When I teach creative writing, I often find myself insisting upon the essential importance of fun: that while the process of writing can and should be challenging, there’s no benefit to be had in martyrdom, and actually a level of relish is neither an indulgence or a distraction, but pretty compelling evidence of an author having found her proper form and subject. It’s what keeps you coming back. If you aren’t bent gigglingly over your manuscript, like a stock photo model alone with her salad, then what’s the point of any of it? There’s a stable of classics I draw on to evidence this claim, great novels where a big part of the appeal is feeling as though you’ve stumbled into a very interesting person’s exact idea of a very good time: Woolf’s Orlando, Nabokov’s Pnin, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, The Pisces by Melissa Broder. A lot of Austen, but maybe most of all Emma. And from now on, I’ll be adding Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch to the list.
His fourth work of fiction in a genre-spanning oeuvre, Nonesuch is a historical fantasy set during the second world war, every paragraph of which is packed with authorial zest. The novel opens in London, August 1939: war has been declared, but hasn’t yet made its reality felt in the city’s streets, and Iris Hawkins, an ambitious office clerk, makes her way through the sun-baked West End in a slinky dress. One half of a disastrous date later, she’s being whisked away to a DIY surrealist film club in bohemian Bloomsbury – not her scene at all – and two extremely fateful introductions: the first to Geoffrey Hale, a sweetly apprehensive BBC television engineer; and the second to the object of Geoffrey’s guileless infatuation, one Lady Lalage Cunningham, an icy aristocratic beauty with amazing hair and worrisome political sympathies. Cue chaos. Nonesuch follows the bolshy Iris from her seedy summer’s night through a regrettable Hampstead hook-up, and, eventually, neck-deep into a time-travelling plot by “magical fascist lunatics” to assassinate Winston Churchill. The novel is a pleasing pasticcio of romance, occultism, non-Euclidean geometry and airborne adventure across the blitz-stricken rooftops of London. It is difficult to imagine it would hold together quite so well in other hands than Spufford’s.
Experienced hands, maybe? It doesn’t feel incidental that Nonesuch isn’t his first literary response to the blitz. In 2021’s Light Perpetual, he gave fictional lives to five children who were killed in the very real 1944 bombing of a south London Woolworths, and perhaps some of the exuberance that makes Nonesuch a winning prospect derives from his decision to revisit the setting unburdened by the conceptual weightiness of this earlier project. In contrast to Light Perpetual, Nonesuch is a true fantasia, though not without substance – in fact, the novel’s madcap denouement and metaphysical preposterousness often feel like a commentary on the psychological confusion of life during wartime in “civilisation’s last redoubt”: a city upon which bombs fall “as indifferently as raindrops astrew with pits and horrors and splintered places”. Is magic “really any harder or madder to believe than the rest of this?” Iris asks Geoffrey. “Another couple of hours and we’ll all be hiding in holes. And then boys from Hamburg and Munich – nice boys, probably, on the whole, who love their mothers – will fly overhead trying to kill us. It’s a crazy world.”
Bombed-out London makes a fitting match for Spufford’s always adroit prose, and throughout the novel supernatural energies are drawn into revealing analogy with the Nietzschean will to power that undergirds fascistic thinking. “Are all magicians bullies? Iris wondered. Did the urge to dominate that showed up in magic always show itself as well in mean little displays of power over human beings?” The world of Nonesuch comfortably accommodates “angels as well as office work”, and Spufford brings his formidable insight to bear on the dynamics of both.
The mercurial Iris Hawkins and the patrician Lady Cunningham are a superficially interesting pairing, as far as pro- and antagonists go, though there were aspects of the characterisation of both that jarred. Personally, I didn’t find Iris’s strident proto-girlbossing – “I want to be a Rothschild, a Rockefeller, a JP Morgan – and when I am, I want everyone to know that I’m Iris Hawkins from Watford” – quite as empowering as Spufford seemed to hope I would, while Lady Cunningham, “a Christmas tree fairy among fascists”, barely aggregates more menace over the course of the novel than PG Wodehouse’s Mosley parody, Roderick Spode. I also found a late-in-the-game revelation about her motivations almost uncomfortably contrived to add dimension to this otherwise suitably cartoonish villain.
Still, why quibble over the details when the broad sweep is so dazzling? Nonesuch is a formidable achievement, a popcorny delight of a novel – and those who agree will be pleased by an ending that hints we’ve plenty more to come from Spufford’s fantasy multiverse.
• Nonesuch by Francis Spufford is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
