My mum was not “of an adventurous disposition” like Francis Spufford’s grandmother Nancy, to whom his new novel is dedicated, and neither was she a bad girl like Iris Hawkins, the heroine of his latest novel, Nonesuch. But in 1943, having lost her job in Gillingham, strings were pulled—since she was only a year away from conscription—and she found herself in a new and necessary job, working in Lloyds Bank in the City of London. Yet unlike Iris, who only after some time of being over-looked can take her opportunity to advance herself within the fictional stockbrokers of Cornellis & Blome, Mum quickly found herself promoted to running the statistical department—at the age of only 17. Beside her were elderly men, bent across ledgers like Dickensian characters; any younger men were already conscripted. She learnt fast, and before the War was over, she was—just as Iris is the only one who knows how to work the teleprinter—trained in using an enormous calculating machine: the immediate, non-computerised forerunner to the first IBMs.
Day after day, Mum would take the train from Gillingham, known like the rest of Kent as “Hell’s Corner” due to the number of air-raids, into the City, the epicentre of the bombing in London. After a brief, eerie calm following the Blitz of 1940-1, referred to by Elizabeth Bowen in The Heat of the Day (1948) as “the lightless middle of the tunnel,” the dark blazed into violence again with the V1 and V2 rocket raids. The mechanical drone, the stealth of the attack, the silence as the engine cut, the bomb beginning its unpredictable descent, and the lack of any human pilot—the machine’s very remoteness—added to its alien threat. Surfacing from the Tube station on her way to work, Mum would survey the latest damage done to the already devastated surroundings: People sweeping away broken glass or picking their way through rubble.
And on the way back, the night sky—if there was no siren—was barely lit by “star” lighting from lamp-posts and the dimmed headlights of cars. Even in the Underground there was hardly any lighting, the only illumination being the torch in your hand pointing fixedly at your feet; Mum’s satchel with her gas-mask was strapped across her shoulder. And then a blacked-out train to the Medway Towns—one layer of darkness overlapping another—to start the process again: “This tideless, hypnotic, futureless day-to-day,” to quote Bowen once more.
As Spufford acknowledges, Bowen’s work—not only The Heat of the Day but also her supernatural tales like “Mysterious Kôr” and “The Demon Lover” (both 1945)—is a reference-point for Nonesuch. Bowen also features in Lara Feigel’s The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), a historical account which, if you have never read Joan Wyndham’s wartime diary Love Lessons (1985), emphasises that the shattering of day and night by the siren and the all-clear brought with it an intensity that could only be alleviated in sex. Iris, actively pursuing her desires with wealthy and hopefully influential men even before the War, would be a firm believer in that. For my Mum, though, it was the “thinning of the membrane between the this and the that” observed by Bowen which characterised her wartime experiences: A clump, and a scrape, and a rasping breath, pursuing you through blacked-out tunnels, as you gather pace, speed up, hurtle through closing doors, and are sped away in a darkened, rattling train screeching you to safety. What was it that pursued Mum that evening? An elderly man with a clubfoot?
Coincidentally, a pursuit by an even stranger apparition marks the shift in Nonesuch from social realism to supernatural fantasy, although here the reference is less Bowen and more M. R. James.
Nonesuch returns Spufford to the wartime setting that initiated his Booker Prize-longlisted novel, Light Perpetual (2021). That novel’s speculative element (what if five fictional children had survived an actual bombing raid in 1944?) is comparatively mild compared with the occult worldbuilding displayed here. Furthermore, despite the presence of five separate storylines in the earlier novel, Nonesuch is generically wilder, careening from historical fiction to full-on fantasy with science-fictional tinges. Stylistically, despite a couple of dazzling set-pieces, the writing is measured (perhaps a little too measured) as each section covers a period of months from August 1939 to December 1940. Yet, there remain a couple of parallels between Nonesuch and its predecessor. Which parts of Nonesuch readers will prefer will vary according to their wavelength.
And indeed, the ether is full of noises. Geoff Hale, this novel’s other main protagonist, is a BBC technician working on early TV broadcasts from Alexandra Palace. Later, he is seconded to a Bletchley Park-style unit, monitoring and deciphering Nazi signals. Spufford characterises the upper air of the London skyline as “furrowed with vibrations,” a metaphor that evokes the Cartesian image of the universe as filled with mysterious, invisible vortices, “such fast and delicate oscillations” that the humans “would have needed to be an organism made of something finer than flesh and blood to feel the quick waves moving.” Whilst on the one hand, such passages evoke such neo-modernist novels concerned with the technologies of communication as Tom McCarthy’s C (2010), on the other hand Spufford’s revelation—that angels can be similarly attuned—evokes the divinities inhabiting dark matter in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000).
Spufford’s novel, via Pullman, is indebted to the scientific romances and chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, most especially The Magician’s Nephew (1955). Whilst Spufford’s unofficial Narnia novel The Stone Table rests in twilight, unsanctioned by Lewis’s Estate and read only by a circle of friends, perhaps Nonesuch and its planned sequel Arcady act as a substitute. Certainly, Iris appears to be an adult response to Pullman’s Lyra and the problematic fate of Lewis’s Susan Pevensie, excluded from Narnia because—according to the character of Jill Pole—“she’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Although the meaning of Susan’s exclusion has been widely debated, Spufford seems to be steering a middle course between Pullman, who acknowledges his own heroine can be “a pretty wicked little girl,” and the more misogynistic implications of Lewis’s prohibition. Iris, who comes from a family of financial clerks, seeks to better herself whether through work or sex, and find pleasure and material comforts into the bargain. Her encounter with Geoff after a failed sexual adventure, stealing him from the aristocratic Lall, precipitates the first stirrings of her own moral conscience: In also stealing his virginity, Iris mocks and humiliates Geoff. Through her attempt to make amends, Iris puts her life in danger from supernatural forces.
Iris, then, is granted a sexual freedom that Lewis appears to scorn in Susan. She is initiated into sexual desire, like Pullman’s Lyra, and initiates others. Her promiscuity, however, is only one aspect of her libertarianism: In an example of that archetypal scene of historical fiction—the one in which an imaginary character meets a real-life personage—Iris extols the virtues of the free market to John Maynard Keynes. Yet, the trajectory of both the plot and Iris’s relationship with Geoff is to temper her atomistic individualism. She learns first to curb her sarcasm and then that others—indeed, the fate of the free world—depend upon her. Not only is Spufford performing a balancing act between Lewis and Pullman, he is also pivoting between other stereotypes. One is the “tart with a heart” and the other is the epic fantasy trope of “The One,” the preordained hero.
Spufford just about gets away with this since, on both scores, Iris is a reluctant protagonist. She is compelled into the fight between good and evil, partially because of her antagonism with Lall and partially because, if the Nazis win, her own dream of material success (which she awkwardly balances with her romantic aspirations with Geoff) would be rendered null and void. Like a good Keynesian, she acts from enlightened self-interest. The fact Iris adjusts her financial ambitions to encompass a moral conscience, without abandoning them, also tempers the redemptive aspects of her narrative—she’s not that good a girl—until on the final pages she commits an act that will have ramifications both for the next novel and the history she has just saved.
To some extent, Iris’s story also evokes the destinies of Alec and Vern in Light Perpetual. Whereas Vern opportunistically seeks to climb the property ladder, scamming others along the way, Alec learns that, despite his personal frustrations, he has always sought to do his best by those around him. Even as she tries to find a solution for the problems of Cornellis & Blome, as the military situation worsens, with an eye to her own status and future prosperity Iris justifies her actions by seeking to support her Jewish employer—whose son has been captured as a prisoner of war. Iris, then, is a synthesis of Alec and Vern, and this uneasy negotiation lends her character more depth than might at first be suggested by the stereotypes around which Spufford tiptoes.
He is less successful, however, with the principal antagonist, Lall. Although described as a short, blond “fairy,” Lall’s “ice maiden” image strongly evokes Lewis’s White Witch. It is Lall, although we don’t know it at first, who launches one of the novel’s two great set-pieces: Iris’s night-time pursuit by a thing, “with its head lying flat on its shoulder as no head should,” and a face “made of newsprint,” “swelling and puckering, the skin of something alive within.” There are clear echoes here of M. R. James’s “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), in which Parkins is assailed by an entity with “a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.” The creature is a Watcher, an entrapped angel from the lower regions, set by the mysterious Order to guard over Geoff’s father Cyprian, who works for them as an archivist. Lall, who is affiliated with the Order, follows Iris and Geoff back to his father’s home and sets the Watcher upon Iris in revenge for stealing Geoff. This episode, an effective supernatural tale which is coupled with the historical research that Spufford has undertaken to set the scene, only presages an even greater conspiracy once Iris connects with the aging and possibly demented Cyprian.
Iris learns that, in 1612, faced with a constitutional crisis, a group of necromancers led by a John Dee-like figure, Hieronymus Dawe, summoned a dozen angels and encased them within stone statues. Since the angels were individually tethered by “an umbilical” to “the place beyond time” (Nonesuch), Dawe reasoned that if he could tie the cords together, they would form “a pathway” by which he and his fellow magicians could journey, through a precise sequence of angels, to Nonesuch—and change history. This he and his comrades did, at the expense of their own lives, creating the timeline in which Iris now lives. The statues, in which the angels were still trapped, were subsequently mounted on buildings around the City of London. It is the intention now of the Order to repeat Dawe’s experiment and change history again, so that Winston Churchill never becomes Prime Minister, and Britain falls to the Nazis.
Although an outrageous plot, the elements are familiar. The fascination with seventeenth-century necromancers, especially if they can time travel, is an almost standard trope of London Gothic, from Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1979) to the novels of Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore. The statues echo Doctor Who’s Weeping Angels whilst a hidden, magical London is as much a part of Lewis and E. Nesbit as it is Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (2011) and Arthur Machen (“N” [1934]). The fascist sympathies of the Order evoke not only the figure of Aleister Crowley but also the representation of neo-Nazi necromancers in such works as China Miéville’s Kraken (2010). Last, while the attempt to change history invokes a whole raft of “Hitler wins” alternate histories, the magical procedure also evokes Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s comic-book series Injection (2015-7). And Iris’s nickname for the angel Raphael, Prince of the Air—“Bluey”—couldn’t stop me from thinking of Moore’s Doctor Manhattan.
Again, wavelengths vary. Spufford’s knowing synthesis may equally attract or discourage fans of occult fantasies. It may appear more audacious to readers of literary rather than genre fiction—or, equally, the hybrid of occult fantasy and carefully researched historical fiction might puzzle or bemuse literary readers. I couldn’t help but feel that the history, especially its emphasis upon the vast employment of women in supporting the war effort, was fascinating enough in itself; and that Iris and her struggle to make it in the world, along with her complicated relationship with Geoff and his involvement in the secret realm of codes and signals, were also intriguing enough. Whether we really needed the fantasy plot depended upon the threat being sufficiently menacing. And I’m not sure it was.
Partially, this is due to the characterisation of Lall. As with Iris’s potential stereotyping, Spufford is keen to avoid her demonisation as a femme fatale, whether akin to Lewis’s White Witch or Aryan Rhinemaiden. On the one hand, despite her vindictiveness towards Iris, Spufford portrays Lall (like Iris) as a potential victim, for example when the remaining members of the Order attempt to sadistically induct her into the cult. On the other hand, despite her brutal revenge on the last of the Order, Lall is curiously inactive when it comes to killing Iris. Instead of the White Witch’s superhuman strength, Lall’s violence is achieved through willpower, but she is less than wilful when it comes to her nemesis. Instead, it is Iris who comes closest to killing Lall, during the novel’s other great set-piece—a hallucinogenic, hyperspatial attempt to pass through the angels in the midst of an air-raid and get to Nonesuch. Lall threatens to kill Iris next time, but the stand-off between them is unconvincing, especially as Lall’s motivations for altering history have changed from that of the Order.
Working undercover as an auxiliary driver, Lall is suspected by Iris of falling in love with one of the other women. Lall protests at the suggestion, but says her desire is now to end the War and save her fellow workers from further danger. Lall’s repressed lesbianism—already indicated in the figure of the White Witch—fails to convince as a motivation, since it not only portrays sapphic desire as deviant but also recalls the supporting character of Mikey in Light Perpetual, whose racist violence stems from the disavowal of his homosexuality. Whereas the echoing of Alec and Vern’s storylines adds to Iris’s characterisation, the recycling of Mikey’s dilemma as the basis of Lall’s seems both repetitive and reductive. The reader might wonder if Lall’s inability to kill Iris stems from their mutual attraction (Iris rescues Lall after almost murdering her), but thankfully, Spufford spares us a Killing Eve-type scenario. Nonetheless, in trying to negotiate Lall’s villainy by giving her a supposedly sympathetic motivation, Spufford ends up diminishing her as a sufficiently scary opponent.
The other way in which the threat is less menacing than it should be comes from Spufford’s style, where again the debt to Lewis is clear. Very often it appears whimsical, for example in the exchanges between Iris, Geoff, and Raphael or in Iris’s relationship with the eccentric and absent-minded Cyprian. The whimsicality takes away both from the threat and the historical realism that does so much in immersing the reader and presenting the supernatural danger as both genuine and real. And when Spufford’s style, especially in the second half of the novel, is not whimsical, it tends to be languid. Partially, this is a problem that he has set himself, since each attempt to enter Nonesuch follows the lunar cycle and can only be assayed once a month. This means that Spufford has time to focus on the relationship between Iris and Geoff, which means in practice several romantic descriptions of sex that tend to become repetitive.
Meanwhile, the reader has plenty of time to ponder the extent to which Spufford’s novel plays into the “Great Man” view of history—he probably just about gets away with that—whilst, at the same time, coming to terms with its playing up to Churchill’s iconography as a great wartime leader at the expense of his failures both in peacetime and World War One, as well as in his relations with Europe, India, and the US. It also seems odd that Spufford does relatively little with Iris’s friend, the sculptor Eleanor Armbruster, since although Evelyn Dunbar was the only official female War Artist, other women contributed significantly to the art of the Blitz. A tighter, more dramatic focus in the second half would have kept this reader’s attention, at least, from wandering.
Having said all this, at the end of Nonesuch, we have only reached the halfway mark and the rabbit-out-of-the-hat on the final pages is such that it suggests Arcady will be less of a straightforward sequel and more a reinvention of what has already gone. Spufford has set himself a considerable challenge; it could be that Arcady will transform what is a good read in Nonesuch into a genuinely great work of historical fantasy. Despite my reservations, I shall be interested to see what occurs.