Book Club - Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Jennifer Down is the award winning author of Our Magic Hour and Pulse Points. Jennifer is one of my favourite Australian authors and so there was quite a bit of anticipation around her new novel Bodies of Light.

Suffice to say it’s a complex and moving story. This is the sort of book that takes you on a journey and really, if it’s not too much of a cliche to say, you wonder if you’re the same at the end of it.

Maybe I should give you a bit of an idea…

Holly has a simple, but happy life. It’s uncomplicated for a reason and Holly would prefer it stay that way.

When a message out of the blue drags Holly into her past, she is shaken. She felt she had escaped, buried the ghosts and become a new person. No one should know who Maggie is but now Holly is faced with the woman she used to be.

Trauma is rarely far from the surface and we are thrown into Maggie’s life to revisit all the events that have brought her to where she is today and once caused her to disappear.

Bodies of Light is a complex and painstakingly realised portrait of a woman. While it is true for any life, in Maggie we see the myriad tragedies and small joys that have dragged up from childhood, through adolescence to become an adult.

I barely feel I can talk about these events. There is certainly an element of spoiling the narrative, but really what we are privy to in Bodies of Light is so personal, so complex that it doesn’t feel like my story to just blurt out on air.

Maggie’s story and the road she has taken to become Holly; far from her beginnings and without a shred or the person she once was, is more than we would ever wish to know about a friend or acquaintance. In giving us such detail Jennifer Down is inviting us to look at Maggie’s world, her actions and their consequences and understand that people always have their reasons.

I’ll admit there were times while reading that I wanted to look away. But then we live in a world that makes it easy to get distracted, to look away when the trauma gets too much.

In fictionalising a life Down has provided the reader space to inhabit the world. Into this space she explores the world of out-of-home, the impacts of childhood trauma and the ways these formative experiences impact our adult selves.

I remember reading early reviewers and social media responses to Bodies of Light and Jennifer Down responding that maybe this book was a heavy outing while we were all going through, or gradually coming out of lockdowns. But I think that this is just the sort of book to shake us after we’ve all had the time to explore (or avoid) ourselves at such a granular level.

This is a book I’ll need to come back to. Not everything can, or should be quick and simple to understand. I started off saying there was some anticipation for me in the arrival of Bodies of Light and I think best ending by replying that the anticipation was worth it ...