I like things that resist being written about,” he says of his passion for nonfiction. I like the complicated fractured broken-up difficult surface of the real world. He says he is longing for cafes to reopen (he does an impressive spluttering Gaggia impersonation) as he “can’t work if it is too quiet” too much solitude and his thoughts “hide like mice under furniture when you turn the light on”.Īnglican in his beliefs and catholic in his interests, Spufford talks with the free-wheeling, high-octane loquacity you’d expect from his books. His wife Jessica Martin, a former Cambridge academic, is a canon of the cathedral, which has been shuttered up for longer in the past 12 months than at any time since the 17th century. But when he turns his computer towards the window the screen is filled with a postcard view of Ely cathedral. We are talking, of course, on Zoom, with just a glimpse of his bookshelves in the background. Spufford is just back from taking the dog for his morning walk in the Cambridge countryside. I like things that resist being written about “Which is lucky because it means I’m not trying to stand in the same place as writers who have things to say based on direct observation about what it’s like being young now. “I’m not an uber-hip millennial,” the now 56-year-old author declares winningly, in his lockdown beard, cossack-style cap and woolly jumper (more jaunty Bolshevik than British boffin, two of his subjects). While he learned a lot from his students – “thank you!” – he is relieved not to be in competition with them. “The internal contradiction just grew too painful and embarrassing.” Every bloody sentence, no matter how much in theory it is removed from you, is reflecting your sense of how human behaviour works.” As a tutor on Goldsmith’s creative writing MA, he spent years telling students that “they must dare to do the thing that they were frightened of, and confidently explaining what was wrong with the fiction they were writing,” he explains. There is something uniquely self-exposing about fiction. “I revere fiction writing and I didn’t want to do it badly. What took him so long to come to fiction? “Cowardice,” he says simply. Now Light Perpetual, which, after that explosive beginning, follows the lives (had they lived) of five Londoners from the second world war to 2009, looks set to be one of the stand-out novels of this year. Then at 52 he published Golden Hill, a glittering take on the 18th-century novel, set in New York, which was the surprise hit of 2016, winning him a Costa first novel award and an enthusiastic new readership. If such an eclectic writer could be said to have a niche, it was to make nerdishness interesting. For many years Spufford steadily worked away as one of the UK’s most respected nonfiction writers, with titles including I May Be Some Time, a cultural history of polar exploration Backroom Boys, charting the overlooked achievements of British scientists the “strangely noveloid” Red Plenty, about postwar Soviet economics and Unapologetic, his lively apologia for religion and riposte to the “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins and co.
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