Summary: A novel about World War II where the war is just some of the reality of the world.
Francis Spufford is a novelist that I avoid all spoilers and descriptions and just buy the book as soon as I see it. Nonesuch was released last week and I started it as soon as I finished my last book. I never like to give away too much when writing about fiction books.
One of the things I really like about Spufford is that he writes very different novels from one another. This one feels like Charles Williams and Neil Gaiman were inspirations (treating the supernatural as very real, with a little bit of almost creepiness, but never really being creepy and enough sex for it not to be a young adult book but it not to feel gratuitous). There is also a hint of CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but only a hint.
I won’t give it away, but Spufford is also very much known for last minute twists to his books. This one is no different and I won’t give it away, but this time I didn’t love the twist. It makes sense, I understand why he did it. But while I think the twist in Golden Hill made the book, I think it was a net negative here. In some ways, I think it changed the book from a historical fiction book that had great characters and really felt like it was a book about the war and the problems of war, to being a book that “was about something.” I don’t want to be too negative, because I loved the novel. But I just don’t think the twist was quite right.
Iris Hawkins is driven young woman. She works in a brokerage house and she wants to succeed. She also is clearly trying to control the world around her and seems to be running from something. In the days leading up to World War II, she stumbles on the reality of the supernatural and gets drawn in to a bigger story than she really wanted to.
This is a book about war, but it isn’t really about war. The reader gets to observe the home front and the bombing of London, day after day. But in part the supernatural story allows the reader to see something else is going on, or at least we get to see some of that.
This is a story of human growth and the development and maturing of the main characters, but no one is perfect or pure. There is a very clear sense of good fighting evil. But the good characters a trying to do what they think is the right thing, even when they don’t really want to. And that in some sense is more difficult than if it were a really hard task that they had been given with divine command.
Part of the theme here is that everything shapes us into who we are. The good can help to make us who we are, but so does the bad. We are shaped by the sum total of our reality. And some of that reality is pretty crappy and we can make bad decisions as a result. But I also think that part of what this book is trying to show is that things can get better when we really try to love others and work for the good of others.
I have only read one of Spufford’s nonfiction books. He wrote Unapologetic, which is a book about the emotional sense that Christianity makes. Nonesuch is not a “Christian novel.” There is sex and bad behavior and language in it. But that emotional sense that he is talking about in Unapologetic is present there. Unapologetic talks a lot about the human propensity to F*ck things up. He talks about it enough in the book to refer to it as move refer to it by its intials, HPtFtU. you can talk about HPtFtU as “sin”, but he is trying to have a thicker idea than the flattened idea of sin that we tend to have. The HPtFtU is not just personal sin, but the way everything seems to get messed up, even when we are not trying to.
One thing after another happens to Iris. Some of which we don’t really know about until the twist. Some happen to her, some she consciously chooses to do, some are accidental or random. (Part of the randomness of sin is illustrated by the fact that bombs hit some buildings and not others and that is mostly random.) But as much as the HPtFtU is real, human goodnesses and grace are also real. Because while Iris didn’t start out trying to be a hero, she did make a small choice which led to another and another and eventually she is consciously working with the supernatural forces to save the world. Both the HPtFtU and the grace of love and community are real things.
I have really enjoyed good fiction this year. The Correspondent, Project Hail Mary, The Daughter of Rage and Ruin and others are doing what fiction is supposed to do, working at us internally. We need non-fiction to learn information, but fiction I think does more to shape us into who we can become.
(Ted Olson pointed out to me on twitter that there is a second book in the series and that the twist likely is a setup for the second book. There is nothing that had seen previously about the book that said it was part of a series. But you can see that Spufford is talking about the second book in interviews like here, but the official webpage from the publisher doesn’t mention that.)
Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook