Joyce does an inviting job of setting up these mysterious circumstances, and of drawing Byron’s magical closeness with Diana. The something Diana hits seems to have been a little girl on a red bicycle. So they leap to her defense on the morning she takes an unusual route to the boys’ elite school through a neighborhood usually considered too rough for them, and obliviously hits something with the Jaguar. And both boys would do anything to protect her. She drives a Jaguar and is always expected to thank him for it.ĭiana is so perfect that Byron’s best friend, James Lowe, is utterly bewitched by her. At a time when feminism is beginning to have an impact on other mothers, Diana dresses in the ultra-ladylike fashion that Seymour demands. He is too young to notice how cowed his mother, Diana, is by his father, Seymour, who isn’t home at the country estate much and demands total obeisance from his wife when he does show up. When Byron tries to imagine the interior of his mother’s mind, he pictures bejeweled drawers, because she is as orderly as she is lovely. The story is told through the eyes of Byron Hemmings, a wealthy boy blessed with a dreamily beautiful mother. Joyce makes the two seconds matter a great deal. Joyce builds her novel around two 11-year-old English boys who have heard that the year 1972 will be two seconds longer than other years and wonder about the cosmic consequences this change may have.

Rachel Joyce’s second novel, “Perfect,” is better and less treacly than her first, “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.” It is eerier, too.

Perfect by Rachel Joyce