Nonesuch
Notes
There's a part of every magical realism/urban fantasy book when they start actually getting to the magic part, and I think to myself... OK? That’s the magic? That’s what we’re doing here? I don't know how to make it seem less orthogonal, but it does always stick out as the point where we have to really accept the gear shift. It reminds me that I would never have the confidence to actually write fiction, because there’s no point in which I would say confidently Yes this is what’s happening now. I decided that this is happening and not something else, and I'm sticking to it.
Noted on May 19, 2026
Geoff’s dad saying he’s glad he found someone to practice the “Rites of Aphrodite’ with. Dead emoji.
Noted on May 19, 2026
There's a lot that's Charles Williams-coded in here, which CW fans will get right away (Lalage! old dudes that want to spank young women as part of a 'magic ceremony'!). But it's also very much in the same vein as CW's best novels: a contemporary story of fairly urbane Londoners, interrupted in their lives by the eruption of some otherworldly or magical element. It doesn't have the arcane metaphysical passages that CW has, but definitely some 'this doesn't compute with our quotidian lives' moments.
Noted on May 19, 2026
I'm obviously a Francis Spufford fan, and here's another novel that jumps to a different genre entirely. Nonesuch is maybe an 'urban fantasy' novel? Our heroine is in London at the dawn of England's entry into WWII, and there's some weird magic afoot. Honestly I loved this.
Noted on May 19, 2026
Quotes
[[ this description of a midnight Christmas service in wartime. Beautiful. ]]
All around, crammed in coats and mufflers, were denizens of the Chelsea streets. The grand ones, who by day she might have taken primarily as a challenge to her vowels: the old ladies in jewels, the aged military men with thread-veins bursting on their cheeks like poppies in a wheat crop, the platinum-rinsed younger ones who bought the clever little tins to make canapés, the men on leave for Christmas in ten different kinds of officers' uniforms, the old bohemians with shaggy hair who these days had symphony orchestras and academies of art and newspaper columns at their disposal. But also the shopkeepers, the shop assistants, the housekeepers, the cleaners, and some of their sons home for Christmas in much less flattering battle dress. (Geoff was in civvies.) And the careful nondescripts too, female and middle-aged male, from whose good clothes you could tell nothing about the places from which they were rising without trace: the chancers, in short, like herself. And a bunch of railway workers over the bridge from Battersea who had come to this midnight appointment straight from the pub.
Kinds of people not usually crowded together, but commonly marked now, if you looked closely in the candlelight, with the strains of the last months. Shadows under most of the eyes, nervous twitches widely distributed, the retired general with skin as gray and rough with fatigue as the meat porter's. The common flesh declared itself, and for once the different clothes looked more like costumes, all of them looser and worse-fitting than they had been before, picked arbitrarily off the rack and flung to the first person who caught them. Who'll be the general tonight? Who'll be the dustman? Who'll be the duchess? Who'll be the draper? Pull on your glad rags for the social game. It had such real stakes, of course, even now with random and democratic death falling from the sky. The number you drew dictated whether you saw out the raids in the basement of the Ritz or in a piss-swilled public shelter. That was why she meant to pass her life in the Ritz, if she could. But here and now, there seemed to be a kind of truce on offer, in the pews; a chance, just for a moment, to see through the game and put aside her own chameleon campaign within it and look with eyes temporarily wiped of class and status and aspiration at what the candlelight disclosed. Smiles between strangers, an awkward goodwill. A speculative suspicion, traveling from eye to eye, that there might be some other way altogether, some essential and uncostumed way, of seeing these rivalrous animals you stood among, this rivalrous animal you were yourself. Some other thing they all were, or might be, if you could but know it.Quoted on May 19, 2026