Nonesuch is set in London at the beginning of World War II—a setting that’s been captured in fiction many times, from recent novels like The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin to classics like Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear. What drew you to writing about this historical moment?
I was nervous, in fact, about going somewhere so well-trafficked as a setting, with so many existing tropes as attractors. But as a writer my subject seems to be cities—their layers, their close-up swirl of human lives, the way their buildings hold a kind of physical memory—and 1940 is the epic moment in London’s life as a city, its time of siege and trial by fire, when its nature was being tested under intense stress. Also a time, it struck me as I set about writing a fantasy novel, when it was easy to imagine ruin and terror thinning the everyday fabric of things, and other realities showing through.
Your main character Iris’ middle name is Susan. Was that an intentional homage to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, or just a coincidence?
Curses, I thought I’d been more cryptic than that. But clearly my cover is blown. Yes, one of the things I wanted to do in Nonesuch was to write an oblique sort of response to the Problem of Susan, who in the last of the Narnia books is famously left out of the apocalyptic happy ending for being “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Ever since, Narnia fans have been turning this line around and around, looking for ways to take it that have less bachelor distaste and incomprehension. Lewis himself said in a letter to a child that Susan would find her own way back to Narnia, and to what Narnia represented. But it seemed to me that a novel about Susan Pevensie as an adult would need as its very first move to lose the distaste and to be willing to be properly interested, itself, in lipstick, nylons and boys. I didn’t then write that book. Not literally, anyway. (There are copyright problems.) Iris in Nonesuch is a quite different being from Susan. She’s a clever opportunist from the outer suburbs, seizing the war’s temporary liberty for women as a chance to rise. But she is very interested in the pleasures of life as a young woman, and Nonesuch is about how a journey to wonder might start, unashamedly, among the nylons. Though Iris prefers silk, when her budget allows.
Iris wouldn’t describe herself as a kind person—in fact, she’d say the opposite—but her actions are often kind, almost in spite of herself. Tell us about how her character came to you.
Iris is a self-reliant person, determined to grab the rewards of this world, who is very conscious that “kindness” is often the heading under which women are suckered into sacrificing their own needs. So she’s allergic to any suggestion from other people that she ought to be kind. She finds it safer to announce up front that she isn’t. When she is kind, she tends not to acknowledge to herself that that’s what she’s doing. But she has a heart, and as well as dealing with falling bombs and magical time-traveling fascists in Nonesuch, she also faces the unplanned experience of falling in love with a man in wild contrast to the handsome dolts she’s found her fun with up to this point.
As for where her character came from, the starting point was an extremely surprising conversation with my grandmother when she was in her 90s. We were in a century-old Indian restaurant in London. She said, “Oh, I was last here in 1935. It hasn’t changed much.” And then she said, “You know, I always preferred to go out with married men. They always spent so much more money on you.” And then she clammed up. She would say no more at all, leaving me to wonder about this cheerfully amoral good time she’d had. Iris isn’t her—she didn’t give me enough to go on for that—but Iris is, kind of, my attempt to imagine my way into what her past might have been like.
“The imp of the perverse is active in me: I like boring stuff that is secretly interesting.”
How do you write about well-known historical periods without falling into tropes or nostalgia, and what do you gain by bringing in speculative or invented elements?
The speculative elements are what keep you from falling into tropes or nostalgia, in my experience. They let you morph, reverse, invert and defamiliarize what you think you know about the time in question, and find the surprises in it: 1740s New York’s frantic devotion to King George II, for example, in my book Golden Hill. In the alt-history of my book Cahokia Jazz, by keeping in existence the dense populations of Native maize farmers up the Mississippi who were there before European germs hit, and imagining for them a 1920s metropolis with canneries and jazz and machine guns, I’m trying to get the reader to notice the screaming blank in the world off the page where all those missing people ought to be. I’m wanting people to notice, afresh, the strangeness of the emptied continent now filled by the USA. Likewise, now in Nonesuch I’m wanting the fantasy of the novel to bring out the unearthliness that was really there in the world’s near-collapse into evil in the year 1940.
Speaking of historicity, you capture life in the lead-up to the war and during the Blitz with such specific and compelling detail. What was your research process like for this book?
I’ve learned that you always need less detail than you think, so long as it’s the right detail—the little grains of very specific, very textured historical fact that, like seed crystals, get the reader working with you to grow a whole world in their heads. For this book, I read a lot of narratively unpromising material about the London Stock Exchange during the war, about the program formats of pre-World War II BBC television, about teletype machines and ambulances and bus routes and traffic casualties in the blacked-out streets, always looking for the things that implied or could generate a human story. The imp of the perverse is active in me: I like boring stuff that is secretly interesting. I’ve written a whole novel about Soviet economics, for God’s sake. And then I walked. I’m a believer in setting off with a street map from the period and summoning the past city from the paving stones up. It worked in lower Manhattan for Golden Hill, and it worked in the side streets of London’s financial district for Nonesuch.
Was there anything you learned during your research that you wished you could incorporate but didn’t have space for?
Many, many more examples of the disgusting recipes proposed to British women as good things to cook under rationing. In the end, I limited myself to the single worst one: a chocolate pudding recipe, sorry, a “chocolate” pudding recipe, which I found copied out in my other grandmother’s handwritten cookbook. A layer of gritty pale beige gelatinized blancmange with a layer of clear brown jelly on top. I cooked it to check. Oh my goodness.
“A book with a woman as hero required a woman as villain as well, it seemed to me.”
Nonesuch features beings that you described in an interview with The Bookseller as “Book of Ezekiel angels.” Can you tell us about how you envisioned these angels?
Victorian angels are pastel and sweet and angels in contemporary fantasy are often hunky bikers with feathers, but Bible angels are either indistinguishable from human beings, so you can entertain them unawares, or so weird, so far off the human scale of perception, that they almost hurt the mind trying to take them in. Poor old Ezekiel could only report a migraine-inducing confusion of revolving wheels on the hillside; the prophet Isaiah cowered before six-winged things that made the ground shake and filled the air with smoke. I thought it would be interesting to go with this last option, and have angels that are good but nearly Lovecraftian in their challenge to the sanity of the beholder.
These terrifying angels are a stark contrast to the stereotypical beauty of another character, Lall, who is a fascist. Can you talk about your choice to reverse our expectations for the appearances of good and evil?
I wanted Lall—Lady Lalage Cunningham, exquisite, petite, fanatical, psychopathic—to have one of those maddeningly perfect faces which has, by unfair stroke of nature, what everyone else has to struggle toward with blusher, highlighter and mascara. And then to be the kind of entitled idiot who takes the accident of their beauty as proof of superiority: who thinks the world is a hierarchy with themselves naturally at the top. It’s that, not Lall’s beauty in itself, that I want you to find hateful. Nonesuch is not opposed to beauty. Not to Iris’ forthright pleasure in her own attractiveness, and especially not to the foal-like male beauty of Iris’ love interest Geoff, which (if I’ve done it right) ought to bring out the protectiveness of a lot of straight women and gay men reading. But a book with a woman as hero required a woman as villain as well, it seemed to me. And the hero/villain duo is built from resemblances as well as differences. Lall, as well as being a fascist at the darkest point of history and the embodiment of everything unfair in the class system that stands in Iris’ way, is also a kind of dark alter ego for her. Someone she needs to defeat by choosing not to be like her.
Nonesuch is the first in a planned duology. What was it like to write knowing you have a follow-up in the works? And what can we expect in the sequel?
I’ve never written anything requiring a sequel before, and it’s exciting to have two whole books to tell a story over (while doing my best to make each stand up on its own). More space, more possibility. But it’s nerve-racking too: One false move in the sequel and I can undo the good work of book one. What can you expect in book two? Not telling.
Read our starred review of Nonesuch.
Photo of Francis Spufford by Antonio Olmos
