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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well, NPR has a podcast that does that too. NPR News Now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day with the latest, most important headlines in episodes that are clear, fact-based, and easy to digest. Listen to NPR News Now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.
Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, is a fan of British writer Francis Spufford's novels. So is our executive producer, Sam Brigger. And they aren't alone. Spufford Books have won the Costa Book Award, the Ondaatje Prize, and have been long listed for the Booker Prize. Sam read Spufford's new novel called None Such, and liked that one too.
Here's the interview Sam just recorded with Francis Spufford. Two of my most enjoyable reading experiences over the last 10 years were reading Cahokia Jazz, a 1920s noir crime novel set in an alternate American history where a sovereign majority indigenous nation-state thrives in the middle of the United States, and Golden Hill, a novel set in 18th century New York.
If I had to make a list of my top five great American novels, Golden Hill would be high on that list, despite the fact that it takes place before the country was founded and its author is a Brit. Now that author, my guest Francis Spufford, has written another incredibly entertaining book. It's called None Such.
It takes place in London during the war as a city must try to survive the Blitz, the eight-month bombing campaign led by the Nazis that killed over 40,000 British. Iris Hawkins, a young independent woman, is trying to survive the nightly attacks while pushing against society's constraints that would keep her in a secretarial pool until she was safely married off.
Her ambitions seek something much more expansive. While her independent side fights against it, she finds herself falling in love with Jeff, a young man working in an even younger broadcast format, television. Oh, and did I mention she has to fight off magic time-traveling fascists who want to travel in the past and kill Winston Churchill? Yes, that's there too.
And a magical land called Nonesuch and Angels and a lot more. Francis Buffer got to novel writing on the late side, in his 50s, after writing nonfiction.
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Chapter 2: What is the premise of Francis Spufford's novel 'Nonesuch'?
He's also written Light Perpetual, a novel that imagines the lives of five real-life people if they had not died as children in the Blitz, and an unauthorized book in the Narnia series, which were officially written by C.S. Lewis.
He also wrote a memoir called The Child That Books Built, about his early escape into reading, and Unapologetic, Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Francis Buffard, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. So I'm clearly not British, but I understand to some degree the foundational importance of the Blitz on modern British identity.
But can you illuminate just how important that history is, especially for Londoners? It's the epic moment in the history of London as a city.
It comes in a heavily mythicised form with politicians invoking something called the blitz spirit over the decades since, which is a kind of rather misleading image of total social consensus and kind of spontaneous mass virtue, which of course is very flattering if you're British. It's nice to think that
Amidst the complications and bits of shame and horror in our history, especially the imperial side of it, there should be one moment where we did the right thing. And I'm not cynical about this myself. I wonder at the series of accidents required for a white supremacist empire to teeter onto the side of the angels and to decide to oppose fascism. But we actually did
It's also a history that fewer and fewer people still alive today live through. Do you feel that it's shrinking in the minds of people there? Yes and no. The odd thing is that when I was born in 1964, so 19 years after the end of the Second World War, and it had happened in my parents' childhood and it was therefore by definition emotionally very remote for me as a child.
But that gap has seemed less significant as time has gone on. And as the veterans first of the First World War and then of the Second World War start to die in Britain perversely, There has been more and more self-conscious public commemoration of the war dead, Remembrance Sunday, which we do on the 11th of November every year.
You know, it was a kind of dying and rather faded commemoration in my childhood and my 20s and my 30s. And now it's enormous. I'd like you to read a passage about Londoners trying to get through these bombings. This is fairly early in the Blitz. It is. It's the point where people are still being as surprised as we would be to find themselves being bombed nightly.
For everyone in London, whether you lived through the night was therefore a matter of luck. The odds were long. Only one in 20,000 chances of being hit, said the papers. But still, every bomb landed somewhere. Every night, for some people, the dice roll was going wrong. Instead of the whistle and crash rising to a peak of noise and then receding as the next bomb fell safely past you...
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Chapter 3: How does Iris navigate life during the Blitz in 1940s London?
And I wanted to pick up specifically the notoriously unfair bit at the end of the last Narnia book in which the character Susan is not allowed to join in with the happy ending because, as it says, she's interested in nothing nowadays but nylons, lipsticks and invitations. Yeah. And ever since, people have been trying to find a kind of spiritual meaning for what Lewis had done there.
And maybe there is one. But there's also, I think, very clearly a kind of bachelor incomprehension or even distaste for the lives of young women. So I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy set then, which very deliberately had – As its protagonist finding her way into wonder, somebody who is really strongly in favour of nylons, lipsticks and invitations and everything they represent.
Although my protagonist Iris would prefer silk if she can get her hands on it. In your book, and this is your phrase, magical time-traveling fascists, want to go back in time and murder Winston Churchill before he shores up Britain's will to fight the Nazis. Iris even walks by this house in Chelsea where she lives.
Chapter 4: What themes of sexism and independence are explored through Iris's character?
It's the headquarters of the British fascists, which was actually a place. Can you talk a bit about the sympathies that the upper class of Britain had for the Nazis during that time?
There was a distinct kind of vein of pro-fascist sentiment in the British upper classes, partly because, as in other bits of Europe, Germany, Italy, the Great Depression had shook people's faith that kind of liberal democracy could do the business and cure the ills of the present day. But also because they liked order and hierarchy and they could see those things disappearing in
in the modern world. Again, one of the strange things to get your head around is that for the first nine months of the Second World War, British fascists were operating completely unimpeded. They were running candidates in special elections on a peace platform.
They thought the war was a terrible misunderstanding of Hitler's good intentions and that it was probably caused by evil Jewish plutocrats, of course. And they were there offering... what seemed to them and to defeated and disheartened people beyond the actual fascist organization as the future, the inevitable thing that would happen when Europe went fascist.
And I give Iris a sense of visceral horror, which I think is completely deserved, watching these people with their big sign saying fascism is practical patriotism and fascism for king and empire and peace now. active at the very moment where a fascist army are kind of rolling westwards and look very much as if they're going to conquer Britain too. It is local evil to go with global evil.
You know, this is a time of rising authoritarianism in many countries. Was that on your mind when you were writing None Such? Yes, I did become very aware the moment of this book occurred.
aligns itself, overlaps with the moment we're having now and that the dangers of that time are kind of a warning about the dangers of this time and that there should be something really sobering about what a close thing it was that the world...
did in the end decide to resist fascism, that there was just the right balance of opinion in Britain to just push it over to going, actually, stuff the British Empire. This is too important. We'll bankrupt ourselves to fight fascism. Let's talk about your hero Iris Hawkins. Like other female characters in your books, Iris is coming up against the social constraints for the women of her time.
And at this period, working women like her are relegated to the secretarial pools of London brokerages, even though she wants to be like a player in the world of finance.
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Chapter 5: How do magical, time-traveling fascists fit into the story?
She also enjoys casual sex, but has to be careful not to have that tarnish her reputation. There's an obvious double standard there. In order to rent an apartment, she has to pretend to be married to a soldier serving abroad because no one will rent to a, quote, tart. She's a really great character.
You dedicated Nonesuch to your grandmother, Nancy, and under the dedication you wrote, quote, not entirely a good girl. And in your afterward, you said that like Iris— She, quote, came from Watford and she was, as Iris would say, of an adventurous disposition. But Iris isn't her, unquote. Of course, you are pointing out the connections between Iris and your grandmother.
We didn't need to know any of those. So how was she an inspiration for Iris? My intentions here are celebratory. And she is safely dead. She died at 99 and a half 15 years ago. There was a particular moment. My grandmother was a resilient person who was on the whole hopeless at storytelling about her life. So you only ever got very small glimpses of her. of what she had done in the past.
And there was a moment at the beginning of this century when she was in her vigorous early 90s when she and I went to the oldest Indian restaurant in England. And we sat down, she looked around and she said, I was last here in about 1935. It hasn't changed much.
And then she said, with no prompting at all, I always preferred going out with married men because they always spent so much more money on you. And then she clammed up instantly. This door opened on the other side of it, this clearly completely unregretted kind of good time she'd had being a bad girl. And then it slammed shut again. And I could not get her to talk any more about it.
She just smiled and looked mysterious. So Iris is in some ways... my attempt to imagine my way into that world. But I didn't have much to go on. So Iris is a creation, not a copy. Were you able to discover anything more about your grandmother's adventures? Hers happened in the early 30s. She was busy being a parent, having run off with Mr. Spufford, who all her brothers hated.
But later on, she worked for a medical charity, which brought distinguished and rather attractive doctors from all over the world. And at her funeral, my father, who loved his mother and was very proud of her, had to be prevented from – reading aloud a list of the distinguished lovers that he deduced she had. I know, I know. But you know, it was a funeral, maybe the mood would have been wrong.
So I didn't have much to go on. And I am aware of the difficulties of doing this as a male writer. And it seems to me that the way to cross the distance between me and someone like Iris is to really commit to her viewpoint. So the book never
ever lets you know what she looks like for example so she is never the object of the book's attention she is always the subject the person who is looking at the world and and liking what she sees there are a number of detailed descriptions of the male bodies she looks at but none of her own
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