Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is a genre-defying delight

Francis Spufford describes his latest novel as a “daft mixture” of “wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic and falling bombs”. The description doesn’t do Nonesuch full justice – among the ingredients he has omitted are a love story, a portrait of blitz-era London so vivid you can almost feel the grit on your teeth, and some excellent jokes. But it serves to introduce a work of fiction remarkable for its intelligence, the energy of its flexible prose (now soaring majestically, now delivering sharply bathetic put-downs) and – yes – for its daftness.

The heroine is Iris Hawkins, a 23-year-old from the suburbs working as a secretary in a stockbroking firm. The male lead is Geoff, a technician developing the new medium of television. Their relationship is based on a piquant reversal of traditional roles. Iris is un-girlishly ambitious: her target is a powerful job in the all-male sphere of finance and she wants to get rich. Her idea of a good time is a sexual encounter (initiated by her) with a handsome fellow who can please her in bed – shared interests or mutual respect not required. When she left Watford, she left her family behind. Geoff, by contrast, is a blushing blond virgin who has selflessly accepted the role, reserved in 19th-century fiction for unmarried girls, of live-in carer to a demanding elderly father.

They meet one hot evening in August 1939. Iris has walked out on dinner with a particularly crass boyfriend to explore Bohemia. In a nightclub in Fitzrovia, where projected clips of abstract film form the decor, she encounters a group of people more interestingly complicated than those she’s previously known. She takes an instant dislike to Lall, a snobbish fascist beauty, and – mainly to spite her – dances with her escort, Geoff the “technical boy”, and takes him to bed. So far, so realistic. But, waking in the small hours, Iris looks out of Geoff’s bedroom window and there – incongruous in a leafy Hampstead lane – she sees a monstrous creature, human-shaped but faceless, moving as though it were made of molten rock, its attention focused, with unmistakable malevolence, on her.

The transition from humorous realism to nightmarish fantasy is a jolt for the reader, but Spufford helps us over it by allowing Iris to be at once terrified and contemptuous. With war imminent, she has enough to worry about without being plagued by weird hauntings. This isn’t the kind of story she wants to be in. Soon, though, she is deep into a narrative in which the sublime – angels manifesting themselves as clouds of electrically charged particles, or blue-skinned naked giants, or animated house-high statues – coexists with the ridiculous. Geoff’s father is a doddery crackpot who has filled his house with hoarded junk, but he is also the custodian of ancient hermetic knowledge capable of conjuring spirits, and of reversing time.

Iris is a material girl, who loves her sleek art deco-style flat. She finds all this hocus pocus as aesthetically displeasing as it is threatening. When an angel appears to her in the glorious six-winged form described by the prophet Isaiah, she scoffs: “You look like an exploded budgie.” Geoff, though, is fascinated. His day job at the BBC is that of creating illusions and transmitting visions. When he rebukes the angel Raphael for referring to “luminiferous aether”, something whose existence was disproved in 1870, the visitor apologises for his word choice. Perhaps Geoff would prefer to talk about “quantum tunnelling”? Scientist and celestial being, they speak the same language.

A high-concept story, then, but one carried forward by action. We hurtle from a devastating air raid to clandestine dealing in Iris’s stockbroking office, to an animate iron dragon trying to bite her limbs off. But Spufford knows how to vary the tempo in his storytelling. There are sci-fi visions here, as Iris traverses glass bridges in the sky with German bombers flying above and below her. And there are equally memorable passages powered by their very ordinariness. Iris, volunteering as a fire watcher, is briefed by Mr Seaton – an elderly widower, prosy, a bit of a fusspot: You grip the sand bucket like this. You sweep the still-smouldering incendiary bomb over the parapet with this broom. Good idea to dunk it in water first. This is where you can brew up your tea… His is a humdrum, straightforward heroism all the more moving for the contrast between its quietness and the flashy violence of technological warfare, and the convolutions of supernatural fantasy.

Each of Spufford’s books is strikingly different from its predecessors. He has written brilliantly unconventional nonfiction and has genre-hopped through fiction. In Nonesuch he revisits several of his past preoccupations: the nexus between money and power (Golden Hill), the chance events that cancel out individual lives (Light Perpetual) or alter the destinies of entire communities (Cahokia Jazz). His form here is one usually associated with children’s literature. Spufford has previously paid tribute to CS Lewis’s Narnia; Nonesuch is closer in subject matter to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, albeit more adult (Iris and Geoff enjoy plenty of sex) and less grownup. Where Pullman’s default mode is high seriousness, Spufford is playful. Where Pullman’s heroine Lyra is noble, Spufford’s Iris is accurately described by an irritated angel as “an impertinent baggage”.

This exuberantly inventive novel deals in solemn matters – war and love and the capriciousness of fate – but it does so with a daft and delightful twinkle. It ends with the words “to be continued”. I look forward to more.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford is published by Faber (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £18. Delivery charges may apply

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