peteg | blog 2026-04-26-FrancisSpufford-Nonesuch.autumn

Francis Spufford: Nonesuch. (2026)

Kindle. Again two-years-and-a-bit on from his previous novel. So many words have already been spilt on this London-during-the-Blitz fantasy. I ploughed through it, mostly enjoyably, hoping it'd get somewhere only to find it incomplete and to be continued. What a threat that is.

Spufford returns to peak Anglo (1939/1940) with a heroine from Watford who may grow into one of the grotesques in Light Perpetual (2021). She gets involved with an underdrawn boffin from the Backroom Boys (2003) and finds herself madly, unhappily, in love. (He's a bit of a human computer and eventually promises to be her Denis Thatcher.) There's some class warfare, generously if shallowly observed, and some supernatural machinery that drives the plot, as if the war itself was not enough. Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories. He goes lightly with the Christianity but endorses the great-man-of-history paradigm (via Churchill) as he presumably must. Sitzfleisch is what I've been lacking all my life.

Along with the main but mostly unseen antagonist, a foxy fascist toff whose perfection is clearly due to black magic, the cast put me in mind most of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) with its similarly triangular study of manners, class and aspiration in contemporaneous NYC. Spufford does not consider the colonial view; he's endorses Keynes's take on the plenty available to (some of) the residents of the metropole and the self-serving tosh that the City was self-policing and not rapacious, or at least not as rapacious as it became. The essentially-American leading lady's wish to profit from the war and get rich is presented without judgment, as is some thievery during the Blitz. It's a strange position to take in present-day England.

Spufford hits the limits of his imagination here. For instance a woman not into men is necessarily into women; he cannot imagine self-partnering or hermitude, or really think through the implications of selecting alternative possible worlds; I mean, at least some of them have to be Pareto improvements on the one we're in, right? It seems causality transcends time and monkeying with the past has limited, non-chaotic, effect; his take on what is and is not invariant was arbitrary. I did not understand how they put an upper bound on the nodes in the Bifröst; surely the door knocker was a tell if not the quotidian blessing bestowed on statuary itself. And so on.

As always Spufford writes cinematically but much is annoyingly derivative as he owns to in an afterword that is followed by a post-credits scene. There are obvious gestures to Schindler's Arc/List (1993), Watchmen (2009), and, gulp, the MCU with its consequence-free do-overs of universe-destroying events. On a more British front it struck me that Spufford was leaning comfortably into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who: the episode that didn't get made (Shada) and Pyramids of Mars. And doubtlessly a lot more.

The problem with any cinematic adaptation is that Steve McQueen got there already; the images in my mind of the Underground refuges were McQueen's. But of course there is no race in this book. And von Trier's wartime Christmas-in-a-church was far more effective.

Louisa Hall contextualises for the New York Times: in conversation with The Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Tiresome. The "heroine ... has figured out how to travel in time, but somehow here we all are, face to face again with history." James Bradley was deeply affected. Goodreads. And so on until this branch of existence gets pruned.

Quarterly Essay #101, Michael Wesley: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia's Future. (March 2026)

The costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.

I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.

Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that point being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north." but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.

It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.

Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spills many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).

Mohammed Hanif: Rebel English Academy. (2026)

Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.

Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.

The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).

Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.

Karan Mahajan: Complex. (2026)

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Henry Reynolds: Looking from the North: Australian history from the top down. (2025)

I figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

John Brunner: Players at the Game of People. (1980)

Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.

I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).

Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.

John Brunner: Threshold of Eternity. (1957-1959)

Kindle. Apparently Brunner's first under his own name, the first-first being under a pseudonym. Space opera. There's already some of his signature moves including multitrack narration and discursive smart-arse grabs at the start of each chapter. He put in a few too many underdrawn characters including a couple of token twentieth-century everypeople. Time travel, temporal inertia and surges... parallel universes with a causality repair mechanism ... oh my. God as a disembodied woman who gifts another woman to her surviving (embodied) husband. The (xenophobic) Enemy invades! The Being ... who does stuff ... ouroboric. Conceptually cracked but you can see the promise.

Goodreads. Apparently reworked by Damien Broderick in 2017.

Daniyal Mueenuddin: This is Where the Serpent Lives. (2026)

Kindle. Inevitable after Mueenuddin's debut collection of shorts. Unfortunately this novel isn't any better.

The first three chapters/parts are relatively short. Initially we're filled in on an orphan boy's origins in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, giving me the expectation that he'd be a major player later. The second recounts the problems a youthful American-educated scion/feudal lord has with controlling his ancestral lands and serfs in the 1980s, notionally juxtaposing raw power with Western humanism. It ends without resolution, leading me to think we'll get the rest of the tale in passing later. The third is about how the landed gentry hook up, the heir and the spare. Finally the latter half of the text agonises over how a servant botched his failproof get-rich scheme in the 2010s that put me in mind of Coffs Harbour.

The central flaw with this work is that it's all been done before, not the least by Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mohsin Hamid in How to get Filthy Richy in Rising Asia (2013). There's no humour, political commentary or class struggle so we can quietly ignore Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga. The anachronistic view from the upper class/feudal seat was mined by Aatish Taseer, Rohinton Mistry and many others. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about the Himalayas as a place for romantic escapes. The servant's view palely foreshadows the one in The Remains of the Day (1989). To echo Rushdie from a long time ago: this novel does not expand the space of things that can be thought.

The writing is often OK and even more often flabby and repetitive. The voices of the characters are flattened and often indistinguishable. Neither of the female characters is interesting or well-drawn. Category errors are rampant. There are no twists. The caste system (I didn't know there was such in Muslim Pakistan) is not clearly articulated though the feudal system is. Mueenuddin's use of the third-person appears to preclude an unreliable narrator but every so often he adopts a phrasing that in other hands would signal a departure from truth. It's a bit boring and there are no payoffs or even moments of quiet grandeur.

Dwight Garner saw a lot more in it than I did but also threw in enough references to signal he knows it's a bit stale. Goodreads.

Raymond Chandler: The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Good-bye (1953), Playback (1958).

Kindle. The remaining four of Raymond Chandler's novels over several months. The collection I have includes the incomplete The Poodle Springs Story (1962) which I'll skip.

The first two are good. The Long Good-bye (1953) is clearly his masterwork: twisty and funny, a rich source for Altman's adaptation (1973). The last just has Marlowe running around in circles in Esmeralda, somewhere north of San Diego, and is quite unsatisfying; so much so that Chandler concludes with a character from a prior story propositioning Marlowe for marriage!

John Brunner: The Webs of Everywhere/Web of Everywhere. (1974)

Kindle. Thin Brunner. Not much chop. Piles on the cliches and moralism to no discernible end. Somehow Alice Springs survives a nuclear exchange, suggesting that Pine Gap wasn't common knowledge at the time (?). The Māori are once again warriors! Teleportation! The Infinitive of Go (1980). All women are mentally unwell.

Goodreads.

John Brunner: A Maze of Stars. (1991)

Kindle. Not great. A sapient ship (Ship!) has seeded the promising planets of the arm of a galaxy with humans and is now revisiting them for the nth time. There are rules of the game, of course, and Ship gets lonely so human companions are the order of the day. It's a bit fat Brunner but has more biology than sociology. The time travel mechanic does not work well; that and the exotic landscapes and biospheres evoke 1960s Doctor Who. The closing exegesis needed expansion and more weaving into the main text. There are some cute ideas (and some lazy historical lifts) that have effects too neat and tidy. Too much moralising again. You can see his interest flagged in this project as he was writing it.

Goodreads.

George Mackay Brown: Beside the Ocean of Time. (1994)

Kindle. The one that didn't win him the Booker. The edition I had (2025) included a worthless introduction by Amy Liptrot (The Outrun (2024)).

To be honest I was a bit disappointed that he didn't take things much further than he had in Greenvoe (1972) and Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) which I did enjoy. Perhaps I rushed it a bit or was too insapient to grasp all his subtleties; he didn't adopt the fancy tenses of Charles Yu to travel through time, or even the slick trickiness of Murray Bail's prose for that matter, but the simple mechanism of dreamlife, later recounted for profit. The stories are sufficiently straightforward that the rewards are in how they are told. And just who is this entity that is sitting beside (and not inside) the ocean of time with the rest of us?

Goodreads. Cornelius Browne points to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).