Francis Spufford’s latest, Nonesuch, is a fantasy novel set in London during World War II and involving magical travel to other worlds. It is also in part an homage to C.S. Lewis. Spufford is an unabashed friend of Narnia. In his memoir, The Child That Books Built, he says that when he read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, he felt that Lewis perfectly interpreted his desire to leave the ordinary world and enter a story: Lewis “invented objects for my longing, gave forms to my longing, that I would never have thought of, and yet they seemed exactly right: he had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy.”

But I have a confession: I have never loved C.S. Lewis. Don’t get me wrong. I read and enjoyed the battered Narnia paperbacks left in my childhood home by my four older siblings. I’ve appreciated his other fictions and works of popular theology. I’ve even taught a couple of his books in general-education humanities courses. I find him witty and wise and charming.

But I don’t love his writing.

Teaching at a Christian university, I’m surrounded by Lewis fans. The surest way to generate big enrollments for an elective course is to teach Lewis, especially his children’s fiction. A few years ago, when my department advertised a position in English literature with an open field of specialization, a disproportionate number of applicants had written dissertations on Lewis.

I’m a contrarian. So the more others rave about Lewis’s brilliance, the more I wonder: Aren’t there other Christian writers who are just as good? When I recently mentioned this to a group of friends, however, they gently pushed back. Is there really another writer like Lewis, who wrote not only incisive apologetics and cultural commentary but also popular fiction for children and adults? I had to admit, the Lewis fans have a point.

But my gripe is personal.

It goes back to the character of Susan Pevensie and my childhood discovery that in The Last Battle Susan doesn’t make it to the new heavens and the new earth.

Being a Susan myself, I strongly identified with the character. As a tail-ender with much older siblings, I was alone with my parents for years after the others left home, and I enjoyed more attention and autonomy than they did. I, like Susan, was ready to be a grown-up from an early age.

I loved that in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Susan and Lucy are the first witnesses to Aslan’s resurrection. And I cheered when Susan gets to display her archery skills in Prince Caspian. True, Lewis makes her a scolding foil to her siblings’ eagerness for adventure, usually urging the “sensible thing.” But still, she was one of the great quartet: “two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve.”

So I was devastated when I read The Last Battle and learned why Susan wasn’t there: “‘My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.’” Eustace explains that Susan doesn’t believe that the children’s Narnian adventures ever happened. And Jill adds, “Oh Susan! . . . She’s interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

I grieved Susan’s absence. When Eustace quotes Susan—“What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children”—I knew that Susan was no longer a believer. Raised in a Christian home, I knew what happened to non-believers. When Peter and Lucy and Edmund (and Eustace and Jill and Diggory and Polly) were joyfully going “further up and further in” to the paradise beyond the end of the world, I was filled with sorrow. Susan wasn’t there. Susan was going to hell.

I later realized that Lewis’s ending left hope for Susan. She wasn’t on the train that crashed and killed the others. Reading Lewis’s The Great Divorce, I came to see that he is far more permissive about the character and timing of God’s invitation than I understood as a child.

I was nonetheless delighted to discover that Nonesuch is Spufford’s attempt to write a Susan-like character back into a Narnia-like story.

Spufford has said on a number of occasions, including in an interview with BookPage, that “one of the things I wanted to do in Nonesuch was to write an oblique sort of response to the Problem of Susan, who in the last of the Narnia books is famously left out of the apocalyptic happy ending.”

As I said, I always identified with Susan’s grown-up-ness, and her wanting to be in charge. And that is certainly part of why Lewis writes her out of the ending. But Spufford picks up on another aspect of Susan’s character, identified by Jill: her love of “nylons and lipstick and invitations.” In an interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Spufford says that Lewis exhibits “a kind of bachelor incomprehension or even distaste for the lives of young women.” He continues, “So I knew that I wanted to write a fantasy set then which very deliberately had, as its protagonist finding her way into wonder, somebody who was really strongly in favor of nylons, lipstick and invitations and everything they represent.”

The central character of Nonesuch is Iris Susan Hawkins, a beautiful young woman working in the financial district of London during World War II. Over the course of the novel, she proves to important figures in the male-dominated world of investment and finance that she has a brain, gradually taking over management of her office when her boss descends into grief. She even recommends a canny investment scheme that wins her a promotion and grudging recognition from that same boss.

She also serves as a fire warden (dampening incendiaries with sand and sweeping them off the roof of her building), has a rooftop battle with a Nazi, and assists with a plan to help Jews flee Europe. And that’s to say nothing of the fantasy plot.

Amid these wartime events, Iris is stalked by an angel trapped by a malicious spell, and meets another, more benevolent but still terrifying angel who can assume various forms, from one resembling the many-eyed, many-wheeled visions of Ezekiel to a stunningly naked, entirely blue male figure. She also uses an incantation to bring stone statues to life and walks on magic pathways far above the streets of London as bombs fall around her. She travels through time (while battling Nazis). And that’s to say nothing of the romance plot.

The romance plot is one of the central plots of the novel. It tells the story of Iris’s meeting and seducing Geoff, a gentle radio engineer. The consequences of this seduction, together with the wartime setting, the angels, and the time travel, make theirs a fraught relationship.

Iris navigates all of this, as someone once said of Ginger Rogers, “backwards and in high heels.” Spufford devotes loving attention to Iris’s clothing, perfume, and lipstick even as wartime austerity and dangers mean that, by the end of the novel, she has lost her curves, is dressed in trousers and sensible shoes, and is often covered with debris. Iris loves her body, how it looks in good clothes, and the power she has over men. But she doesn’t stay there. Iris comes to realize the loneliness of casual sex, her longing for a home and a family, and the necessity of kindness. But that is not to say she, or Spufford, repudiates the clothes and the lipstick. She is a woman who grows and develops and still enjoys looking beautiful.

Iris’s complicated relationship with Geoff, her development, and the mysterious backstory at which Spufford subtly hints are my favourite parts of this novel.

The fantastical elements are my least favourite parts. Maybe it’s my ambivalence about Lewis; maybe it’s my contrarian streak again. It sometimes seems like fantasy is the only thing my students read. While others who are hungry for magic and enjoy the otherworldliness of shows like Dr. Who will appreciate the fantasy of Nonesuch, I would as happily read a novel about complicated, mid-twentieth-century Londoners—minus the fantasy. Spufford’s masterful Light Perpetual, which remains my favourite of his corpus, does just this.

Each of Spufford’s novels is very different from the one before. He has written historical fiction (Golden Hill), contemporary realism (Light Perpetual), an alternative-history noir crime thriller (Cahokia Jazz), and now fantasy. A recurring element in his novels is a Christian assumption about grace. Characters emerge out of deep brokenness and are offered second chances. They make serious moral mistakes but are given opportunities to atone for their sins. Sometimes they accept. In Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, Spufford sums up the good news of Christianity thus: “Far more can be mended than you know.” If you didn’t know these novels were written by a Christian, you could miss it. But grace and redemption, possibilities of mending broken things, are integral to Spufford’s fiction.

Indeed, all of Spufford’s novels feature at least one church service. In Golden Hill, the main character, Mr. Smith, attends two services at Trinity Church in New York City. In Light Perpetual, one of the protagonists, Ben, attends the Assemblies of Salvation church, ministering largely to African immigrants on London’s east side. It’s at one of these services that Ben experiences a successful (partial) exorcism of his demons of deep mental illness. A Catholic mass occurs at a critical juncture in Cahokia Jazz. And in Nonesuch, Iris and Geoff go to a Christmas Eve carol service at Chelsea Old Church on the Thames embankment in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz.

As she sings carols, Iris thinks about what faith means: “They were putting their faith, Iris and Geoff and everyone else there, in promises they didn’t know could be kept. Promises with no guarantee of safety, or of happy endings, any more than there was a happy ending for the baby in the manger. And yet they were trying to trust them anyway.” The Blitz lasted from September until May. At Christmas 1940, there was no end in sight to the bombings. What Iris and the people around her have, as Iris notes, is a conviction of something not seen: that suffering and redemption are bound up together.

At the Christmas service, Iris notes her vulnerability and inability to control the circumstances of the war. The plot of Nonesuch, however, hinges on Iris’s attempt to control time and memory and to atone for evil in the past by changing it.

Iris shares two qualities with Lewis’s Susan Pevensie. Both characters are interested in nylons and lipstick and are “a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” In the Narnia tales, Susan is consistently the most grown-up of the children, an attitude that manifests in a tendency to be bossy and in charge. As a child, I didn’t identify with Susan’s interest in fashion and makeup, but I did long to be grown-up, to enact my will.

Iris, like Susan, is bossy and in charge. And like Susan, she suffers for it. In a complicated scenario involving magic that I can’t explain without spoiling the plot, Iris learns that it is not morally permissible to use people as tools to further her own ends. At the end of this novel, Iris is left in a tragic situation that is the direct result of her overconfident, Susan-like quality.

Spufford redeems his Susan character from Lewis’s disdain by affirming her interest in clothes and makeup, but he explores the real, and much more damaging, moral problem of the wrong kind of agency.

In a 1917 essay on Jane Austen’s Emma, Reginald Farrer claims that the novel, which at first can appear too slow and cluttered, is best appreciated when reread. “Only when the story has been thoroughly assimilated,” Farrer writes, “can the infinite delights and subtleties of its workmanship begin to be appreciated, as you realise the manifold complexity of the book’s web, and find that every sentence, almost every epithet, has its definite reference to equally unemphasised points before and after in the development of the plot.”

The same is true of Spufford’s fiction. When I first read Nonesuch, I struggled to keep track of the plot. And, as I’ve said, I don’t love fantasy. But the novel richly rewarded a second reading. A crucial mystery about Iris’s past isn’t revealed until the final pages. Rereading the novel with this knowledge, I saw many things that I missed on the first read.

Fans of Lewis and those who appreciate journeys from the mundane into fantastical worlds will love this novel straightaway. Contrarians like me might need a second read. Nonesuch ends without resolution; Spufford is writing a companion novel to finish the story. I certainly plan to read it. At least twice.