Francis Spufford’s incorrigibly plural world

Nonesuch, Francis Spufford, Faber, £20

‘Art needs explanation sometimes’, a character says early on in Nonesuch, the latest novel from Francis Spufford. ‘But does this?’

‘No’, comes the reply. ‘It doesn’t need explaining at all. It just works on you.’

We are in London in August 1939 and they are talking about the new technology of television. But they might just as well be discussing the book itself.

Nonesuch’s premise is brazenly silly. Winston Churchill replaces Lord Halifax as prime minister. A cabal of aristocratic Nazis plot to go back in time and assassinate Churchill right before the fateful cabinet meeting, thereby ensuring Britain’s submission to Germany. They can travel through time thanks to occult knowledge first uncovered at the fag-end of the Renaissance, which gives them the power to command angels. Their de facto head is Lall Cunningham, a repressed young lesbian. The only person who can stop her is Iris Hawkins, a sexually confident City secretary from Watford who has a dark secret of her own; Iris is helped by Geoff Hale, her sometime lover, a TV broadcast engineer and son of a bumbling occultist.

So far, so preposterous, perhaps. But the premise doesn’t really need explanation. Think of it as simply a magic keyhole to a beautifully realised, incorrigibly plural world, packed with the unpredictable terrors and unlooked-for enchantments of life in a city in wartime. It works; unlock it you must. Nonesuch is a joy.

At the heart of that magical world is London, the old coal-powered city solidly built of Edwardian brick and Edwardian virtues, ordered in its institutions and structures; within it lies the City, a place of crabbed yards and copperplate writing, deeply rooted, proud of its past, respectable and solid in all its fundamentals, and presided over by ‘the tethered planet of St Paul’s rising up above the wedding-cake stucco’. How solid are its certainties really, though? The Luftwaffe come, night after night, to punch it full of holes – lives, homes, businesses, futures – ‘ten thousand possible exits from life opened silently, and unpredictably, and without appeal, down which anyone and anything could fall, no matter how precious’.

This London is animate and mythic, full of metamorphic possibility, magical and terrifying. A tree might be ‘so thick with hoar frost… as if it had quit the vegetable kingdom for a new and crystalline existence’. Firebombs turn concrete to torrents of dust. Angels are turned to stone; indeed, the architecture, at least some of it, is alive. The war has brought chaos. It has also made the world’s essential liquidity, its mutability, more apparent. The angels are a part of that, conjured by Spufford out of Paracelsus and particle physics. They are in the air all around, ‘alive among the invisible vibrations of the radio waves’ and streaming through the atmosphere, scintillating beings comprised of bright points of oscillating light held together by a kind of group intelligence, like a great flock of birds massed on a radar screen. We, too, are things of tides, interpenetrated and permeable: having sex with Geoff, Iris finds, the difference between them ‘was at once too important and too unimportant for the limit of her skin to be a very significant boundary’. Elsewhere, alone in bed, she experiences ‘the vague happy fuzz of a body that does not distinguish itself entirely from the smoothness of the cotton it lies on’. We exist on the very brink of wonder.

Miraculously, none of this reads as remotely mystical. The narrative rips along, but what grounds the book so well is the precision with which the enormity of war – the physical and emotional extremities of life under bombardment – is delineated, and the way the city’s citizens respond. They, too, seem single points of fierce light, fighting lonely collective fights. Across the burning city at night the ARP wardens battle the vast fires and tumbling masonry, each defending what is theirs, each ready to defeat the Luftwaffe alone armed only with bucket and broom. ‘Hundreds of gallant midgets’, Iris thinks them, drawing, not for the first time, on the language of childhood myths. Meanwhile, the daytime City is powered by an army of suburban women flooding in from suburban basements, crypts and underground shelters, from Walthamstow, Clapham, New Cross, Penge, each in their different way engaged in their own personal war, ‘looking better than they smelled’ because where was there to wash? Spufford handles these small, absurd acts of courage and resistance, no matter how large the terrors, with the lightest of touches. They make Iris’s own private war with fascism, armed with the science of angels, seem almost quotidian.

And those childhood stories and myths suffuse the book: Nonesuch is steeped in Edwardiana, and not always charmingly so. Spufford’s world takes the overlap between Nazism and the occult seriously, and the antecedents of both lay in the esotericism of the late-19th and early-20th century. The Edwardian imagination wasn’t all treasure-packed attics, cosy burrows and curious rabbit holes. The unnamed occult body to which the ‘magical fascist lunatics’ belong is surely modelled on the Order of the Golden Dawn. (Nonesuch owes something to the metaphysical thrillers of Charles Williams, himself a member of the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, a successor to the order.) The aristocracies of the spirit world which infused such thinking are evident here; class – who gets to be whose elite – is another recurrent thread. The politics of mysticism always tends to hierarchies and control. ‘Did the urge to dominate that showed up in the magic always show itself as well in mean little displays of power over human beings?’ Iris wonders. But perhaps the natural order of things is hierarchical: the angels have their proletariat, too, we learn.

As for Iris herself, she is a fabulous creation: smart, ambitious and not entirely scrupulous, she voyages forth into a frowsty world welcoming of neither her sex nor her class, determined to bend it to her will. As an angel says, she is ‘an impertinent baggage  who refuses to be intimidated by what is more powerful than her’. She might, I suppose, be the kind of modern woman that C. S. Lewis dreaded his Susan Pevensie would become – Iris’s middle name is Susan, after all, and she does meet some fauns – although her interests extend far beyond nylons and lipstick and at least as far as oral sex and the prodigious size of one angelic member. 

I don’t recall Susan being that engaged by Keynesian economics either. But Iris has worked out that money itself is a puissant form of magic – abstract, indestructible and enchanting. She understands the transformatory power of bearer bonds, for instance – each a ‘genie… made of ink and paper’ – and wants admittance to the secret rooms where decisions are made, access to the great riverine flood of capital through the world. It’s more than ambition; it’s a way of being. Iris sees life as investment, trade and arbitrage. Love is a complication. As such she has a sharp eye for the bottom of a market and makes more than one thrillingly lop-sided bet on the future. The book ends on one of them. ‘To be continued…’, the last page says. I do hope so. Nonesuch is extravagantly entertaining, luminously written and, in places, absurdly moving. Its past is one I can’t wait to return to.