THE SATURDAY MORNING BOOK REPORT
Our book this week is from an author who's first book I tried and I DNF'ed (Cahokai Jazz). He gets another chance, and a very rare grade from me.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford F
Incomplete.
The last line of this book is "To be continued" with a classic cliffhanger ending. There is no indication anywhere on the book that it is only volume one of a series. I don't accept incomplete work. Hence the "F" grade.
The setting, anyway, had a lot going for it. London 1939-1940, and the blitz. Perhaps my favorite place and time in history. The story, something of a romance and an exploration of the suppressed position of women in that time period was wrapped around a great McGuffin.
The premise is that magic exists with the help of "angels" who are being compelled to work for some people, thorough spells. And that there was this "bridge" via a series of nodes created by spells through which one could enter the land of Nonsuch, from there you could then travel anywhere in time. The McGuffin is that protagonists are tasked with preventing a Nazi sympathizer who knows how to use this bridge from reaching Nonesuch, and from there to a time and place where she can assassinate Winston Churchill in 1939. This would lead to Lord Halifax replacing Chamberlin as prime minister, and who then, the author at least, suggests, would've made peace with Hitler, and that somehow, the British Nazis would have taken over. Which is to say, nonesuch nonsense.
So it's a time travel novel. Time travel novels never really make sense, if you take a minute to think about them. Go back and change history and you eliminate the reason you went back to change history in the first place, and thus, no effort would be needed to change it since the world would be different, and thus, you, if you existed at all in the future, wouldn't have been sent back to change it. But if you weren't sent back to change history, then history wouldn't have been changed... And so, around and around you go again and again. It never makes sense.
The story is marketed as fiction, rather than fantasy or SF and reads like fiction, except for the magic and the McGuffin that runs through it, off and on, both more or less as an excuse to juice up the plot. As literary fiction it had a lot of inner dialog, literary fiction sort of musing, that kept the pace of the book rather leisurely despite the magic elements. The magic parts involved a lot of far-out descriptions that, as you likely know, doesn't work for me, so I skimmed over those parts to get to the results. And the results, in my opinion, ended up being neither fantasy nor literary fiction.
Besides being incomplete, I had a great problem with the McGuffin. Time travel aside, it didn't make any sense. The people going back in time are from 1940. At that point in history, few, if anyone but perhaps, Churchill himself, would believe that he, of the Dardanelles disaster, would end up be heralded as such the key figure in Britain's fight in World War 2. That is a post-war impression, and not universally held. The British people tossed Churchill out of office as soon as they had the chance to after the war. Even if you give Churchill sole credit for Britain staying in the war, as the author does, no one in 1940 would have been able to know that. Nor predict the Mosley's Blackshirts would be anything but a band of kooks, should Churchill not be around. Personally, I seriously doubt that Churchill alone was standing between a British defeat and a Nazi victory. No British politician of any sort would trust Hitler's word in 1940 after Munich and his invasion of Poland. And I am sure Winston wasn't alone in his determination to defeat Hitler. And well, Hitler would've still invaded Russia, and that wasn't ever going to turn out well. In short the McGuffin is not compelling.
So, with the novel being incomplete, the McGuffin unbelievable, and the magic more of a plot device than anything that feels organic to the world. I won't be reading the second part, cliffhanger or not. All I can say is I'm glad I read a library book, and didn't buy it. If I found that I spend $30 on half a novel, I would've been really angry.
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