Best literary fiction out now: Nonesuch by Francis Spufford, Jean by Madeleine
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford (Faber £20, 496pp)
Enjoyment is often absent when it comes to contemporary literary fiction. Spufford is on a one-man mission to put that right.
Nonesuch, his fourth novel, and set in Blitz-era London, is a sumptuous tale of a forward thinking, gifted City clerk, Iris Hawkins, who finds herself embroiled in an esoteric battle between good and evil after encountering an incorporeal, shapeshifting being outside a house in Hampstead.
As she and Geoff, a brilliant TV tech engineer (with whom she has lots of thrilling sex) are plunged into a race to avert a Nazi time-travelling plot, Spufford uses the mysterious disfigurements of bomb-eviscerated London to whip up a world that is both reassuringly familiar and intoxicatingly strange.
It’s a measure of Spufford’s inordinate skill that I adored this transporting mash-up of mysticism, adventure and Keynesian economics while finding the actual plot complete tosh.
Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan (Daunt Books £10.99, 256pp)
This slow-burn debut initially treads familiar ground. It’s the summer of 1976 and Jean, a solitary 17 year old at an English boarding school for troubled boys, has taken to meeting another boy, Tom, by the lake where they smoke weed and, inevitably, clumsily, begin to engage in other things.
Yet while Dunnigan’s coming-of-age novel remains conventional, she skilfully examines the push-pull of a violent, damaged adolescent as he becomes both steadily more disillusioned and alone and, at the same time, moves towards a form of self-acceptance and understanding.
Dunnigan is excellent on the bravado- fuelled, treacherous and furtive relationships between boys in a hermetic environment. Her carefully controlled prose rarely puts a foot wrong.
Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward (Corsair £22, 288pp)
This is an ambitious novel – the tripartite story of women living at the same time in 1970s America, but in different worlds.
Phyllis Patterson is an Illinois housewife whose personal frustrations and disappointments are thrown into sharp relief by the return from Vietnam of her son and his new mixed-race family.
Andrea Dworkin is trying to find her voice among the era’s new radicals, including Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, after fleeing an abusive marriage. And the poet and anti-war campaigner Muriel Rukeyser petitions for the jailed Korean poet Kim Chi-ha while hanging out with lots of intellectual lesbians.
The novel’s feminist underpinnings are earnestly handled – and the singular Dworkin feels more like a collection of radical slogans than a fully realised person. But the book tackles big ideas with verve while remaining alert to the multiple power dynamics shaping women’s lives.