Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Francis Spufford, whose new novel, recently reviewed as the lead review in The Spectator,

rapturously by our own Philip Henscher, is none such, which is an extraordinary sort of fantasy

adventure that takes place in the Blitz. Francis, welcome. Thank you for having me. Now, you said

just when we were sort of limbering up for our formal conversation that this was a book in which

you said, you know, I've just unashamedly set out to give pleasure.

Yes, I'm fundamentally not ashamed at all by the idea that books should give pleasure,

but there is a difference from, I think, the writer's end between the kind of book

where you want to do something terribly weighty and feel that as part of the contract,

you should give pleasure as well, pleasure being a many-sided thing which tragedies can give us just as much as farces.

And on the other side, the kind of book you write where you know you plan to throw in the kitchen sink of pleasure

from the beginning and fundamentally put in everything that you enjoy thinking about. And none

such is the second kind of book. It has its serious aspects. I did not write it as pure froth

and Zabaglione. It is supposed to do some serious things as well,

but the pleasure giving was fairly central to how I wrote it and what I wrote. Most writers,

you know, writers are, as your memoir, the child books built, indicates, are built by books.

Were there kind of things you wanted to do in this book that you were like,

I've seen this sort of book, I've loved this sort of book.

What was in the background of it for you, the mulch of which it grew?

Multiple mulches, but the big one in book terms was that I wanted it to be

in conversation with the kind of, quote,

spiritual thrillers that C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams and the inklings were writing, in fact,

...