Nonesuch by Francis Spufford – Review
By Barney Bardsley
It is rare – at least for this reviewer and voracious reader – to find books that are near impossible to put down. Books pulsing with vitality and daring, with heart-felt emotion, humour and daring at their centre. Francis Spufford’s first novel, Golden Hill, set in eighteenth century New York, and brim-full of unforgettable characters and events, was one. And Nonesuch, his third work of fiction, is another. Spufford is a master story teller, and he writes with a confidence, charm and style that is hard to resist. If fantasy, adventure, hard-headed romance and real-life dilemmas, described with unflinching bravado, are your thing, Spufford is definitely your man.
Set in the London of World War Two, Nonesuch is, at one level, a beguiling love story, featuring Iris, a chippy, working class girl, and Geoff, who is a bit of a technological nerd, with plenty of brains, but nowhere near Iris’s level of street smarts and worldly experience. Against all the odds, they begin to fall for one another, and Spufford does not flinch from giving us plenty of bedroom closeups, as their love affair progresses. But his descriptions of the couple’s love making is wondrously unsentimental, and very beautiful to read, a rare thing in literature, indeed.
Meanwhile, their energetic, feisty confrontations, which increase in complexity and emotional depth, the more involved they become as a couple, are also described with affection and searing honesty. Spufford is clearly fond of both these young people, who face such brutal challenges as the war invades their daily life – and as a result the reader, too, becomes hopelessly invested in each of their fates.
But there is more, much more, to this book. It turns out that the shy and conventional Geoff has an eccentric father, Cyprian Hale, who lives with him, existing in a state of perpetual chaos – and possessing a less than optimal obsession with the occult world. This is where it gets wild and complicated. Think fascist fairies! Strange ghost like figures roaming the London streets! Statues with spirits trapped inside. A blackshirt plot to assassinate Churchill. A very real attempt to travel back through time and space, to re-write history, and instal a Nazi government in dear old Blighty. Spufford’s imagination is audacious, and the best way to experience this book’s more fanciful tropes, is to sit back, buckle up, and simply enjoy the ride.
“Blistering big read”
Suffice it to say that it is up to our brave young hero and heroine, Iris and Geoff, to nip all this supernatural chicanery in the bud, and restore the world to some kind of order and balance, even if they continue to be in the middle of a bloomin’ great war.
How does it end? Well, that would be telling. And despite the very real need of the reader to get a neat and happy conclusion to the story – and the temptation of the author to give it to us – Spufford, thankfully, resists this entirely.
There are casualties, many of them, in the wake of the book’s extraordinary set of events. One of the main characters dies in a bomb explosion. The Romeo and Juliet lovers do not get their happy-ever-after reward. The war still blasts its way through the lives and dreams of a whole nation. Destruction and death are everywhere to be found. And yet, such is the author’s good-humoured ebullience, his commitment to lively characters and a damned good story, that it is hard to feel anything but energised by this blistering big read of a novel.
After 477 pages, we end up simply not knowing what on earth is going to happen next; who survives, and where they all end up. But there are three words on the final page, that give this reader, at least, a hope that all is not lost: To Be Continued. We clearly have not heard the last of Iris and Geoff, nor the curious otherworldly concept of ‘Nonesuch’ – a city where everything in the universe gets cheerfully bent out of shape. Who knows what the next instalment will bring? Only one thing is for sure: in Francis Spufford’s skilful hands, it is absolutely bound to be interesting, with another rollicking good read to anticipate and relish.
‘Nonesuch’ by Francis Spufford is published by Faber
