True Stories and Other Essays by Francis Spufford - review

The boring thing about Francis Spufford is that you always know what’s coming next. His books are about, in order: polar exploration, his childhood reading material, a history of 20th-century British science, the wealthiest period of Soviet history, his Christian belief, and a novel set in 18th-century Manhattan. Talk about ploughing the same field over and over again.

Actually, there is one constant in each of these books: the extremely high quality of the prose and the intelligence behind it. Big brains don’t necessarily make good writing but in Spufford’s case they do, and the joy of his style is that it is more than just flash, or rhetoric, but integral to his argument.

Here he is, writing about that Victorian precursor to the computer, Charles Babbage’s “difference engine”. He’s talking about “the promise of beginnings”, the moment when all the possibilities of a nascent technology seem to come into mental flower — in Babbage’s case, this being the possibility of artificial intelligence, even when looking at a diagram for a steam-powered network of brazen wheels and cogs: “For a brief moment... modest results of an invention and frankly utopian results can have equal likelihood in our minds, and are rolled together intoxicatingly, almost lyrically.”

It’s those last five words that lift Spufford above almost any other writer I can think of, especially one who writes on technical matters. They are themselves intoxicatingly rolled together, almost lyrically: and that word is particularly well chosen, for it suggests that they are an accompaniment to a deeper music.

In one of the final essays here, You Could Read Forever, he talks about literary Companions (specifically, reviewing Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nights: a Companion) as “a kind of lean-to extension built around the back of the house of the book”. This book, too, is itself a kind of lean-to extension to his oeuvre — appendices, as it were, to his other published work (apart from his novel). There isn’t — as far as I can see — any repetition here. Mostly the pieces were commissioned by editors who knew that Spufford was someone who could talk with authority, passion and an amused intelligence about those subjects.

He writes about other subjects, too, but on technology he is particularly good — look at his take on the ambiguous successes of British improvisational engineering such as the SR53. This plane was designed to outclimb Russian nuclear bombers — and would have, if the Russians hadn’t switched to missiles — and was equipped with a couple of gadgets bought with petty cash from a yachting supply shop in Cowes. He has just the right eye for the gripping detail.

He is incapable of dullness. He writes, of a woman praying at Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb: “... her hand pressed against the glass wall enclosing it as if she were completing a circuit”. That’s amazing, I think. Publishers say that collections of essays don’t sell. This one deserves to, hugely.

£15.30, Amazon, Buy it now