Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

Overview

A spellbinding novel that will resonate with readers of Mark Haddon, Louise Erdrich, and John Irving, Perfect tells the story of a young boy who is thrown into the murky, difficult realities of the adult world with far-reaching consequences.

Byron Hemmings wakes to a morning that looks like any other: his school uniform draped over his wooden desk chair, his sister arguing over the breakfast cereal, the click of his mother’s heels as she crosses the kitchen. But when the three of them leave home, driving into a dense summer fog, the morning takes an unmistakable turn. In one terrible moment, something happens, something completely unexpected and at odds with life as Byron understands it. While his mother seems not to have noticed, eleven-year-old Byron understands that from now on nothing can be the same.
 
What happened and who is to blame? Over the days and weeks that follow, Byron’s perfect world is shattered. Unable to trust his parents, he confides in his best friend, James, and together they concoct a plan. . . .
 
As she did in her debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has imagined bewitching characters who find their ordinary lives unexpectedly thrown into chaos, who learn that there are times when children must become parents to their parents, and who discover that in confronting the hard truths about their pasts, they will forge unexpected relationships that have profound and surprising impacts. Brimming with love, forgiveness, and redemption, Perfect will cement Rachel Joyce’s reputation as one of fiction’s brightest talents.

Praise for Perfect
 
“Touching, eccentric . . . Joyce does an inviting job of setting up these mysterious circumstances, and of drawing Byron’s magical closeness with Diana.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“Haunting . . . compelling.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“[Joyce] triumphantly returns with Perfect. . . . As Joyce probes the souls of Diana, Byron and Jim, she reveals—slowly and deliberately, as if peeling back a delicate onion skin—the connection between the two stories, creating a poignant, searching tale.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Perfect touches on class, mental illness, and the ways a psyche is formed or broken. It has the tenor of a horror film, and yet at the end, in some kind of contortionist trick, the narrative unfolds into an unexpected burst of redemption. [Verdict:] Buy It.”—New York
 
“Joyce’s dark, quiet follow-up to her successful debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, could easily become a book club favorite. . . . Perfect is the kind of book that blossoms under thoughtful examination, its slow tendencies redeemed by moments of loveliness and insight. However sad, Joyce’s messages—about the limitations of time and control, the failures of adults and the fears of children, and our responsibility for our own imprisonment and freedom—have a gentle ring of truth to them.”—The Washington Post
 
“There is a poignancy to Joyce’s narrative that makes for her most memorable writing.”—NPR’s All Things Considered

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812983463
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/02/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	112,008
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rachel Joyce is the author of the international bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. She is also the award-winning writer of more than twenty plays for BBC Radio 4. She started writing after a twenty-year acting career, in which she performed leading roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company and won multiple awards. Rachel Joyce lives with her family on a Gloucestershire farm.

Read an Excerpt

1

Something Terrible

James Lowe and Byron Hemmings attended Winston House School because it was private. There was another junior school that was closer but it was not private; it was for everyone. The children who went there came from the council estate on Digby Road. They flicked orange peels and cigarette butts at the caps of the Winston House boys from the top windows of the bus. The Winston House boys did not travel on the bus. They had lifts with their mothers because they had so far to travel.

The future for the Winston House boys was mapped out. Theirs was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The following year, they would take the Common Entrance exam for the college. The cleverest boys would win scholarships, and at thirteen they would board. They would speak with the right accent and learn the right things and meet the right people. After that it would be Oxford or Cambridge. James’s parents were thinking St. Peter’s; Byron’s were thinking Oriel. They would pursue careers in law or the City, the Church or the armed forces, like their fathers. One day they would have private rooms in London and large houses in the country where they would spend weekends with their wives and children.

It was the beginning of June in 1972. A trim of morning light slid beneath Byron’s blue curtains and picked out his neatly ordered possessions. There were his Look and Learn annuals, his stamp album, his torch, his new Abracadabra magic box, and the biology set with its own magnifying glass that he had received for Christmas. His school uniform had been washed and pressed by his mother the night before and was arranged in a flattened boy shape on a chair. Byron checked both his watch and his alarm clock. The second hands were moving steadily. Crossing the hall in silence, he eased open the door of his mother’s room and took up his place on the edge of her bed.

She lay very still. Her hair was a gold frill on the pillow and her face trembled with each breath as if she were made of water. Through her skin he could see the purple of her veins. Byron’s hands were soft and plump like the flesh of a peach, but James already had veins, faint threads that ran from his knuckles and would one day become ridges like a man’s.

At half past six, the alarm clock rang into the silence and his mother’s eyes flashed open, a shimmer of blue.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

“I’m worried,” said Byron.

“It isn’t time again?” She reached for her glass and her pill and took a sip of water.

“Suppose they are going to add the extra seconds today?”

“Is James worried too?”

“He seems to have forgotten.”

She wiped her mouth and he saw that she was smiling. Two dimples had appeared like tiny punctures in her cheeks. “We’ve been through this. We keep doing it. When they add the seconds, they’ll say something about it first in The Times. They’ll talk about it on Nationwide.”

“It’s giving me a headache,” he said.

“When it happens you won’t notice. Two seconds are nothing.”

Byron felt his blood heat. He almost stood but sat back again. “That’s what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It’s the difference between something happening and something not happening. You could take one step too many and fall over the edge of a cliff. It’s very dangerous.”  The words came out in a rush.

She gazed back at him with her face crumpled the way it got when she was trying to work out a sum. “We really must get up,” she said.

His mother pulled back the curtains at the bay window and stared out. A summer mist was pouring in from Cranham Moor, so thick that the hills beyond the garden looked in danger of being washed away. She glanced at her wrist.

“Twenty-four minutes to seven,” she said, as if she were informing her watch of the correct time. Lifting her pink dressing gown from its hook, she went to wake Lucy.

When Byron pictured the inside of his mother’s head, he imagined a series of tiny inlaid drawers with jeweled handles so delicate that his fingers would struggle to get a grip. The other mothers were not like her. They wore crocheted tank tops and layered skirts and some of them even had the new wedge shoes. Byron’s father preferred his wife to dress more formally. With her slim skirts and pointy heels, her matching handbag and her notebook, Diana made other women look both oversize and underprepared. Andrea Lowe, James’s mother, towered over Diana Hemmings like a dark-haired giant. Diana’s notebook contained articles she had snipped and glued from the pages of Good Housekeeping and Family Circle. She wrote down birthdays she had to remember, important dates for the school term, as well as recipes, needlecraft instructions, planting ideas, hairstyling tips, and words she had not heard before. Her notebook bulged with suggestions for improvement: “22 new hairdos to make you even prettier this summer.” “Tissue paper gifts for every occasion.” “Cooking with offal.” “i before e except after c.”

“Elle est la plus belle mere,” James sometimes said. And when he did he blushed and fell silent, as if in contemplation of something sacred.

Byron dressed in his gray flannel shorts and summer T‑shirt. His school shirt was almost new, and he had to tug to fasten the buttons. Having secured his knee-length socks with homemade garters, he headed downstairs. The wood-paneled walls shone dark as conkers.

“I’m not talking to anyone but you, darling,” sang his mother’s voice.

She stood at the opposite end of the hallway at her telephone table, already dressed. Beside her, Lucy waited for her plaits to be tied with ribbon. The air was thick with Vim and Pledge polish, and it was a reassuring smell in the way that fresh air was reassuring. As Byron passed, his mother kissed her fingertips and pressed them to his forehead. She was only a fraction taller than he.

“It’s just me and the children,” she said into the mouthpiece. The windows behind her were opaque white.

In the kitchen Byron sat at the breakfast bar and unfolded a clean napkin. His mother was talking to his father. He rang at the same time every morning, and every morning she told him she was listening.

“Oh, today I’ll do the usual. The house, the weeding. Tidying after the weekend. It’s supposed to get hot.”

Released from her mother’s hands, Lucy skipped to the kitchen and hoicked herself up onto her stool. She tipped the box of Sugar Stars over her Peter Rabbit bowl. “Steady,” said Byron as she reached for the blue jug. He watched the splashy flow of milk in the rough vicinity of her cereal. “You might spill, Lucy,” he said, although he was being polite. She already had.

“I know what I’m doing, Byron. I don’t need help.” Every word of Lucy’s sounded like a neat little attack on the air. She replaced the jug on the table. It was vast in her hands. Then she slotted a wall of cereal boxes around her bowl. Byron could see only the flaxen crest of her head.

From the hall came their mother’s voice. “Yes, Seymour. She’s all polished.” Byron assumed that they were discussing the new Jaguar.

“Please could I have the Sugar Stars, Lucy?”

“You are not supposed to have Sugar Stars. You must have your fruit salad and your healthy Alpen.”

“I’d like to read the box. I’d like to look at the picture of Sooty.”

“I am reading the boxes.”

“You don’t need all of them at once,” he said gently. “And anyway you can’t read, Luce.”

“Everything’s as it should be,” came their mother’s voice from the hallway. She gave a fluttery laugh.

Byron felt a notch of something hot in his stomach. He tried to remove a cereal box, just one, before Lucy could stop him, but her hand flew up as he was sliding it away. The milk jug shot sideways, there was a resounding smash, and the new floor was suddenly a wash of white milk and blue pins of china. The children stared, aghast. It was almost time to clean their teeth.

Their mother was in the room within moments. “No one move!” she called. She held up her hands as if she were halting traffic. “You could get hurt!” Byron sat so still his neck felt stiff. As she made her way to the cleaning cupboard, balancing on tiptoes, her arms stretched out, her fingers pointed, the floor swished and snapped beneath her feet.

“That was your fault, Byron,” said Lucy.

Diana rushed back with the mop and bucket, and the dustpan and brush. She twisted the mop in soapy water and dragged it through the pool of liquid. With a glance at her watch, she swept the broken bits of china into a dry patch and scooped them into the dustpan. The last splinters she scraped up with her fingers and shook out over the bin. “All done,” she said brightly. It was then that she noticed her left palm. It was cut with crimson, like spilling stripes.

“Now you’ve got blood,” said Lucy, who was both appalled and delighted by physical injury.

“It’s nothing,” insisted their mother, but the blood was slithering down her wrist and, despite her bib apron, had made several spots on the hem of her skirt. “Nobody move!” she called again, turning on her heels and rushing out of the room.

“We’ll be late,” said Lucy.

“We’re never late,” said Byron. It was a rule of their father’s. An Englishman should always be punctual.

When Diana reappeared she had changed into a mint-green dress and matching lambswool cardigan. She had wound her hand with a bandage so that it looked like a small paw and had applied her strawberry-red lipstick.

“Why are you still sitting there?” she cried.

“You told us not to move,” said Lucy.

Clip, clip, echoed her heels across the hallway as the children raced after her. Their blazers and school hats hung from hooks above their school shoes. Diana scooped their satchels and PE bags into her arms.

“Come along,” she called.

“But we haven’t cleaned our teeth.”

Their mother failed to answer. Swinging open the front door, she darted into the shroud of mist. Byron and Lucy had to rush outside to find her.

There she stood, a slight silhouette against the garage door. She studied her watch, her left wrist clamped between the thumb and fingers of her right hand, as if time were a small cell and she was examining it through a microscope.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “If we hurry, we can make up time.”

Cranham House was a Georgian residence of pale stone that shone bone-white in full summer sun and pink as flesh on a winter morning. There was no village. There was only the house and the garden and then the moor. The building sat with its back resolutely set against the mass of wind, sky, and earth that loomed behind, and made Byron think of a home that wished it had been built elsewhere, in acres of flat English parkland, for instance, or on the gentle banks of a stream. The advantage of the setting, his father said, was that it was private. This was what James called an understatement. You had to drive at least three miles to find a neighbor. Between the gardens and the first slopes of the moor was a meadow with a large pond, and then a belt of ash trees. A year ago the water had been fenced in and the children were forbidden to play there.

The gravel drive popped beneath the wheels of the Jaguar. The mist was like a hood over Byron’s eyes. It stole the color and edges from even the closest things. The top lawn, the herbaceous borders and rose pagodas, the fruit trees, the beech hedging, the vegetable plot, the cutting beds and picket gate, they were all gone. The car turned left and carved its path toward the upper peaks. No one spoke. Diana sat straining forward over the wheel.

Up on the moor, conditions were even worse. That morning there was no dividing line between hills and sky. The car headlamps bored shallow holes into the blanket of white. Occasionally a watery group of cattle or a protruding branch took shape, and Byron’s heart gave a bounce as his mother swerved to avoid them. Once Byron had told James that the trees were so scary on the moor they could be ghosts, and James had frowned. That was like poetry, James had said, but it was not real, just as a talking detective dog was not real on the television. They passed the iron gates to Besley Hill, where the mad people lived. As the wheels of the Jaguar rumbled over the cattle grid, Byron breathed a sigh of relief. Then, approaching the town, they turned a corner and braked hard.

“Oh no,” he said, sitting tall. “What’s happened now?”

“I don’t know. A traffic jam.” It was the last thing they needed.

His mother lifted her fingers to her teeth and ripped off a shred of her nail.

“Is it because of the mist?”

Again: “I don’t know.” She pulled at the handbrake.

“I think the sun is up there somewhere,” he said helpfully. “It will burn this off soon.”

There were cars blocking the road as far as they could see, all the way into the veil of cloud. To their left the dull silhouette of a burned-out vehicle marked the entrance to the Digby Road Estate. They never went that way. Byron saw his mother glance over.

“We’re going to be late,” wailed Lucy.

Snapping down the handbrake, Diana pushed the car into first gear with a crunch, yanked at the wheel, and accelerated toward the left. They were heading straight for Digby Road. She didn’t even mirror, signal, maneuver.

At first the children were too stunned to speak. They passed the burned-out car. The glass of the windows was smashed, and the wheels, doors, and engine were gone so that the car was like a charred skeleton. Byron hummed gently because he didn’t want to think about that.

“Father says we must never go this way,” said Lucy. She smothered her face with her hands.

“It’s a shortcut through council housing,” Diana said. “I’ve been this way before.” She eased her foot down on the accelerator.

There was no time to consider what she had said: that, despite their father’s rule, she had been this way before. Digby Road was worse than Byron had imagined. In places it wasn’t even tarmacked. The mist was glued to the rows of houses so that they reached ahead, dull and indistinct, and then appeared to disintegrate. Pieces of rubbish choked the gutters: rubble, bags, blankets, boxes, it was hard to tell what it was. Occasionally washing lines appeared, strung with sheets and clothes that held no color.

Reading Group Guide

1. The attempt to achieve perfection is central to the behavior of both Diana and Byron Hemmings. Has the novel changed your perception of what it may mean to be “perfect”?

2. The author portrays time as a slippery and unpredictable con- cept. Has this affected your attitude toward the ways in which we measure the paths of our lives?

3. Responsibility is a theme that plays a key part in the novel. Who do you believe holds the greatest responsibility for the accident?
Is Jim’s mental illness the inevitable result of the events of his childhood, or do you think it would have occurred no matter what?

4. Is Jim’s mental illness the inevitable result of the events of his childhood, or do you think it would have occurred no matter what?

5. Diana says,“I’m beginning to think chaos is underrated.” Do you agree?

6. Byron identifies the moment at which he no longer considers himself to be a child. How does the novel question traditional definitions of childhood and parenthood?

7. The author writes beautiful descriptions of Cranham Moor and the English landscape. What is the significance of the natural world in the novel?

8. What is the significance of class in the relationship between Diana and Beverley?

9. Several characters struggle with depression and obsessive- compulsive behavior. How effectively do you feel mental disor- ders are portrayed?

10. Diana believes that the course of her life is determined by des- tiny. What part does spiritual belief play in the novel, and do you agree that our actions cannot influence our own fates?

11. Seymour Hemmings and Andrea Lowe express strong views about feminism. How does the author represent the role of women in the novel?

12. How does the author create the different time periods of the novel? Are there echoes from 1972 in the present or is it a world and time that has disappeared without a trace?

13. Diana is lonely despite having a family and friends; Jim also experiences intense loneliness. What do you think makes people feel connected to one another, and what creates fulfilling rela- tionships?

14. Byron and James Lowe are best friends as boys, and the employ- ees at Mr. Meade’s café form bonds of kinship. How does the author represent friendship, and what do you think it means to be a true friend?

15. Who is the most powerful character in the novel, and why?

16. Eileen and Jim are damaged, in different ways, by their pasts. To what extent do you feel that their private pain is transformed through the act of sharing?

Editorial Reviews

Touching, eccentric . . . Joyce does an inviting job of setting up these mysterious circumstances, and of drawing Byron’s magical closeness with Diana.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
 
“Haunting . . . compelling.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“[Joyce] triumphantly returns with Perfect. . . . As Joyce probes the souls of Diana, Byron and Jim, she reveals—slowly and deliberately, as if peeling back a delicate onion skin—the connection between the two stories, creating a poignant, searching tale.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Perfect touches on class, mental illness, and the ways a psyche is formed or broken. It has the tenor of a horror film, and yet at the end, in some kind of contortionist trick, the narrative unfolds into an unexpected burst of redemption. [Verdict:] Buy It.”—New York
 
“Joyce’s dark, quiet follow-up to her successful debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, could easily become a book club favorite. . . . Perfect is the kind of book that blossoms under thoughtful examination, its slow tendencies redeemed by moments of loveliness and insight. However sad, Joyce’s messages—about the limitations of time and control, the failures of adults and the fears of children, and our responsibility for our own imprisonment and freedom—have a gentle ring of truth to them.”—The Washington Post
 
“There is a poignancy to Joyce’s narrative that makes for her most memorable writing.”—NPR’s All Things Considered
 
“Beautifully written . . . Joyce showed an incredible sensitivity and understanding when she wrote about the impact of mental illness in Harold Fry, and that talent shines even brighter now that she’s devoting more space to the subject. . . . Joyce is great at building tension, with her prose managing to give huge weight to a menacing comment or a small mistake.”—The A.V. Club

“Perfect is a poignant and powerful book, rich with empathy and charged with beautiful, atmospheric writing.”—Tana French,  author of In the Woods and Broken Harbor
 
“[Rachel] Joyce, showing the same talent for adroit plot development seen in the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, brings both narrative strands together in a shocking, redemptive denouement.”—Publishers Weekly
 
 “If only there were more novelists like Rachel Joyce. . . . [The character] Diana herself is faultless. She is to Perfect what Harold Fry was to Unlikely: a fully rounded hero, someone to fall in love with.”—The Telegraph (UK)

“[Perfect’s] unputdownable factor . . . lies in its exploration of so many multilayered emotions. There is the unbreakable bond between mother and son, the fear of not belonging . . . and how love can offer redemption.”—London Evening Standard

From the Publisher

09/16/2013
An 11-year-old boy makes an error that brings tragedy to several lives, including his own, in Joyce’s intriguing and suspenseful novel. One summer day in a small English village in 1972, Byron Hemmings’s mother, Diana, is driving him and his younger sister to school when their Jaguar hits a little girl on a red bicycle. Diana drives on, unaware, with only Byron having seen the accident. Byron doesn’t know whether or not the girl was killed, however, and concocts a plan called “Operation Perfect” to shield his mother from what happened. Previously, she has always presented the picture of domestic perfection in trying to please her martinet banker husband, Seymour, and overcome her lower-class origins. After Byron decides to tell her the truth about the accident, she feverishly attempts to make amends by befriending the injured girl’s mother, but her “perfect” facade begins to splinter. Joyce sometimes strains credibility in describing Diana’s psychological deterioration, but the novel’s fast pacing keeps things tense. Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Jim, a psychologically fragile man in his 50s, endures a menial cafe job. Joyce, showing the same talent for adroit plot development seen in the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, brings both narrative strands together in a shocking, redemptive (albeit weepily sentimental) denouement. The novel is already a bestseller in England. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

After an award-winning career as an actor and playwright, Joyce turned her hand to fiction and came up with last year's international best seller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Here, she's replaced enterprising retiree Harold Fry with equally enterprising 11-year-old Byron Hemmings, who's dismayed when his mother seems totally oblivious to a terrible event that happens while she's driving him and his sister through thick fog on the way to school. With good buddy James, the suddenly distrustful Byron hatches a plan to discover the truth.

Library Journal

2013-10-05
The time is out of joint, as the follow-up to a popular novelistic debut brings a slightly darker edge to its fablelike whimsy. Having earned a best-selling readership in both the U.S. and her native Britain with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), Joyce returns with an even less likely but more ambitious piece of fictional fancy. The protagonist is 11-year-old Byron, a reflective and innocent schoolboy who becomes overly concerned when his best friend, James, tells him that two seconds will be added to this leap year to somehow even things out. After his mother assures him that "[w]hen it happens you won't notice. Two seconds are nothing," Byron responds, "That's what nobody realizes. Two seconds are huge. It's the difference between something happening and something not happening." And with the addition of those two seconds--or not--something happens--or not. And whether or not something happens, everything changes. A veteran of the stage and a radio playwright before turning to fiction, Joyce specializes in the sort of insights that some find charming, others cloying and a style that could sometimes pass for fairy tale, other times for Young Adult (though those readers wouldn't have much patience for her plotting). The novel alternates between chapters that follow what happens to Byron, his mother and their family (which the reader quickly realizes is more dysfunctional than Byron does) and ones that concern an adult sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder who resorts to menial labor when the British mental health system fails him. "No one knows how to be normal, Jim," a social worker tells him. "We're all just trying to do our best." The two plot lines must inevitably intersect, but the manner in which they do will likely surprise even the most intuitive reader. Many of those who loved the author's first novel should at least like her second.

Kirkus Reviews