Drum and Carter: Carter's arrogance and wilful self-delusion; Drum's paralysing fear of the future and his equally disabling fear of seeming weak. At one of many drunken dinners Carter tells Drum he has been asked to write about their national service experience. Drum objects: he doesn't want Carter writing about him "like I was your batman or something". Carter protests - he would never do that. "You wouldn't know you were doing it," Drum replies flatly. The book is full of these delicately judged moments, simultaneously inconsequential and profound. Whereas the relationships between the men's children feel more generic, Evers finds affecting depth in the more cautious, but in the end much truer, attachment between their wives. He is less certain of his ground when it comes to plot. The different sections of the novel have an immersive granularity that allows them to unfold almost in real time but the structure by which he connects them across six decades is clumsy and, on occasion, melodramatic. While The Blind Light is meticulously embedded in historical detail, the (invented) seismic event that forms the fulcrum of the narrative stretches credulity, undermining the authenticity of the undertaking. Evers's periodically overworked prose is also a distraction. He can and frequently does write with a lovely lucidity, even lyricism, but too often he adopts an irritatingly mannered style. He has a habit of chopping his sentences. Into snatches. Snatches repeated for emphasis. Yes, emphasis. The intention is presumably to create emotional immediacy but over 500 pages it grates, disrupting rather than intensifying the reader's connection with his characters. There is still much to savour in The Blind Light. At its heart, the novel is a thoughtful and powerful study of the corrosive effects of fear, the damage we do to ourselves and our loved ones when danger is all we can see. Right now that story feels disconcertingly timely.
Kirkus Review
Sixty years in the lives of two British families. In Evers' deliberately paced novel, two young British soldiers separated by social class become close friends in 1959 at a military base that features an installation known as Doom Town, a graphic simulation of the devastation wrought by a nuclear war. There, we follow the lives of James Carter and Drummond Moore through two generations as they marry, raise children, and deal with the complications that arise in their relationship when Carter, a privileged civil servant, persuades his working-class friend to leave his job at a suburban London Ford factory to purchase (as a front for Carter) and work the farm adjacent to Carter's estate in northwest England. Throughout their adulthood, the two men are haunted by the specter of nuclear holocaust, a fear that provokes a crisis for the Moores when a frighteningly realistic nuclear-attack drill brings their families together in the Carters' bunker in 1980. From the cultural upheaval of the 1960s through Thatcher-era austerity to the disruption of Brexit, Britain undergoes wrenching economic, political, and social change, but little of that appears to touch the lives of these characters in any significant way. The sole exceptions are the terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005, events that intrude on the story only obliquely because of the presence of a couple of the characters in the city when they occur. Instead, as he revisits his characters at gradually lengthening intervals, Evers is preoccupied with familial tension, mostly involving the Moores, including the estrangement of their daughter, Anneka, and Drummond's wife Gwen's protracted agonizing over whether to embark on an affair with a travel writer whose exotic life contrasts sharply with that of her stolid farmer husband's. Despite a handful of emotionally affecting scenes and some well-drawn characters, the novel feels overlong given its dearth of narrative momentum. The lack of palpable drama makes this multigenerational saga a disappointment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Doom Town is the catchy yet grim nickname for a real site in Cumbria, England, used for simulating the aftermath of a nuclear strike. In Evers' (Your Father Sends His Love, 2016) spacious and unusual saga, Drummond "Drum" Moore and Jim Carter run training rescue missions there in 1959 for their National Service, an experience that shakes them deeply and casts a shadow on their families henceforth. Evers excels at depicting the men's strong, identity-shaping bond, which doesn't quite surmount their class differences. Following their military commitments, Drum works at a Ford factory in suburban London and raises two children with wife Gwen, a former barmaid, while the arrogant, posh Carter weds and lives in rural Cheshire. Years later, Carter persuades Drum to take over his neighbor's farm, thus keeping Drum's loved ones secluded and safe, but in doing so, Drum loses sight of other family problems. The novel spans six decades, and the later generation's stories aren't as interesting, but the moody setting, rich in details reflecting social change in Britain, well suits this tale of lives eclipsed by fear.
Library Journal Review
Doom Town, Evers's imagined simulation of the aftermath of a nuclear attack, is both fiction and metaphor. In this novel of steadfast friendship, conscripts become acclimated to human-wrought obliteration. Doom Town is a training ground for British soldiers where Carter, a son of privilege, and Drummond, a child of the working class, become comrades and friends, ultimately inseparable. It is also where their mutual obsession with surviving a nuclear attack begins. Here, nuclear annihilation is a blinding symbol of foreboding, of impending disaster, a theoretical analogy to the unforeseen disasters the two families must actually face. At times, the reader will hear the forlorn echo of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, but Evers (Your Father Sends His Love) unfailingly reminds us that there is hope, always hope, even in the truly moving death scene near the end. The narrative follows Carter, Drummond, and their families over 60 years, during which lives intertwine, children are born, and personalities evolve. VERDICT Unpredictable character arcs will keep readers wondering what will happen next, and the many tragedies and triumphs of each family evoke the same epic feel of generational change as Edna Ferber's Giant.--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge