Adventures down Counter-Factual Rabbit Holes—Mark Meynell
- Mark Meynell
- Oct 1
- 9 min read
On Francis Spufford's Fiction
by Mark Meynell
What Christopher Nolan is to filmmaking, Francis Spufford is to literary fiction. A bit of a stretch, perhaps? After all, filmmaking depends on hordes of collaborators, while writing is a solitary art; we’re clearly not comparing like with like. But hear me out.
Nolan is hailed for a mastery of the high-concept cinematic spectacle that most of the time keeps on the right side of telling a human story. The scale may be minute (Memento, 2000: viewed through the eyes of an amnesiac), or an entire theatre of war (Dunkirk, 2017), or the whole of time and space (Interstellar, 2014). The films’ settings range from the dystopian (the Gotham of his Batman Trilogy, 2005-12) to Victorian gothic (The Prestige, 2006), or the fantasies of the human imagination (Inception, 2010). Now that his take on Homer’s Odyssey is in the works, he is also immersed in deep mythological time. It is quite the genre-bursting portfolio.
What of Francis Spufford? For many years, he contented himself to niche but deeply researched nonfiction. His subjects included the British obsession with the Antarctic before Scott’s fatal expedition (I May Be Some Time, 1996); rereading the children’s books he once loved (The Child That Books Built, 2002); accounts of British boffins (Backroom Boys, 2003); not to mention his swashbuckling riposte to New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (Unapologetic, 2012)! They are fascinating and reliably engaging books, but perhaps too niche for mass-market interest. However, Spufford has now turned to fiction, writing three wonderful novels (four if you include, Red Plenty, his ingenious if bizarre collection of short stories set in the USSR’s planned economy). They are gripping, full of twists and rich characters, but most surprisingly (considering the contemporary state of European culture), they have deep (if usually concealed) theological foundations. For several years, I’ve been chewing on what makes these books both so effective and affecting. What’s in the secret sauce?
Big Ideas But Greater Stories
It would be perfectly possible to plunge straight into a bullet list of the grand ideas at the heart of each of these three novels, but that would be as dull as a textbook and betray their wonder. Any good story requires intriguing characters to hook our curiosity. But that is never enough in itself. Why would we ever want to spend time in their company unless they inspire fascination and perhaps even love, even when they do not deserve our approval? They have to be people we want to know better. If big ideas eclipse these characters, the story will inevitably fail. That is perhaps the problem with one or two of Nolan’s films (like Tenet, 2020, perhaps). Spufford clearly understands this and while his theoretical underpinnings are rich and weighty, the novels never buckle. In Golden Hill, Mr. Smith, an enigmatic traveler, arrives in 1746 in colonial New York, a city still loyal to the king, George II. He carries with him a bill of £1000. Of course, at the time, verification of such a bill would take weeks because of the time required for the Atlantic crossing to London and back again. Nevertheless, a businessman decides to honor the bill despite Mr. Smith’s reluctance to reveal his mission. Of course, this sets up a nice narrative device to create both a framework and jeopardy. Is that bill fraudulent or not? What is Mr. Smith’s plan? And is that even his real name? We’re hooked immediately. But we’re sustained by all kinds of (often laugh-out-loud funny) adventures, in keeping with the style of 18th century novels like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. In fact, one reviewer on BBC Radio 4 was so enraptured with its style and language that he said Golden Hill was “the best eighteenth century novel written since the eighteenth century”! But don’t let that put you off. It’s remarkably readable, witty and fun.
In Light Perpetual, it’s no mystery visitor that we encounter but five people who never existed. Spufford describes how he was walking to work (he is Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London) and spotted a plaque commemorating the 168 killed when a V-2 bomb fell on a South London Woolworths. Fifteen were under the age of eleven. So he imagines the lives of five primary school classmates had they lived over the next six decades. Spufford avoids the trap of state-of-the-nation or eyewitnesses-to-history narratives through an unswerving focus on these individuals rather than losing sight of them in a string of Big Events. History is the background pulse, while Spufford’s story is constantly poignant and deeply human.
These are individuals who were never going to make historical waves or impact wider society; instead, they are more likely to be those buffeted by the turbulence of social change. One is a newspaper typesetter who finds his entire profession devoured by automation and digitalization. One battles for years with mental illness without professional help and self-medicates in destructive ways, while another copes with a husband in prison for a brutality that results from deep internal pain. The interactions and crises are often heartbreaking. But the deeper tragedies come from those who never seem to grow or learn as they age. Those that do are the characters who gain degrees of acceptance, if not actual contentment. It is the very ordinariness of this cohort of people as they battle through life that makes them so special. It is a remarkable creation.
Immersed in Counterfactual Invention
The inspiration behind Light Perpetual is an instance of the classic ‘“What if?” question, an exploration of intriguing might-have-beens. What would the lives, and indeed the world, have been like if those 268 had lived? Of course, it could be said that all fiction expresses this question by creating counterfactual narratives. The setting might be recognizable in every conceivable way (apart from the invention of characters, perhaps); it might inhabit the fantastical or alien realms of speculative fiction or could delve back into a past that we thought we knew but actually only in part (if at all).
Spufford appears to relish the exploration, and so we thrill at the chance to eavesdrop on Mr. Smith’s escapades in colonial, royalist Manhattan. But what if the closer past is fundamentally altered by its own counterfactual. This is the wonder behind Cahokia Jazz.
What if the Columbian Exchange had not taken place in quite the same way? You know, the way Europeans visited the Americas and offered the inhabitants their military might, enslavement and infectious diseases in trade for their gold and crops. Spufford asks what might have happened in North America if a substantial proportion of the indigenous population survived smallpox. In the early 20th century, the US does look unsettlingly but plausibly different. Cahokia is where modern St. Louis sits, in a majority-native state roughly equivalent to Missouri. The book’s coup de théâtre is to place within it a sparkling 1920s whodunnit with all the hallmarks of noir classics: grizzled, chalk-and-cheese detective partners, mob bosses and jazz speakeasies, femme fatales and murky conspiracies. What’s not to love? But yet again, the grand concept never eclipses the human. Joe Barrow is a mixed-race detective coworking a racially charged case with potentially devastating repercussions. We stalk his every move and smart from every left hook. But at every turn, he encounters a cast of fascinating but utterly credible Cahokians. While their world is strange enough, the wiles of the venal, avaricious, or fearful are sufficiently recognizable to make this a story of compelling relevance.
Whimsy and the Joy of Another’s Imaginative Powers
There is more good news, though. Fascinating scenarios and enthralling casts are tremendous virtues for any book. But when you discover that they are written with verve and panache, wit and whimsy, it’s quite the cocktail. This is an author in full command of his prose, and he can be very funny indeed. His ear for the idioms and rhythm of subcultures has perfect pitch, whether that be for the 18th century British colonial trader, the south London drug addict, or the slang-filled elisions of Depression-era cops.
Take the constant banter between Joe and his partner Phin Drummond, characterized by that classic cop coping mechanism of gallows humor. When they find a corpse in the snow, Joe is glad it’s not summer because of the stench that would have arisen. Drummond responds, “that is why the good Lord created see-gars, to block the noses of the police” (CJ, p6). The descriptions of Drummond’s physical appearance are cartoonish, nicely counterbalancing the atrocities they investigate. He has “a funny-pages face . . . lips and eyes and nose drawn on a little too big and simple for his skinny white-trash head” (CJ, p7).
Another pair of characters trade quips and banter, but this time it is for the sheer joy of it. Golden Hill’s Mr. Smith and Tabitha Lovell spar effortlessly, in gleeful echoes of Beatrice and Benedict in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. It’s fun as well as funny, and knowingly winks at the reader. For example, Tabitha mocks the book Smith is reading because it is a novel, which she claims is “Slush for small minds, sir. Pabulum for the easily pleased” (GH, p44). So perhaps she thinks we should stop reading the novel right there, then . . . The thing is, we are pleased by these novels, but they are far from slush or shallow distraction.
In fact, Spufford takes great relish in dropping narrator’s asides to his readers. Because this is the 18th century, naturally our hero must face a duel, but as with the vast majority of us, fencing’s obscure vocabulary does not exactly trip off Spufford’s tongue. So he informs us, "The truth is, that I am obliged to copy these names for sword-fighting out of a book, having no direct experience to call upon. I throw myself upon the reader’s mercy, or rather their sense of resignation” (GH, p235).
Exploring the possible lives of people cruelly snuffed out by V-2 bombs, Light Perpetual, inevitably offers less scope for humor. That doesn’t curtail every instinct for the absurd or comic, however. In the highly charged account of the Woolworths explosion that opens the book, the moment is frozen so that “the children stand like statues executed in flesh.” But how tellingly bathetic to learn at that very moment “Vern’s finger is up his nose” (LP, p5). In more mundane pleasures, there are some very enjoyable set pieces such as a primary school music class or a charismatic preacher’s sermon.
A Moral But Grace-filled Universe
To what end is all this? To entertain? Without question. To transport and empathize? Certainly. But the novels' most gratifying feature, amid modern society’s deluge of published words, is how thoughtfully and even theologically situated they are. For all the many complexities they engage, these books seem to inhabit a moral universe. It is rarely that explicit and there is no hint of the trite, platitudinous solutions that are features of the potboiler. Nevertheless, Spufford prompts us to cast sensitive eyes on the injustices and violence of a racist world (such as in Cahokia Jazz). Is there hope for genuine pluralism when violent conflict seems so endemic to American history, for example? That is the undertone of colonial New York as well, with the deep legacy of British slavery being a constant in Golden Hill. Is there hope for genuine justice? Or do the powerful pull every string to preserve their privilege? To call them out is truly prophetic.
The counterweight to justice—and one which, of course, resonates particularly for those in the Judeo-Christian tradition—is grace. And startling grace is to be found in these books too. Spufford’s characters all share the imago dei and so will never be as grotesque or irredeemable as they could be, but nor are they flawless saints. Therefore, horrific crimes need to be investigated (as Father Brown and Lord Peter Wimsey would certainly agree). But perpetrators, let alone societies, are lost indeed if there is no room for grace and forgiveness. Without spoiling too much, we soon wonder whether or not Mr. Smith might just be the vehicle for such things in Golden Hill.
What of God himself? Light Perpetual has more god-talk than the other books, in part because several characters are, or become, professing Christians. That is not the central fact of their narratives, but it is an indispensable part nonetheless. Unlike too much fiction written with scientific materialist assumptions, Spufford never gives readers the sense that the metaphysical is absent, only invisible. We are mortal and finite, but God is not. Sometimes, there are portals into his realms, such as in one of those all-too-brief moments that moved me more than I can say. Ben is the one who battled with mental illness but his life is transformed by his relationship with Marsha, a Christian believer whom we presume to be of Nigerian heritage. The book closes with Ben lying comfortably in his hospice bed as he takes his final breaths. But even after he has done so, we see him overflowing with praises:
Praise him in all the postcodes, thinks Ben.Praise him on the commuter trains: praise him upon the drum and bass. Praise him at the Ritz: praise him in the piss-stained doorways. Praise him in nail bars: praise him with beard oil . . .. . .Praise him in trouble. Praise him in joy. Let everything that has breath, give praise.The sun is overhead. The sun is shining straight down. The grass grows bright with ordinary light. Ben sees the light, and the light is very good. (LP, 318-9)
I must confess that at that point, I could not hold back the tears. Of grief. And of joy.
Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor, and teacher based in the UK, and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology, and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net.
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