In his 2002 memoir The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford proposes that there are two kinds of reader. One kind discovers books relatively late in life – say, during their student years. This kind of reader is interested in ideas – their holiday suitcase tends to be garnished by volumes of philosophy, politics, literary theory. The other kind of reader is quite interested in ideas, but because they discovered books in childhood, their first love, Spufford suggests, will always be the story. This kind of reader is always hoping to step through the wardrobe and fine the snowy forest, the incongruous lamp-post, the waiting faun ...
The ideal novelist serves both categories of reader, and it is in this sense that Spufford is an ideal novelist. He has, so to speak, reversed into fiction. For the first decade of his career he was a creator of highly original and ambitious nonfiction. His interest was history. (A practising Christian, he has also written a book of apologetics unapologetically entitled Unapologetic [2012]). By the time he wrote Red Plenty, his 2010 book about ordinary life in the post-Stalin USSR, he was mixing fiction with his history, to novelistic effect; at last he began to publish actual novels, including Golden Hill (2016) and the superb alternate-universe thriller Cahokia Jazz (2023).
Spufford is that rare thing: an intelligent storyteller. Saturated as we are, just now, in cheap stories told by fools, cynics, liars, hustlers, and tyrants, we have watched the value of story, in the 21st century West, become debased.
Spufford understands that storytelling is really a kind of ritual, and, as with any ritual, its purpose is to guide us towards inner change. It is not at all surprising that he has written (but has been, for copyright reasons, unable to publish) his own instalment in the Narnia series. Narnia is the place in which truths invisible to the eyes of the mundane world can clearly be seen. In Lewis’s books, those truths are Christian. In Spufford’s, they feel more ecumenical. But his fiction is certainly shaped by a deeply Christian respect for the numinous, and for the redemptive power of story.
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Nonesuch, Spufford’s new novel, is distinctly Narnian in timbre. The Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe have been, you will recall, evacuated from London during the Blitz. The second World War and its terrors therefore lurk just beyond the edges of the tale. Narnia has its own terrors, but it is also a refuge. Shaped by what Lewis called “the Deep Magic” (the intrinsic rightness of the created world), it is a place in which order will always in the end be found. Part of the game of Nonesuch is to restore the reality of the second World War to a Narnian story of magic, rewriting not just Lewis but history itself. It is a luxuriously enjoyable book – Narnia for grown-ups.
The setting is London in the late summer of 1939. The protagonist is Iris Hawkins, a young woman who works as a secretary for an investment house in the city. Iris is much cleverer than the young men she dates (and, daringly for a young woman of her social class, sleeps with). She has read Keynes, has a keen eye for emotional nuance, and nurses ambitions to transcend secretarial work and become, herself, a market operator.
On a night out, she meets some employees of the nascent BBC television service, and goes home with one of them: Geoff, a callow but likable engineer. All of this is handled with great narrative brio; the lurch into fantasy (prepared for in a brief prologue) is similarly gripping.
It turns out that Geoff’s father, the milquetoast Mr Cyprian Hale, is a magician, though of a naive and lowly sort. He is, in fact, a dogsbody for “a certain ... Order, dedicated to esoteric knowledge”. Iris finds herself being followed by a nightmarish creature made of ancient newspapers – a Watcher, we discover, bound to protect the Hales’ house, in which the ramshackle archive of the Order is stored. To banish the Watcher, Iris will herself need to tinker with esoteric powers – powers which may or may not be angels (CS Lewis would approve). Meanwhile the War progresses. Who sent the Watcher after Iris? Has it anything to do with Lall, the chilly, glamorous young aristo linked to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists?
Pure story, this, but of the richest kind. All good stories are also stories about the story, and so it proves here. Nonesuch is so beautifully worked out, in its details and in its architecture, that there are all sorts of pleasures on offer: mystery, character, event, political commentary, historical speculation, allegory, social comedy ... And it ends, as all the best old stories do, with three words of promise: “To be continued.”
Kevin Power is an author, academic and critic
