Francis Spufford on Blitz London, archangels, and the temptation to change history.

Send us Fan MailFrancis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of permission slip for a writer: a time of exhaustion and improvisation, when ideals are tested in private, and when the fantasy of a “better” history starts to look like a dangerously tempting bargain. We also trace two companion texts that illuminate the book’s moral weather: John Crowley’s Four Freedoms, a wartime novel about ideals and compromise, and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” that unsettled poem written as Europe tipped into catastrophe.