[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Early in Nonesuch,[.small-caps] Francis Spufford offers a description of the London sky:[.article__paragraph--cap]

[As Iris] stepped out into the evening on the Charing Cross Road, her senses busy, more was happening around her than her eyes could see or her ears hear. Above the billboards and the rooftops where the sunlight was ripening to orange gold, the air over London quivered, and not just with heat.

What follows is virtuosic scene-setting, scanning the radio and television signals flying across “the sixteen skies of Europe” on the eve of the Second World War. Even as it describes these historical facts, the language artfully suggests presences beyond the natural.

Nonesuch is, to begin with, superb historical fiction, a portrait of one woman’s life in London during the Blitz. Iris Hawkins is a secretary at a stockbroker’s office, determined to get rich and prone to casual affairs with superficially attractive men. As she navigates class distinctions, financial instability, physical danger, and – most terrifying of all – falling in love, she emerges as a fully developed and endearing heroine. Through Iris, we experience the tumultuous months before the War, the horrific suspense of the rising conflict abroad, and the mingled thrill and terror when bombs begin to fall.

But history, in Spufford’s novels, usually comes with a twist – and here, that twist takes an angelic form. Like radio and television signals, immaterial spirits pervade the air, undetectable to the eye. These are not, as one character notes, sentimental Victorian angels. They are the many-winged, many-eyed terrors of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Saint John. When a fling brings Iris into contact with one of these invisible presences, she finds herself the unwilling principal of a supernatural struggle across time to stop a fascist agent from rewriting the past in favor of the Nazis.

At the heart of Nonesuch is the human desperation for control. Iris yearns for wealth as a way to control the people around her. She pursues no-strings-attached liaisons because they allow her to maintain command over her pleasures, her emotions, and her future. But as she falls in love with the ferociously earnest engineer Geoff Hale, she must loosen her grasp on the world, exchanging control for a more perilous prize: human connection. Her foil is fascist operative Lady Lalage Cunningham, who worships power – the power of aristocrats over the “lesser orders,” of the broadcaster over a mass audience, of the magician over enslaved spirits. Readers of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi or C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew will recognize the conjunction of magic and technology, and the opposition between coercion and wonder at play here.

But these fascinating intertexts should not distract us from the most important fact: Nonesuch is a great novel. In enchanting prose, Spufford crafts an immersive narrative, almost impossible to put down. The story ends on a cliffhanger – and so much the better, because it means we can expect another book in Iris’s company.

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