The waiting staff notice Francis Spufford before I do. Not for his three-decade-long career as a writer. No, not that. It’s his headgear.
“I’ve just had my hat admired,” he announces as I shake his hand. “The lady on the desk comes from the right bit of Himalayan India.” I had already planned to ask him about it — the striped hat has sneaked into photos over the past few years — but didn’t realise I’d get an answer so quickly.
“It represents an adequate response to male-pattern baldness,” he says. “With it, and the beard, I’ve gone in my late fifties from a man with a round and nondescript puddingy face to a man with an interesting face.”
Spufford isn’t new to rebranding. His early non-fiction took in polar expeditions, childhood reading and British engineering. Then came Red Plenty in 2010, a fiction/non-fiction hybrid about the Soviet economy that set him off in a thrilling new direction in fiction, beginning with his prizewinning 18th-century-set novel Golden Hill (2016). Across nine books, the range is wide but the approach all Spufford: intricate storytelling and ebullient voice. His worlds are peopled by characters energised by the urgency of their mission and the zing of the prose they’re contained within.
We’re meeting at The Cinnamon Club, near the Houses of Parliament, where books line the walls in dark-wood shelving, reflecting the restaurant’s previous incarnation as a library. Spufford settles at the table and hides his glasses in his shirt pocket. He looks towards me, then away, hands clasping and unclasping. “I was at school just over there,” he says, gesturing in the direction of Westminster School, before pointing around the room to draw me into his memory. Between the ages of 13 and 17, this was his place of escape. “We’re sitting in fiction, A to Z,” he tells me with a smile.
I congratulate him on his third novel, Cahokia Jazz, which was published in October. It’s an atmospheric, twisty crime novel with layer upon layer of intrigue; in a counterfactual 1922 America, a pianist-turned-detective embarks on a murder case that complicates with each discovery. “The form was more technically challenging than I expected,” he says. “There have to be gizmos and parts all attached to each other that spin and revolve.”
He says yes emphatically when I ask him whether he found the framework of a crime novel helpful in the writing. “I like constraint . . . It forces you to be concrete and definite in what you plan to do. It also works as a form of distraction from things I’m more frightened of.”
We have spoken once before (we share a publisher), which encourages an acceleration — perhaps why we are talking of fear before we have even ordered wine. For now, Spufford switches lanes. “My plan,” he says, opening a menu, “would be to drink a glass of something very nice but not a bottle of something very nice . . . ” He trails off but I worry that he’s looking after the FT’s budget.
I instruct him to go wild. “Then I would like a glass of the Greek Assyrtiko 2021 for £25.40.”
The waiter is swift. We opt for the three-course set menu. I read aloud the vegetarian options: jackfruit kebab, tandoori cauliflower, dessert to be decided later. Spufford orders the venison kebab and roast haddock with chana dal, along with a glass of Assyrtiko for each of us.
Spufford now lives in Cambridge with his wife and 18-year-old daughter, but is in London frequently to teach at Goldsmiths College. He is well-practised in talking about his work, pausing only to wait for the right phrase — yet there’s a buzz of nervousness. We say cheers. What notes, I ask, is he getting from the wine? “The specialised language of wine-speak doesn’t join up completely with what happens on my tongue . . . but I think it tastes nice and it tastes of grapes.”
We launch into the nature of invention. “It’s a question of maintaining sufficient continuity and there being the right details which allow the reader’s imagination to do a vast amount of the heavy-lifting,” he says. “I don’t over-invent in the Tolkien sense of actually inventing Elvish . . . I’m a nerd, but I’m not that kind of nerd.”
He agrees that over-invention is a particular joy, but you only need to read Spufford to confirm that. In the acknowledgments of Cahokia Jazz, he teases extra material for a character’s life. He includes Easter eggs too: there’s a nod to TS Eliot and a whole cameo for Vladimir Nabokov. His sense of play is emphasised by his delay: he wrote his first novel at 50. How does he map his journey to fiction?
“I was an extremely self-conscious, nervy, quite depressed twentysomething . . . It took me a very long time to dare to write fiction because it’s so exposing of your basic understanding — or lack of it — of other human beings.”
Were there attempts before Golden Hill . . . He starts to shake his head before I reach my question mark. “I didn’t dare. Well, only in the sense that I was stealing it into non-fiction. My non-fiction was surreptitiously fictional. It was a way of going, ‘I can let myself have this without frightening myself,’ and what ‘this’ was gradually expanded. By the time I got to Red Plenty, I was thinking of it as an actual compromise between fiction and non-fiction . . . Only after I’d done that and hadn’t been . . . told by a scornful world to shut up did I dare to do the whole thing.”
So fear was responsible? “Yes . . . I would add cowardice, but also an exaggerated sense of what the stakes of failing at it would be . . . It’s got less alarming by doing it and not just because I’m better at it . . . I have a more healthily derisive sense that novels are quite silly.”
Spufford riffs on the novelist he might have been if he had started in his twenties, then turns more reflective. “In some ways I’m quite happy that I waited until I felt I could do some of the human bits of realism convincingly . . . I’m still producing gizmos, but I’m hoping they’re gizmos with recognisable humans in them.”
“Gizmo” downplays what are intensely thoughtful novels, but he’s right about the humans. He balances thorough research with a foreground of charged aliveness. I tell him as much. “I’m smiling at her silently,” he remarks to my Dictaphone.
Our wine is going down quickly. “Do you think they’ve forgotten our lunch?” We look across the room and, as if Spufford has summoned him, a man bearing plates comes into shot. Free wine is promised as an apology. And here’s the food: tiny kebabs in disguise. “I think what we’ve got here is a reinvented bhaji,” Spufford says.
Well, while we’re on the subject of invention . . . Does he know what his next novel will be?
“I’d better not say too much,” he warns, before admitting that it’s a fantasy novel set during the Blitz. He spins me a kernel of a story. “I’m partly writing it,” he explains, “because [of a lunch] with my grandmother.”
She was 93, and they were dining at Veeraswamy, off London’s Regent Street. “We sat down and she looked around and said, ‘It’s changed a bit. I was last here in 1935.’ Then, apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Do you know, I always preferred going out with married men because they always spent so much more money on me.’”
Wow, I say. “She didn’t want to talk about it much . . . it was like the fluke of a whale of bad behaviour from the 1930s suddenly went whoosh and disappeared under the water again. I thought, ‘I’ll have some of that.’”
Our starters are cleared away and mains switched in. I’m intrigued by the instinct: what’s his relationship to borrowing?
“It’s rare that things come quite as directly,” he says, as he examines his haddock atop a smear of dal. My cauliflower and vibrant rice sit in a spicy green sauce. “Usually [it’s] in remixed form. I’m perversely keen on writing about things I can’t have experienced.”
I sip my wine to clear the spice. He forks some fish. I ask him whether it feels like a moral question.
“Not really . . . There is a historic problem of some people habitually getting to be the ones who do the representing and some people habitually getting to be the ones who are represented . . . but the solution is an opening of storytelling to everyone, not a deep anxiety spread among everyone. I get very teacherly about this and I am a teacher. I’m also hopelessly earnest.”
I suggest it’s a conversation he must have had plenty of times while teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths. “Seventeen years,” he says, “so I am, in theory, Professor Spufford.”
Sorry, I should have addressed him as . . . “No, you really shouldn’t have. Both my parents were Professor Spufford, and on the extremely rare occasions when I get addressed with it, I always want to go, ‘Where?’” He joke-glances behind his shoulder.
He speaks with relish as he articulates his job’s value. “The reason why teaching writing is pleasingly inexhaustible, the way that writing the damn stuff is, is that novels can be more different from each other than virtually anything else in the world that goes around under the same name.”
Our plates are cleared. We order our apology wine and attend to the dessert menu. “Do you think the FT would like it for copy purposes,” he asks, “if I ate a garam masala Christmas pudding?”
I tell him he should follow his instincts but bear in mind he began lunch by saying he had a pudding face . . . “You’re right, I don’t want to associate me with any kind of boil-in-the-bag qualities.”
We order ice cream and chink our new wine. Time to turn to faith. Spufford is married to an Anglican priest; his 2012 book Unapologetic was a direct and emotive argument for Christianity. It’s something he is often asked about — but the meaning still rings in his answer. “Christianity seems to me more true than other stories of the world that I’ve come across, and it nourishes me,” he says quietly. “I mean to stay with it until I die.”
He continues: “It feels to me like an orientation towards goodness and towards something that is ultimately kind . . . at its best, a kind of unflinching openness to all of the stuff that humans do.”
He describes it as an “unfrightened sympathy”. I ask him whether there is a comparison to his approach in fiction. Empathy and redemption resound in his work but I think particularly of Light Perpetual (2021). At the beginning of the novel, a German rocket hits a shop in south London in 1944, before Spufford summons the dust to reverse the action, gifting his characters twice over with life. They are ordinary people, sometimes foolish or bad, but as we watch their lives unfurl, the light on them is benevolent.
“The most you can do,” he says, “is to create some momentary sense of what it might be like to look at human lives with more compassion and more patience and more curiosity than finite humans mostly have time for.”
Our ice cream arrives. I bring up what seems to me a contradiction. In his 2002 memoir The Child That Books Built, Spufford recounts his furious flight into books, unable to confront the “raw vulnerability” of his unwell sister Bridget (she was born with a rare congenital disease, and died in 1989). There is a passage where he describes an encounter on a bus, years after Bridget has died, with a girl who has learning disabilities. “I would have taken away what afflicted her if I could, but since I couldn’t, I hated her for what she made me feel,” he wrote then. He wishes her away so she won’t “burrow at the long-buried roots in me of an intolerable pity”.
The moment is uncharacteristic of the Spufford in front of me — then, he fought against pity and vulnerability. Now, what he aims for in fiction — isn’t it the inverse? Spufford is solemn. “Yes, it is.”
He was in his thirties when he wrote the memoir. “That is somebody consciously pushing out there on to the page a truth about them that they’re ashamed of,” he says, his voice lower. “People have been very kind to that passage. I think it’s fairly hateful myself.
“I haven’t made the connection but you’re right: the impossible ambition of the fiction which is universally sympathetic and is never afraid and is never imperious is absolutely the direct reverse of that reaction. And it also says that the making of fiction can reverse what the flight into fiction once did.”
A redemptive arc, if ever there was one. “Oh, I’m a sucker for a redemptive arc.” We begin our now melting scoops of coffee, caramel and berry, adorned with popping candy.
“I’m sorry he was so mangled,” Spufford says of his younger self. “It feels now as if I have more choice . . . I don’t have to leave my fingerprints on the page in quite the same way. Maybe that’s just a really elaborate way of going: ‘I’m happier than I used to be and consequently feel more free.’”
Would he ever write about his sister more directly? He makes a sound. “I might now want to write about her much more directly, but . . . I was not actually paying the attention which would leave me with the memories which would enable me to do her justice now. I’d like to, but I don’t know how.”
There is poignancy in his certainty. But now he does observe, is aware. “Yes. I know what I’ve got and I’m extremely lucky to have it. And I am fundamentally self-approving about what I know how to do when I’m writing . . . I’d like to do it generously if I can, but I’m not uncertain about my capacities.”
The most freeing thing of all.
“It doesn’t necessarily come over very well if you’re making the mistake of telling it to somebody who’s got the tape recorder on.”
Well, it can be fairly presented.
“Mr Spufford is entirely lacking in self-doubt. Undertakes every project with complete confidence in his own inevitable success,” he jokes.
We drink our coffee, ordered without losing the thread of our conversation. I can just see through the distant door that the day has turned to darkness. I think of Spufford’s 13-year-old self, perusing the fiction section where we sit. I see — in an anachronism he might not mind — the same boy landing on the near-middle of that section, finger quivering over a spine he likes the look of: S, for Spufford. Why not be proud? Sometimes it is an honesty: to look face-on and acknowledge what you see.
Rebecca Watson is a novelist and the FT’s assistant arts editor
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