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Nonesuch: Adventures in time alteration.

 


What if Churchill had not been made Prime Minister in 1940? Removed from the field of possibilities, an alternative in Lord Halifax falls into place, and an armistice or peace is signed with Hitler. No one is the wiser that this has taken place, for time has been magically altered. All is different now.

This is the possibility that haunts Francis Spufford's latest novel and that its heroine must thwart. Iris is an unlikely candidate as saviour of Britain. She works as a secretary at a stockbroker's, is highly ambitious, wants to be rich, and she labours under an unexplained estrangement from her mother. She likes sex, has multiple male admirers, and is definitely aiming to 'marry up'', curbing her Watford vowels and having a side hustle so she can both dress well and afford to save for an investable nest egg. Yet, she must be careful; she does not want to be caught by a man who might curb her freedom and throttle her ambition. She definitely does not want to fall in love, nor, for that matter, save the world!

But with a moment of impulsiveness (over a man and a desire for oneupwomanship), she finds herself in the house of the retiring librarian of a magical order, entangled ever more deeply with his skeptically scientific son, and in a race to find the magical bridge to Nonesuch where time and eternity meet, and where time's path can be altered. Her competition in this task is a cool, contained, and distinctly haughty aristocratic woman, a member of the Order (a magical grouping) and a member of the British Union of Fascists! Her aid is Geoff, the scientist, and an intermittently useful angel!

Spufford handles the complexities of a developing relationship between an experienced woman and a neophyte man with aplomb against the background of this magical plot (or vice versa) and pulls off the trick of making his fantastic irruption feel wholly acceptable. He also proves himself a poet of London at war with vivid, evocative descriptions, including of just what it feels like to keep carrying on as the bombs fall and fatigue takes its toll.

Resonances with Charles Williams have been alluded to by reviewers - magical orders, poetic London, a tryst with evil - but the differentiator is that whereas Williams was a master of the metaphysical, Spufford's gift is in his psychological portrayals - just how do people fall in love and what labyrinths of emotion do they inhabit as they find out whether it is real or not, lasting or not - and its costliness.  

Yet they do merge in a core question about the messiness of the world - what is its value, in its freedoms, as compared to an ordered world, more comfortable possibly, but less free - and what right might we have to order its destiny in time? What are the moral limits of magic (and by extension any form of control)?

This question comes four square at the book's climax - and carries over - because the book is to be continued. It would be a spoiler to mention how this takes shape, but it is a masterly stroke of a cliffhanger!


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