VINTAGE BOOK OF THE DEVIL

by Francis Spufford, Spufford

A history of the Devil, as he appears in literature through the ages.

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Then in 2023 I returned to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stood on the banks of the Mississippi. I was aiming for something like a classic black and white movie, except one you never saw, because it came from another history than our own. It won the Sidewise Award for alternate history. And now (2025/6) I've written a historical fantasy, "Nonesuch", set during the London Blitz, where as well as German bombs the protagonist Iris needs to deal with time-travelling fascists, and the remnants of Renaissance magic, preserved in the statues of the burning city. As writers of fantasy, I like C S Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley, Tamsyn Muir, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Addison. If you like them, you may like this.

Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to the Dean of an Anglican cathedral in eastern England, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London.

Reviews

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone who loves music knows that the Devil has all the best tunes, but how does he stack up as an author?

More accurately, how have various writers authored him over the years? The the Devil himself does get to write an introduction, in which he explains why he hates us for constantly miscasting him in history, blaming him for our own evil deeds.

Well, what other use is he to us?

As yo would expect, the Bible verse comprises much of the content here, testaments Old and New, alongside lashings of Milton and passages from the various renderings of the Faust story (Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann and the original Historie).

There were also sources which were unfamiliar to me that I will hunt out in future, such as The Chester Mystery Cycle (spoken verse in old english between Jesus and sundry devils such as Diabolus and Sathanas) and Thomas Heywood's The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels(1635).

I enjoyed the inclusion of unknowable yet hotly debated theological arcana, such as whether or not the Devil himself suffers from the fires of hell (St. Augustine reckons he does).

I was surprised to find Hades as a character in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, but of course the Bible was initially compiled by Greeks for a largely Greek audience.

I think I can say that after reading this I do have a little more sympathy for the Devil.