TERRY GROSS, HOST:
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 Briger. 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 "Nonesuch" and like that one, too. Here's the interview Sam just recorded with Francis Spufford.
SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: 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 "Nonesuch." 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 push against society's constraints that would keep her in a secretarial pool until she was safely married off. Her ambition seek something much more expansive. While her independent side fights against it, she finds herself falling in love with Jeff (ph), a young man working in an even younger broadcast format, television. Oh, 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 and called Nonesuch and angels, and a lot more.
Francis Spufford got to novel writing on the ate side in his 50s after writing nonfiction. 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 Spufford, welcome to FRESH AIR.
FRANCIS SPUFFORD: Thank you for having me.
BRIGER: 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?
SPUFFORD: It's the epic moment in the history of London as a city. It comes in a heavily mythicized 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.
BRIGER: It's also a history that fewer and fewer people still alive today lived through. Do you feel that it's shrinking in the minds of people there?
SPUFFORD: Yes and no. The odd thing is that - and 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 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 11 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.
BRIGER: I'd like you to read a passage about Londoners trying to get through these bombings. This is fairly early in the blitz?
SPUFFORD: It is. It's the point where people are still being as surprised as we would be to find themselves being bombed nightly.
(Reading) For everyone in London, whether you lived through the night was therefore a matter of luck. The odds were long, only 1 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, there'd be a descending whistle that only grew louder and then some unimaginable instant of violence and light and pain and dissolution.
Each bomb might be that one. You couldn't know it wasn't till it hadn't fallen on you. And then when you had survived another night of fat, you tidied yourself up, put on your work clothes and stepped out. The hot, bright summer had become a hot, bright Indian summer, shorter days and cooler nights, but still a blaze of clear blue overhead. She walked up the King's Road to the Tube, past ruins still smoldering and holes in the ground where repair crews were already at work on mangled pipes. And she felt the light revving up the engine of her organism. Beat, heart; breathe, lungs; hunger, stomach; now, now, now, said her body. There was only a faint ache in her eyes looking at the bright and damaged world - an ache so permanent that after a while, she started to think of it as the world itself aching faintly all the time.
BRIGER: Thank you for reading that. I just really love the contrast between the terror of the night and then, if you survive, the need to get up and just get about the day.
SPUFFORD: That, I think, is one of the hardest things for us to imagine successfully, though, it's, you know, probably easier if you're living in Tehran or Beirut at the moment. The idea that rather than some terrifying crisis after which there'd be probably PTSD and months of recovery and maybe some helpful 21st century therapy, you just go to work, and you make your way over the broken glass, discover if your office is still standing - if it is, you work 9-5. And then you leave hastily before it can get dark and the bombers can come back, eat something and then make for the cupboard under the stairs or the air raid shelter in your garden or the basement of a department store or wherever it is that you're doing your best to shelter and then do it again and again and again for 60 plus nights in a row. And I think that repetition and the way it changed people is one of the things that is most remote from us.
BRIGER: You've professed your love for the C.S. Lewis "Narnia" books, and in those books, the children discover the land of Narnia because they're sent out of London in the country for safety during the war. Iris, your hero, will discover Nonesuch, this fantasy land, because of the war, too. Did you think of your book, "Nonesuch," as in conversation with the "Narnia" books?
SPUFFORD: Exactly that. I was wanting to have a conversation with Lewis and with the other members of the Inklings, his writing circle, who through the period of the war, were writing these cosmic thrillers, motivated by, I think, a very similar sense that there was something unearthly about the ruined city, a way in which it seemed quite natural for people to be pushed to the familiar edges of their experience and then beyond it into something unearthly or magical. But also, I had a specific loving argument I wanted to have with C. S. Lewis because I am a devotee of the "Narnia" books. I have been since I was a child. But because I love him, I'm allowed to be annoyed with him, as well. 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. 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 was really strongly in favor of nylons, lipsticks and invitations and everything they represent. Although my protagonist, Iris, would prefer silk if she can get her hands on it.
BRIGER: 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. 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?
SPUFFORD: 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 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 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 signs 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.
BRIGER: You know, this is a time of rising authoritarianism in many countries. Was that on your mind when you were writing "Nonesuch"?
SPUFFORD: Yes, I did become very aware the moment of this book aligns itself, overlaps with the moment we're having now and that the dangers of that time are 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.
BRIGER: If you're just joining us, my guest is Francis Spufford whose new book is "Nonesuch." More after short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF WES MONTGOMERY'S "4 ON 6 - LIVE PARIS 65")
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. My guest is Francis Spufford, whose new book is "Nonesuch." He's also written the books "Cahokia Jazz" and "Golden Hill," among many others.
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. 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?
SPUFFORD: My intentions here are celebratory, and she is safely dead. She died at 99 1/2 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 what she had done in the past. 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 anymore 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.
BRIGER: Were you able to discover anything more about your grandmother's adventures?
SPUFFORD: 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.
BRIGER: Oh, that's too bad.
SPUFFORD: She was - 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's looking at the world and liking what she sees. There are a number of detailed descriptions of the male bodies she looks at but none of her own. And I wanted somebody who genuinely had the freedom to be unlikable at times and complicated and genuinely self-centered. Not a secretly kindhearted person merely posing as assertive, but somebody who was determined enough to get what they want that they could be quite manipulative.
BRIGER: So you have some sex scenes in your book, and as I said, Iris likes sex but is afraid of intimacy. And when, despite herself, that intimacy grows between her and Geoff, those sex scenes, like, have a different weight to them. Can you talk about that?
SPUFFORD: I think she discovers that you can be a lot more naked than just taking your clothes off if the emotional stakes are higher and if you are constantly aware that the other person is as real as you are. She and Geoff are in bed together within the first 30 pages of the book because she fancies him and it's a one-night stand. She had no intention of it ever resuming. When it does resume, it's very different indeed, and she is terrified to begin with because sex with that kind of depth of unprotected - and I'm not talking about contraception - but unprotected mutual knowledge is a very different thing. It has the potential to transform. It has the potential to wound. It has as much danger as bliss in it. But she is, although not an entirely nice person, definitely a brave one. So she is up for the danger, and she is up for the chance of being hopelessly changed by the unscheduled experience of love.
BRIGER: Since your book takes place in England, class is an issue. And Iris is middle class, and her radar is highly attuned to class distinction. In an early scene, she introduces herself to some people that she's very aware are of an upper class than her. And I'm just going to read this.
(Reading) Hello, said Iris, Iris Hawkins, and heard Watford unmistakably in her own vowels, as if she had whole avenues of prosperous-but-not-posh suburbia tucked away in there and the girls grammar school and the future she hadn't wanted, in which a good girl could hope for a nice young man with prospects in the building trade or a solicitor's office. That world, lost but refusing to be gone, inexorably following her around and speaking out of her mouth.
So can you tell us a little bit more about what it means in this time to have a Watford accent?
SPUFFORD: Watford is part of the ring of outer suburbs around London. It doesn't have a especially stigmatizing accent. She's not poor. She's not working class. She's prosperous suburban lower middle class. These are distinctions that mean something in England. And she doesn't sound classy until she remakes herself. By the end, she is indistinguishable from the people she wishes to impress.
BRIGER: Do regional accents still exist to the degree that they did back then, and do they still signify in such a strong way?
SPUFFORD: They've got homogenized much more. There are still very strongly marked regional accents from other big cities, and there are identifiable country accents, which you could pick out the way that a voice from the Deep South can be picked out. But these are no longer all straightforwardly subordinate accents to a posh BBC voice like the one I am speaking to you in now because that's how I learned to speak at school in the 1960s and '70s.
The BBC itself has spent 20 or 30 years very deliberately recruiting those accents and adding them to what the official voice of British radio and television sound like. So you no longer feel the way that Iris would have done in 1939 to '40 - that the whole of broadcasting (impersonating British accent) is conducted by people who sound rather like this. And if you sound rather like this, then you know that it's not your voice which is coming out of the bloody radio. So that has changed. We are a more socially mobile society than we used to, and our kind of social signifiers have slipped and switched around, as well.
BRIGER: Our guest is author Francis Spufford. His newest book is "Nonesuch." We'll be back after a short break. I'm Sam Briger, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRANFORD MARSALIS QUARTET'S "CAROLINA SHOUT")
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Sam Briger. My guest today is British author Francis Spufford. His new book is called "Nonesuch." He's also written "Golden Hill" and "Cahokia Jazz."
So, Francis, your book "Cahokia Jazz" imagines a United States where the Indigenous population was not decimated by disease carried across the Atlantic by Europeans. So along the east of the Mississippi, there's this self-governed Indigenous nation state called Cahokia. Why did you choose that area of the United States as a location for the city?
SPUFFORD: Because there is the real archaeological site of Cahokia just opposite St. Louis on the eastern bank of the river, which is one of the world's wonders, and it astonishes me that not as many Americans as you'd think know about this thing. It's got the largest pyramid north of the Maya ruins of Central America in it. It was a city possibly bigger than London or Paris in the 12th century, deserted again later for reasons that archaeologists are busily arguing about. And I think this is one of those things where there's an advantage of being an outsider. I am not a Native American, and I'm not a white American either or an African American. I am looking, I hope fondly and intelligently, from way over here. And I wanted to kind of question the strange obviousness that is granted to the absence of big populations of Native Americans in U.S. history.
If you look at the history of any particular state, they make a brief appearance in, you know, kind of 1790, 1820, 1835, and as you go westward, it gets a bit later. There is an Indian war, and then they're effectively gone from the history of what follows. And I thought, you know, what if they weren't gone? What if the United States, like Mexico, was necessarily a country which was a kind of much more active hybridization of Native American and European? What if it was an unavoidable presence? And the way to do it was in alternative history because it's great for world building, and the way to do the alternative history, because it's great for that, is as a crime novel because a detective - they can - he can go and ask questions of anybody - is a fabulous way to explore a world.
BRIGER: Right. The main character, Joe, is a policeman, but he's also excellent jazz pianist, and he can't decide if he should give up police work to dedicate his life to jazz. Was there a particular pianist from the time that you based what you thought his playing would be like on?
SPUFFORD: He's a mixture of Jelly Roll Morton and James P. Johnson, who wrote "The Charleston." It's a great time for jazz. Probably I'm showing my prejudices here, but it's late enough that you've got fabulous soloists and individual vision coming into it, and it's still early enough that you can dance to almost all of it. And jazz is the great American fusion music. It's the thing where the - as W.E.B. Du Bois says - the weight and tragedy of African American history is converted as a kind of gift of lightness and joy to the rest of American history. And I wanted Joe Barrow, my detective, to be a thwarted jazz pianist because I wanted him to be expressing the difficulty and the joys of the great American mixture.
BRIGER: So earlier we talked about writing sex scenes, and I found that there are a lot of similarities between bad writing about sex and bad writing about characters playing music. People tend to fall into the same traps of either focusing too much on mechanics, if you will, or on the other hand, like, something so metaphoric that it's disembodied. In "Cahokia Jazz," you have a really good scene of some jazz musicians playing together. And I just wondered if you would read this. This is a scene where Joe, the policeman, has been invited up to play with his former bandmates that are led by Dolphus Henderson, a clarinetist, right?
SPUFFORD: Yeah.
BRIGER: And they play "Kansas City Stomp."
SPUFFORD: They do. I'll leave this as a kind of exercise for the listener, whether you think this counts as bad music like bad sex.
(Reading) The opening was a lineup of separate calls. Dee-do (ph), dee-do. Dolphus wailed, Stukely honked, he jangled and Dutch doomba-doomba'd (ph). And then all in together for the brass annunciatory blare of the tune, Willie doing the flat-footed beat of the stomp underneath, Dolphus and Stukely jousting, he and Dutch mainly rhythm at this point. But the way the stomp worked for a band was chorus and then solo, chorus and then solo for each of the players in turn as many times as you liked. Through the chorus and Dolphus nodded him in first, the whole thing back in his two hands, taking the tune bold but plain this first time around, with nothing but the stomp beat underneath from Willie till Dolphus came back in over the top with a noodling moan and they all restated the tune together. Then Dolphus himself, of course, making the clarinet sob and sing and almost squeak. And then Stukely, neck inflated like a bullfrog, squeezing out sweet and golden statements from the cornet. Then Dutch, thunderous, plucking and slapping. And around again, by common consent a little faster this time.
BRIGER: So I just like that because it's not taking itself too seriously. There's, like, a joyousness of the way you're describing it. There's squeaks and slaps and honks. I don't know. Did you find that hard to write?
SPUFFORD: Yes, because I don't play any of those musical instruments. I'm a listener, not a musician, and I am the least musical member of an extended family. So to imagine myself inside the - kind of the good communication of a jazz band working in sync, I had to borrow the expertise of my wife and my brothers-in-law and my mother-in-law and listen very, very carefully and say, does this sound right? - to them.
BRIGER: Well, we need to take a short break here. Our guest is author Francis Spufford. His newest book is "Nonesuch." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAMES P. JOHNSON'S "YOU'VE GOT TO BE MODERNISTIC")
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. My guest is Francis Spufford, whose new book is "Nonesuch."
Francis, you grew up in a university town. Both of your parents were historians, and I think both taught at the University of Kiel.
SPUFFORD: Yep.
BRIGER: You had a younger sister who was born with a genetic disorder - cystinosis - that she died from at the age of 22. And it sounds like your parents, unsurprisingly, were very occupied in your childhood with her care and really trying to save her. But as her sibling, I'm guessing you were perhaps benignly neglected, understandably so.
SPUFFORD: I wouldn't put it quite like that. They tried their damndest. They were very aware of exactly the danger of me being benignly neglected. But it had the perverse consequence that I think I spent my childhood feeling I needed to reassure them that I was fine, which was emotionally laborious in itself. So I was very glad to head off into books as...
BRIGER: Right.
SPUFFORD: ...A series of, you know, doors out from emotional intensity.
BRIGER: Right. You said that reading was your escape. You actually have a memoir called "The Child That Books Built," and you especially enjoyed fantasy by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. So what was your reading behavior like? Were you the kind of reader that would read over everything else, like doing your schoolwork, seeing friends, eating?
SPUFFORD: Yeah, and remained so for some time, although the existence of the iPhone has kind of sabotaged...
BRIGER: Oh, no.
SPUFFORD: ...That kind of deep immersion now. I was the kind of reader as a child where people had to shout in my ears when it was mealtime to get me to come back and pay attention to the soundtrack of the real world. Very deep immersion with something, I think, a bit driven about it. I'm not sorry that I've lost the capacity to go that far away, though I wish I could swim in whole reservoirs of novels rather than coming up to check my email every half an hour or so.
BRIGER: In that memoir, you write...
(Reading) Still, when I reach for a book, I am reaching for an equilibrium. I am reading to banish pity and brittle bones. I am reading to evade guilt and avoid consequences.
That made me think of your sister, and I was wondering if you feel survivor's guilt over her death. Or even when she was living, did you feel some guilt because of your healthiness?
SPUFFORD: Yes, I did, is the short answer. The way I dealt with it was to behave as if it was a kind of law of the universe that I was fine, so I didn't let myself think it's not fair that I should live and she shouldn't. But at the same time, I felt overwhelmed by the scale of what would have been the right kind of order of compassion. So I think I showed less of it than I should have done, and, yeah, there's guilt in that now. And I didn't know her as well as I could have because I was so aware of her as a kind of potentially pitiable person, whereas in fact, she was a funny and rather peppery and witty person, as described by other people. And I kind of missed that 'cause I was in Narnia and because I was going, no, no, I can't look. It's too awful. I miss her very much. I wish now, at 61, I had a 58-year-old sister who had passed through all of these decades with me and who I could compare notes with, but I don't. Now, I haven't seen her for - oh, Lord, it's 35 years now. But I think of her often.
BRIGER: We haven't spoken about your novel "Light Perpetual," but that imagines what would have been the lives of five children who were actually killed by a bomb during the Blitz. And I was wondering if, in that book, although she's not a character, you know, whether you were also imagining what your sister's life would have been like if she had lived.
SPUFFORD: In an indirect way, yes. Absolutely. Someone can be a presence without being a character. And once the shock of somebody dying young is over, I think the sorrow of it settles in around all of the things that they're then missing and all of the stages of life that they don't get to go through. There were some reviews of "Light Perpetual," you know, saying, you know, the children who die in the first chapter and then get given a kind of ambiguous literary resurrection - people were complaining that they didn't have remarkable lives, and they grew old and died anyway. And I thought, yes, but that's the prize. What you want is to grow old and die anyway.
Going back to what I said in the memoir about reading to banish pity, that changes. And I don't read to banish pity anymore, and I don't write to banish pity either. I write to try and find concrete and fully felt ways to give pity a place to live and endure. In some ways, I suppose I'm trying to make up for looking away in those early years. I'm trying to look straight at these days.
BRIGER: You have another nonfiction book called "Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense," which to me is a funny subtitle because it sounds like it's apologizing a little bit there already. But anyway, this is a somewhat salty - I don't know if you'd like the word - defense of your Christianity. But you said as a young man, you were an atheist, even though your wife became a reverend, but that you did something bad in your marriage. You don't get into it. We don't need to know what it was. But you and your wife were miserable. And one morning, you went to a cafe and heard Mozart's "Clarinet Concerto," the adagio movement, and you were transformed. This was the moment of the rebirth of your faith. Let's hear a little bit of that movement. And this is a version from the Berlin Philharmonic with the clarinetist Sabine Meyer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SABINE MEYER, BERLIN PHILHARMONIC & CLAUDIA ABBADO'S "CLARINET CONCERTO IN A MAJOR, K. 622: II. ADAGIO")
BRIGER: That was the "Clarinet Concerto" - the music that our guest, Francis Spufford, heard that converted him to Christianity.
And, you know, that's a lovely piece of music. To my ears, it's not particularly sacred. So how do you get from that music to becoming a believer?
SPUFFORD: Well, I'm going to steal some words here from the novelist Richard Powers, who described that movement as what mercy would sound like. And although I didn't get to that kind of way of describing it for a long time after, that's what it felt like in the moment. It felt like an announcement of a completely unillusioned kind. No self-deception, no cheery, misleading optimism. Something that all of the kind of possible darknesses and mess of the human condition acknowledged. And yet, it said - and yet there is also this to consider as well. There is this undestroyed, merciful sound rising up out of the confusions of the world. And you are, in fact, deceiving yourself more, it said to me, if you don't reckon for the existence of this as well. I wouldn't say that, you know, three minutes of Mozart and I was a Christian again.
BRIGER: (Laughter) OK.
SPUFFORD: But on the other hand, it was what started a process in which I thought, a world with mercy in it - where would I go and look for some more of that? At what address? And gradually got from there to a sense that the Christian story was the richest and deepest and, again, least illusioned story of human beings that I could find and had the best fit with my experience.
BRIGER: Where are you on the scale of belief in the tenets of Christianity?
SPUFFORD: I'm - and I don't always manage it, but I'm a pretty solid kind of Creedal Christian. I believe in the resurrection. I believe in miracles. I believe in the strangeness and convincingness of what traditional Christianity has got at its heart. I'm a rather liberal Christian in American terms. But nevertheless, that's what there is there to be believed, and that's what I try my best to believe.
BRIGER: It's probably helpful to have your wife be a reverend, to...
SPUFFORD: It is. And I - people ask me who my favorite theologian is, and I only have to look across the breakfast table. She's a very, very good preacher. But she wasn't the spur for me to write that book. That book is of a particular date and time.
BRIGER: Right.
SPUFFORD: You called it salty, by - which is a nice way of saying it's got a lot of swearing in it.
BRIGER: Yes, it does.
SPUFFORD: And it was written in 2010, around the kind of absolute apex of the New Atheist movement, which you have to understand landed a bit differently in England than it did in the United States. In England, Christianity is very much a minority pursuit, so we do not have the sense of it as this overbearing and sometimes alarming monolith that might be forcing other people into mouthing words they don't want to say. It's not a book that tries to convince people. It's a - or convert people. It's a book that merely wants you to notice that Christian faith is this highly recognizable thing that humans do, which answers to universal human needs. And you may not think it's a good answer, but it's not just a fairy tale out of the air by which people deceive themselves. It's one of the world's answers to the big stuff.
BRIGER: Well, Francis Spufford, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today.
SPUFFORD: Thank you for having me.
GROSS: Francis Spufford's new novel is called "Nonesuch." He spoke with our executive producer Sam Briger. After we take a short break, TV critic David Bianculli will review the new movie sequel to the TV series "Peaky Blinders." This is FRESH AIR.
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