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gogollescentI read more than one book in April, but I think I only have a full review in me of Francis Spufford's Nonesuch, the first half of an urban fantasy duology set in WWII England during the Blitz. I like and admire Spufford's prose a great deal and am always hoping that his next book will be the book that I find fully realized in its invariably complex project; unfortunately, if I were to graph the trajectory of my reactions to his writing across time-of-publication, it would look like... um, honestly, a steadily downward trend for "percentage of thematic and dramatic intention actually executed on," although a more seasick up and down for "how much my personal shit X title was," with spikes for Golden Hill and Cahokia Jazz and a mighty trough on Light Perpetual.
Anyway. Nonesuch did not buck the trend, though as the first in a series I afford it a tiny bit more benefit of the doubt re: the eventual landing. The protagonist is a young woman named Iris, employed in the secretarial pool of a stockbroking firm but with a private ambition of herself becoming a wealthy financier; also with a defiant, hedonistic love of the casual sex that adds companionship and fun to an otherwise starkly lonely life, even as she feels increasingly ground-down by the double life required of a single, sexually active woman with a "nice" professional reputation to maintain. She becomes accidentally embroiled in the affairs of a Golden Dawn-style occultist society of aristocratic British fascists when she sleeps with a young engineer named Geoffrey Hale whose naive, isolated father serves as "librarian" to the order, presiding over their collection of hoarded esoterica even at the expense of living space for himself and his son. Iris's unauthorized entry (sneaking up with Geoff to his childhood bedroom) draws the attention of an angel ritually compelled to protect the library, which then grimly and doggedly pursues her until she uses a spell given to her by the elder Mr. Hale to release it from its arcane bondage.
From there, a somewhat contrived series of events sets Iris on course to do magical-problem-solving battle with the sole member of the society not summarily arrested under 18B at the outset of the war: Lalage "Lall" Cunningham, Geoff's childhood crush and the barely of-age daughter of the head of the order; also a classic bratty, superiority-inferiority complex-ridden Bad Gay. The angel Raphael informs Iris that there exists a Wood-between-the-Worlds-esque crossroads or place outside time, nicknamed the Palace of Nonesuch by the society, from which all times are accessible, real, present rather than past; and that Lall hopes to change history and ensure a German victory by murdering Churchill before he can win his case for Britain to enter the war. Nonesuch can only be found at the far end of a daisy-chain of eight timey-wimey bridges between angels entombed alive in statues throughout London, and the bridges only appear beneath the dark of the moon, and only ever to one seeker on a given night; thus Iris can theoretically forestall doomsday indefinitely by opening (but not using) enough bridges to prevent Lall from completing her chain of eight.
If you're thinking: huh, that sounds kind of cheesy but fun--yes, it does, doesn't it? Alas, the execution is heavy on the cheese and light on the fun. Part of the basic structural problem is that the book never quite finds its rhythm or meaningfully overlays the two halves of Iris' life. Spufford is or seems much more sincerely interested in the surreal quasi-magic of trading securities during the Blitz, and he struggles to paint monthly quantum-urbex contests over the fate of the timeline as anything other than slapstick interruptions. Yet because the quest for Nonesuch is almost Iris' only meaningful and attainable objective in the novel's timeframe, fat cat capitalist fantasies notwithstanding, and because only the matter of Lall and the angels can advance the main plot... the middle trudges dutifully along at a rate of one second per second, with lots of pagetime devoted to Iris's extremely informed, artificial-feeling romance with Geoff. That's supposed to be a pointedly earthly story about how love is both transcendent and mundane, comprised as much of two adults learning to communicate and maturely manage their differences as of mindblowing, tastefully-amorphous sex acts, but the Hard Conversations between them have all the music of TV dialogue in which characters reveal what they learn in therapy--with the added bonus that they don't actually seem to reach especially loving or mature conclusions, as opposed to making a lot of passive-aggressive compromises.
I was so frustrated with this book. It really is composed almost entirely of ideas that appeal to me on paper. I like, in theory, the never-stated but suffusing comparison between the strange abstraction of money and of magic and the way each makes manifest the ambivalent power of human hope, human self-belief. I like the contrast between the crystalline mathematical disembodiment of the angels and the too-muchness of the wartorn city. I like Spufford's interest in depicting British opposition to Germany as a fascinating historical accident, the necessary resistance given--also of necessity--by a corrupt empire and its standard-bearers, rather than as a destined triumph of innate virtue. I like my imagined version of the triad between Iris, Geoff, and Lall, a version that better expresses that contradiction, that leans into the ugly homoerotic tension between Iris' will to dominate and Lall's childish, insecure aggression, as well as Geoff's irrational protectiveness of his old friend. But the tone is all off, because he really wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants Iris to be a genuinely selfish, flawed specimen of representative British ambivalence, whose first thought on discovering that her Jewish employer is secretly storing U.S. Treasury bonds is to wonder if she can steal them in transit and reinvent herself in America; who glories in the discovery that Lall is gay because it means she can finally feel superior to her. He also wants to reassure us at every turn that Iris's girlboss ambitions are #valid and that her manipulation, unkindness, and self-pity in re: Geoff are mere sympathetic byproducts of life under patriarchy--all sorts of anxious bids for reader patience which, in a basic human sense, I would have been happy to extend without the narrative pressing it on me at every turn, but which I began to run rather short of when it accidentally went full circle to "women aren't quite moral agents anyway, and men's feelings do count a bit less; so (frankly) do the feelings of Other Girls not elevated to the sacred rank of protagonist." Rather than successfully holding the two poles of the dialectic (Iris the hero, willing to do what others won't; Iris the deeply stunted person, unwilling to risk full empathy) in tension, it constantly averages them into something less human.
...The cliffhanger ending speaks to some of these problems, but it didn't lower my blood pressure any because I just got annoyed about the feeling of an elaborate 500-page fakeout instead; also I still suspect Spufford of being unable to fully commit to his premise because of how intensely self-conscious, how anachronistically cheated out, all the girlbossing was.
One more note before I wrap: it's hard to comment on the depiction of the angels and occultism in this because I strongly suspect Spufford of intending to bring in the central role of antisemitic cultural appropriation in all Western mysticism before the series' conclusion, but it's never more than implied in this volume, even as the characterization of the angels as immaterial and defined by a single purpose, as well as the magic system's emphasis on language, mathematics, music, and the aesthetic manipulation of half-glimpsed laws and structures underlying reality, all strongly evokes a world in which mysticism per Kabbalah is more literally "true" than the warped version practiced by the unnamed society. (It might have a name. I might just have forgot.) Despite my complaints, I will read the second book when it comes out and report back. That said it's Spufford so there's also a scene where everyone sings at midnight mass and Iris thinks about how human belief in a better tomorrow is almost like God existing, in a sort of way.
Anyway. Nonesuch did not buck the trend, though as the first in a series I afford it a tiny bit more benefit of the doubt re: the eventual landing. The protagonist is a young woman named Iris, employed in the secretarial pool of a stockbroking firm but with a private ambition of herself becoming a wealthy financier; also with a defiant, hedonistic love of the casual sex that adds companionship and fun to an otherwise starkly lonely life, even as she feels increasingly ground-down by the double life required of a single, sexually active woman with a "nice" professional reputation to maintain. She becomes accidentally embroiled in the affairs of a Golden Dawn-style occultist society of aristocratic British fascists when she sleeps with a young engineer named Geoffrey Hale whose naive, isolated father serves as "librarian" to the order, presiding over their collection of hoarded esoterica even at the expense of living space for himself and his son. Iris's unauthorized entry (sneaking up with Geoff to his childhood bedroom) draws the attention of an angel ritually compelled to protect the library, which then grimly and doggedly pursues her until she uses a spell given to her by the elder Mr. Hale to release it from its arcane bondage.
From there, a somewhat contrived series of events sets Iris on course to do magical-problem-solving battle with the sole member of the society not summarily arrested under 18B at the outset of the war: Lalage "Lall" Cunningham, Geoff's childhood crush and the barely of-age daughter of the head of the order; also a classic bratty, superiority-inferiority complex-ridden Bad Gay. The angel Raphael informs Iris that there exists a Wood-between-the-Worlds-esque crossroads or place outside time, nicknamed the Palace of Nonesuch by the society, from which all times are accessible, real, present rather than past; and that Lall hopes to change history and ensure a German victory by murdering Churchill before he can win his case for Britain to enter the war. Nonesuch can only be found at the far end of a daisy-chain of eight timey-wimey bridges between angels entombed alive in statues throughout London, and the bridges only appear beneath the dark of the moon, and only ever to one seeker on a given night; thus Iris can theoretically forestall doomsday indefinitely by opening (but not using) enough bridges to prevent Lall from completing her chain of eight.
If you're thinking: huh, that sounds kind of cheesy but fun--yes, it does, doesn't it? Alas, the execution is heavy on the cheese and light on the fun. Part of the basic structural problem is that the book never quite finds its rhythm or meaningfully overlays the two halves of Iris' life. Spufford is or seems much more sincerely interested in the surreal quasi-magic of trading securities during the Blitz, and he struggles to paint monthly quantum-urbex contests over the fate of the timeline as anything other than slapstick interruptions. Yet because the quest for Nonesuch is almost Iris' only meaningful and attainable objective in the novel's timeframe, fat cat capitalist fantasies notwithstanding, and because only the matter of Lall and the angels can advance the main plot... the middle trudges dutifully along at a rate of one second per second, with lots of pagetime devoted to Iris's extremely informed, artificial-feeling romance with Geoff. That's supposed to be a pointedly earthly story about how love is both transcendent and mundane, comprised as much of two adults learning to communicate and maturely manage their differences as of mindblowing, tastefully-amorphous sex acts, but the Hard Conversations between them have all the music of TV dialogue in which characters reveal what they learn in therapy--with the added bonus that they don't actually seem to reach especially loving or mature conclusions, as opposed to making a lot of passive-aggressive compromises.
I was so frustrated with this book. It really is composed almost entirely of ideas that appeal to me on paper. I like, in theory, the never-stated but suffusing comparison between the strange abstraction of money and of magic and the way each makes manifest the ambivalent power of human hope, human self-belief. I like the contrast between the crystalline mathematical disembodiment of the angels and the too-muchness of the wartorn city. I like Spufford's interest in depicting British opposition to Germany as a fascinating historical accident, the necessary resistance given--also of necessity--by a corrupt empire and its standard-bearers, rather than as a destined triumph of innate virtue. I like my imagined version of the triad between Iris, Geoff, and Lall, a version that better expresses that contradiction, that leans into the ugly homoerotic tension between Iris' will to dominate and Lall's childish, insecure aggression, as well as Geoff's irrational protectiveness of his old friend. But the tone is all off, because he really wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants Iris to be a genuinely selfish, flawed specimen of representative British ambivalence, whose first thought on discovering that her Jewish employer is secretly storing U.S. Treasury bonds is to wonder if she can steal them in transit and reinvent herself in America; who glories in the discovery that Lall is gay because it means she can finally feel superior to her. He also wants to reassure us at every turn that Iris's girlboss ambitions are #valid and that her manipulation, unkindness, and self-pity in re: Geoff are mere sympathetic byproducts of life under patriarchy--all sorts of anxious bids for reader patience which, in a basic human sense, I would have been happy to extend without the narrative pressing it on me at every turn, but which I began to run rather short of when it accidentally went full circle to "women aren't quite moral agents anyway, and men's feelings do count a bit less; so (frankly) do the feelings of Other Girls not elevated to the sacred rank of protagonist." Rather than successfully holding the two poles of the dialectic (Iris the hero, willing to do what others won't; Iris the deeply stunted person, unwilling to risk full empathy) in tension, it constantly averages them into something less human.
...The cliffhanger ending speaks to some of these problems, but it didn't lower my blood pressure any because I just got annoyed about the feeling of an elaborate 500-page fakeout instead; also I still suspect Spufford of being unable to fully commit to his premise because of how intensely self-conscious, how anachronistically cheated out, all the girlbossing was.
One more note before I wrap: it's hard to comment on the depiction of the angels and occultism in this because I strongly suspect Spufford of intending to bring in the central role of antisemitic cultural appropriation in all Western mysticism before the series' conclusion, but it's never more than implied in this volume, even as the characterization of the angels as immaterial and defined by a single purpose, as well as the magic system's emphasis on language, mathematics, music, and the aesthetic manipulation of half-glimpsed laws and structures underlying reality, all strongly evokes a world in which mysticism per Kabbalah is more literally "true" than the warped version practiced by the unnamed society. (It might have a name. I might just have forgot.) Despite my complaints, I will read the second book when it comes out and report back. That said it's Spufford so there's also a scene where everyone sings at midnight mass and Iris thinks about how human belief in a better tomorrow is almost like God existing, in a sort of way.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-25 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-25 07:07 am (UTC)Although since it's Spufford I'm realizing he probably also decided that it would be problematic to present a bi character as sleeping around, absolutely necessary and the sole progressive option to make her a Kinsey 0--
no subject
Date: 2026-04-26 08:19 pm (UTC)Shame, because so much of this sounds so interesting, and your initial description of Iris as a character sounds like it could be so fresh.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-26 08:57 pm (UTC)It's super messy altogether but it is interesting. Iris is probably like two thirds of the way there to being a pretty singular protagonist, certainly in fantasy. Part of the problem is that he's sort of also afraid of culturally appropriating feminism, lmao, and so uses kid gloves when it comes to anything that might be remotely unflattering and thus remotely transgressive--e.g., the thing where she loves and finds relief in sex (and also carries a secret trauma that has cut her off from her family and her old ideas about her future), but these two things are totally unrelated and the casual sex is Only empowering, never self-harming, even when she's sleeping with extremely unpleasant dudes. That's a slight simplification, she's certainly intended to be an unreliable narrator about herself, but it's one of many things he spends a lot of time timidly "complicating at the edges" rather than really committing to.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-26 10:59 pm (UTC)(Also, in this instance, your icon's expression really added something to your response :D)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 01:53 am (UTC)