The Blitz, romance, and time-traveling fascists

Each episode will speak with a special guest, listen to musical gems, play music inspired games,

“and answer questions from our listeners, the first episode drops March 4th.”

Listen on the NPR app. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. Our book critic, Moorian Carrigan, is a fan of British writer Francis Buffard's novels. So is our executive producer, Sam Brigher. And they aren't alone.

Spuffard books have won the Costa Book Award, the Undoggy Prize, and have been longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Sam Ritz Buffard's new novel called Nonsuch, and like that one too.

Here's the interview Sam just recorded with Francis Buffard. Two of my most enjoyable reading experiences over the last 10 years. We're reading Cahokia Jazz, a 1920s noir crime novel, set in an alternate American history, where a sovereign majority indigenous nation-state thrives in the middle of the United States, and Golden Hill, a novel set in 18th century New York.

If I had to make a list of my top five great American novels, Golden Hill would be high on that list, despite the fact that it takes place before the country was founded, and its author is a Brit. Now that author, my guest, Francis Buffard, has written another incredibly entertaining book. It's called Nonsuch.

It takes place in London during the war, as a city must try to survive the blitz. The eight month bombing campaign led by the Nazis that killed over 40,000 British. Iris Hawking's a young independent woman is trying to survive the nightly attacks, while push against the society's constraints that would keep her in a secretarial pool until she was safely married off. Her ambition seeks something much more expansive.

While her independent side fights against it, she finds herself falling in love with Jeff, a young man working in an even younger broadcast format. Television. Oh, and did I mention she has to fight off magic, time-traveling fascists,

“who want to travel in the past and kill Winston Churchill?”

Yes, that's there too. And a magical land called Nonsuch and Angels, and a lot more. Francis Buffard got to novel writing on the late side in his 50s after writing on fiction. He's also written late perpetual, a novel that imagines the lives of five real-life people if they had not died as children in the blitz. And an unauthorized book in the Nonsuch series,

which were officially written by CS Lewis. He also wrote a memoir called The Child That Books Built about his early escape into reading, and unapologetic, while despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. Francis Buffard welcomed a fresh air. Thank you for having me. So I'm clearly not British, but I understand to some degree the foundational importance

of the blitz on modern British identity. But can you illuminate just how important that history is especially for Londoners? It's the epic moment in the history of London as a city. It comes in a heavily mythicized form with politicians invoking something called the blitz spirit over the decades since which is a kind of rather misleading image of total social consensus and kind of spontaneous mass virtue, which of course is very flattering if you're British. It's

nice to think that amidst the complications and bits of shame and horror in our history, especially the imperial side of it, there should be one moment where we did the right thing. And I'm not cynical about this myself. I wonder at the series of accidents required for a white supremacist empire to teethe onto the side of the angels and to decide to oppose fascism. But we actually did. It's also a history that fewer and fewer people still alive today live through.

“Do you feel that it's shrinking in the minds of people there?”

Yes and no. The odd thing is that I was born in 1964, so 19 years after the end of the

second world war and it had happened in my parents childhood and it was therefore by definition

emotionally very remote for me as a child. But that gap has seemed less significant as time has gone on. And as the veterans first of the first world war and then of the second world war started dying in Britain. Conversely, there has been more and more self-conscious public commemoration of the war to at remembrance Sunday, which we do on the 11th of November every year. You know, it was a kind of dying and rather faded commemoration in my childhood and my 20s and

my 30s and now it's enormous. I like you to read a passage about Londoners trying to get through

being as surprised as we would be to find themselves being bombed nightly. For everyone in London,

whether you lived through the night was therefore a matter of luck. The odds were long. Only one in 20,000 chances of being hit at the papers, but still every bomb landed somewhere. Every night for some people the dice roll was going wrong. Instead of the whistle and crash rising to a peak of noise and then receding as the next bomb fell safely past you that'd be a descending whistle that ain't degree louder and then some unimaginable instant of violence and light and pain and

dissolution. Each bomb might be that one. You couldn't know it wasn't till it hadn't fallen on you. And then when you had survived another night of fat, you tidied yourself up, put on your work clothes

and stepped out. The hot bright summer had become a hot bright Indian summer,

shorter days and cooler nights, but still a blaze of clear blue overhead. She walked up the king's road to the tube past ruins still smoldering and holes in the ground where repair crews were already at work on mangled pipes and she felt the light revving up the engine of her organism. Beat heart, breathe lungs, hunger, stomach. Now, now, now, set her body. There was only a faint ache in her eyes looking at the bright and damaged world. An ache, so permanent that after a while she

started to think of it as the world itself aching faintly all the time. Thank you for reading that. I just really love the contrast between the terror of the night and then if you survive the need

“to get up and just get about the day. That, I think, is one of the hardest things for us to”

imagine successfully though it's, you know, probably easier if you're living in Tehran or buried

at the moment. The idea that rather than some terrifying crisis after which that be probably PTSD in months of recovery and maybe some helpful 21st century therapy, you just go to work and you make your way over the break and glass to discover if your office is still standing. If it is, you work from 9 to 5 and then you leave hastily before it can get dark and the bombers can come back each something and then make for the cupboard under the stairs or the air edge shelter in

your garden or the basement of a department store or wherever it is that you're doing your best to shelter and then do it again and again and again for 60-plus nights in a row and I think that repetition and the way it changed people is one of the things that is most remote from us. You've professed your love for the CS Lewis Narnia books and in those books the children discover the land of Narnia because they're sent out of London in the country for safety during the war.

Iris your hero will discover nuns such this fantasy land because of the war too.

“Did you think of your book nuns such as in conversation with the Narnia books?”

Exactly that. I was wanting to have a conversation with Lewis and with the other members of the inklings, his writing circle, who through the period of the war were writing these cosmic thrillers motivated by I think a very similar sense that there was something unearthly about about the ruined city, a way in which it seemed quite natural for people to be pushed to the familiar edges of their experience and then beyond it into something unearthly or

magical. But also I had a specific loving argument I wanted to have with CS Lewis because I am a devotee of the Narnia books. I have been since I was a child but because I loved him I was allowed to be annoyed with him as well. And I wanted to pick up specifically the notoriously unfair bit at the end of the last Narnia book in which the character Susan is not allowed to join in with the happy ending because as it says she's interested in nothing nowadays but

nylon's, lipsticks and invitations. And ever since people have been trying to find a kind of spiritual meaning for what Lewis had done there and maybe there is one but there's also

“I think very clearly a kind of bachelor incomprehension or even distaste for the lives of”

young women. 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 is really strongly in favor of nylon's, lipsticks and invitations and everything they represent. Although although my protagonist Iris would prefer silk if she can get her hands on it. In your book and this is your phrase magical time-traveling fascists. I want to go back in time and murder Winston Churchill before he

lives. It's the headquarters of the British fascists which was actually a place. Can you talk a bit

“about the sympathies that the upper class of Britain had for the Nazis during that time? There was a distinct”

kind of vein of pro-fascist sentiment in the British upper classes partly because as in other bits of Europe, I'm Germany Italy, the great depression had shook people's faith that kind of liberal democracy could do the business and cure the ills of the present day. But also because they liked order at hierarchy and they could see those things disappearing in the modern world. Again, one of the

strange things to get your head round is that for the first nine months of the Second World War,

British fascists were operating completely unimpeded. They were running candidates in special elections on a peace platform. They thought the war was a terrible misunderstanding of Hitler's good intentions and that it was probably caused by evil Jewish political attacks. Of course, and they were there offering what seemed to them and to defeated and disheartened people beyond the actual fascist organization as the future, the inevitable thing that would happen when Europe went fascist.

“And I give Iris a sense of visceral horror, which I think is completely deserved at watching”

these people with their big signs saying fascism is practical patriotism and fascism for King

and Empire and peace now. Active at the very moment where a fascist army are kind of rolling westwards and look very much as if they're going to conquer Britain too. It is local evil to go with global evil. You know, this is a time of rising authoritarianism in many countries. Was that on your mind when you were writing them such? Yes, I did become very aware the moment of this book aligns itself overlapped with the moment we're having now and that the dangers of that time

are kind of a warning about the dangers of this time and that there should be something really sobering about what a close thing it was that the world did in the end decide to resist fascism that there was just the right balance of opinion in Britain to just push it over to going

“actually stuff the British Empire. This is too important. We'll bankrupt ourselves to fight”

fascism. Let's talk about your hero Iris Hawkins. Like other female characters in your books, Iris is coming up against the social constraints for the woman of her time and at this period working women like her are relegated to the secretariat pools of London brokerages even though she wants to be like a player in the world of finance. She also enjoys casual sex but has to be careful not to have that tarnish her reputation. There's an obvious double standard there. In order

to rent an apartment she has to pretend to be married to a soldier serving abroad because no one will rent to a quote "tart." She's a really great character. You dedicated none such to your grandmother Nancy and under the dedication you wrote quote not entirely a good girl and in your afterward you said that like Iris she quote came from Wattford and she was as Iris would say of an adventurous disposition but Iris isn't her. Of course you are pointing out the connections between

Iris and your grandmother. None of we didn't need to know any of those. So how was she an inspiration for Iris? My intentions here are a celebratory and she is safely dead. She died at 99 and a half 15 years ago. There was a particular moment. My grandmother was a resilient person who was on the whole hopeless at storytelling about her life so you only ever got very small glimpses of what she had done in the past and there was a moment at the beginning of this century when she was in her

vigorous early 90s when she and I went to the oldest Indian restaurant in England and we sat down she looked around and she said I was last here in about 1935 it hasn't changed much and then she said

with no prompting at all. I always preferred going out with married men because it would spend so much

more money on you and then she clamped up instantly this door opened on the on the other side of it this clearly completely unregretted kind of good time she'd had being about girl and then it slammed shut again and I could not get her to talk any more about it she just smiled and looked mysterious.

to go on so Iris is a creation not a copy. Were you able to discover anything more about your

“grandmother's adventures? Hers happened in the early 30s she was busy being a parent having”

run off with Mr Spufford who all her brothers hated but later on she worked for a medical charity which brought distinguished and rather attractive doctors from all over the world and at her funeral my father who who loved his mother and was very proud of her had to be prevented from reading aloud a list of the distinguished lovers that he deduced she had. She was she I know I know but you know it was a funeral maybe the mood would have been wrong so I didn't have much to go on and I am

aware of the difficulties are doing this as a male writer and it seems to me that the way to cross the distance between me and someone like Iris is to really commit to her viewpoint so the book

never let's you know what she looks like for example so she is never the object of the book's

attention she is always the subject the person who's looking at the world and liking what she sees there are a number of detailed descriptions of the male bodies she looks at but none of her own and I wanted somebody who genuinely had the freedom to be unlikable at times and complicated and genuinely self-centered not a secretly kind hearted person merely posing as as assertive but somebody who who was determined enough to get what they want that they could be quite manipulative.

So you have some sex scenes in your book and as I said Iris likes sex but is afraid of intimacy and when despite herself that intimacy grows between her and Jeff those sex scenes like have a

“different weight to them can you talk about that? I think she discovers that you can be a lot more”

naked than just taking your clothes off if the emotional stakes are higher and if you are constantly aware but the other person is as real as you are she and Jeff are in bed together

within the first 30 pages of the book because she fancies him and it's a one-night stand she had no

intention of it ever resuming when it does resume it's very different indeed and she is terrified to begin with because sex with that kind of depth of unprotected and I'm not just talking about contraception but unprotected mutual knowledge is a very different thing it has the potential to transform it has the potential to wound it has as much danger as as bliss in it but she is although not an entirely nice person a definitely a brave one so she is up for the danger and

she is up for the chance of being hopelessly changed by the unscheduled experience of love. Since your book takes place in England class is an issue and Iris is middle class and her radar is highly attuned to class distinction in an early scene she introduces herself to some people that she's very aware of an upper class than her and I'm just going to read this hello set Iris Iris Hawkins and heard whatford unmistakably in her own vows as if she had

whole avenues of prosperous but not posh suburbia tucked away in there and the girl's grammar school and the future she had it wanted in which a good girl could hope for a nice young man with prospects in the building trade or a solicitor's office that world lost but refusing to be gone inexorably following her around and speaking out of her mouth so can you tell us a little bit more about what it means in this time to have a whatford accent whatford is part of the the ring of

outer suburbs around London it doesn't have a especially stigmatizing accent um she's not poor she's not working class she is prosperous suburban lower middle class these are distinctions that mean something in in England and she doesn't sound classy until she remakes herself by the end she is indistinguishable from the people she wishes to impress do regional accents still exist to the degree that they did back then and and do they still signify in such a strong way they've got

homogenized much more there are still very strongly marked regional accents from other big cities and there are identifiable country accents which you could pick out the way that a voice from the deep south can be picked out but these are no longer all straightforwardly subordinate accents

“to a posh BBC voice like the one I am speaking to you in now because that's how I learned to speak”

at school in the 1960s and 70s the BBC itself has spent 20 or 30 years very deliberately

sound like so you no longer feel the way that Iris would have done in 1939 to 40 that the whole

“of broadcasting is conducted by people who sound rather like this um and if you sound rather like this”

then you know that it's not your voice which is coming out of the bloody radio so that has changed we are a more socially mobile society that we use to and are our kind of social signifiers of slipped and switched around as well our guest is Arthur Francis Buffard his newest book is none such we'll be back after a short break I'm Sam Brigger and this is fresh air this message comes from sports in America with a David Green the world of sports is filled with stories that

go beyond the highlights of the game join former morning edition host David Green for sports in

America from WHY and PRX a weekly show featuring in-depth conversations with star athletes, coaches,

parents and the millions of fans whose lives are touched by the game here about the personal

“and transformative moments that make fans want to stand up and cheer each week on sports in America”

with a David Green listen wherever you get your podcasts so Francis your book Hokie Jazz imagines United States where the indigenous population was not decimated by the disease carried across the Atlantic by Europeans so along the east of the Mississippi there's this self-governed indigenous nation state called Cahokia why did you choose that area of the United States as a location for the city because there is the real archaeological site of Cahokia just opposite

Saint Louis on the eastern bank of the river which is one of the world's wonders and it astonishes

me that that not as many Americans as you'd think know about this thing it's got the largest pyramid north of the myor ruins of of central America in it it was a city possibly bigger than London or Paris in the 12th century deserted again later for reasons that archaeologists are

“a busy arguing about and I think this is one of those things where there's an advantage of being”

an outsider I'm not a native American and I'm not a white American either or an African American I am looking I hope fondly and intelligently from from way over here and I wanted to kind of question the strange obviousness that that is granted to the absence of big populations of native Americans in in in US history if you if you look at the history of any particular state that they make a brief appearance in you know kind of 1790 1820 1835 and as you guys you go west would it

get a bit later there is an Indian war and then they're effectively gone from the history of what follows and I thought you know what if they weren't gone what if the United States like Mexico was necessarily a country which was a kind of much more active hybridization of of native American and and and European what if it was an unavoidable presence and the way to do it was was in alternative history because it's great for world building and the way to do the

alternative history because it's great for that is as a crime novel because a detective they can go and ask questions of anybody is a fabulous way to explore a world the the main character Joe is a policeman but he's also an excellent jazz pianist and he can't decide if he should give up police work to dedicate his life to jazz was there a particular pianist from the time that you based what you thought his playing would be like on he's a mixture of jelly roll

Morton and James P. Johnson who wrote the Charleston it's a great time for jazz probably I'm showing my prejudices here but but it's late enough that you've got fabulous soloists and individual vision coming into it and it's still early enough that you can dance to almost all of it and jazz is the great American fusion music it's the thing where the as W E B G boy says the weight and tragedy of African American history is converted as a kind of gift of

lightness and joy to to the rest of American history and I wanted Joe Barrow my my detective to be a 40 jazz pianist because I wanted him to be expressing the difficulty and the joys of the great American mixture so early we talked about writing sex scenes and I found that there are a lot of similarities between bad writing about sex and bad writing about characters playing music people tend to fall into the same traps of either focusing too much on mechanics if you will or

on the other hand like something so metaphoric that it's disembodied in Cahokia jazz you have

this is a scene where Joe the policeman has been invited up to play with his former bandmates

that are led by Dolphus Henderson a clarinetist right yeah and they play Kansas City Stomp they do I'll leave this as a kind of exercise for the listener where they you think this counts as bad music like bad sex the opening was a line up of separate calls do you do Dolphus wailed stucly honked he jangled and Dutch dumberdumberd and then all in together for the brass a nancyatery glare of the tune willy doing the flat-footed beat of the stomp underneath

Dolphus and stucly jousting he in Dutch mainly rhythm at this point but the way the stomp worked for a band was chorus and then solo chorus and then solo for each of the players in turn

as many times as you liked through the chorus and Dolphus nodded him in first the whole thing

back in his two hands taking the tune bold but plain this first time round with nothing but the stomp beat underneath from willy till Dolphus came back in over the top with a noodling moan and they all restated the tune together then Dolphus himself of course making the clarinet sob and seeing and almost squeak and then stucly neck inflated like a bullfrog squeezing out sweet and golden statements from the corner then Dutch thunderous plucking and slapping and

around again by common consent a little faster this time so I just like that because it's not taking itself too seriously there's like a joyousness of the way you're describing it there's

“squeaks and slabs and honks I don't know did you find that hard to write?”

Yes because I don't play any of those musical instruments I'm a listener um not a musician

I am the least musical member of an extended family so so to imagine myself inside the the kind of the good communication of a jazz band working in sync um I had to borrow the expertise of my wife and my brothers in law and my mother in law and listen very very carefully and and say does this sound right to them? Well we need to take a short break here our guest is author Francis Buffard his newest book is nun such more after a break this is fresh air this message

comes from sports in America with David Green the world of sports is filled with stories that go beyond the highlights of the game join former morning edition host David Green for sports in America from WHY and PRX a weekly show featuring in-depth conversations with star athletes, coaches, parents and the millions of fans whose lives are touched by the game here about the personal and transformative moments that make fans want to stand up and cheer each week on sports in America

with David Green listen wherever you get your podcasts. Francis you grew up in a university town

“both of your parents were historians and I think both taught at the University of Kiel”

you had a younger sister who was born with a genetic disorder sister noces that she died from at the age of 22 and it sounds like your parents unsurprisingly we're very occupied in your childhood with her care and and really trying to save her but as for sibling I'm guessing you were perhaps benignly neglected and understandably so. I wouldn't put it quite like that they tried their damnedest they were they were very aware of exactly the danger and me being benignly

neglected but it had the perverse consequence that I think I spent my childhood feeling I needed to reassure them that I was fine which was which was emotionally laborious in itself so I was I was very glad to to head off into books as a series of you know doors out from from emotional intensity. Right you you said that reading was iriscape you actually have a memoir called the child that books built and you especially enjoyed fantasy by Tolkien and and CS Lewis so what was your

reading behavior like were you the kind of reader that would read over everything else like doing your schoolwork seeing friends eating yeah and and remains safe at some time although the existence of the iPhone is kind of sabotage. Oh no deep immersion now I was the kind of reader as a child where people have to shout in my ears when it was meal time to get me to come back and

“pay attention to the soundtrack of the real world very deep immersion with something I think a bit”

driven about it. I'm not sorry that I've lost the capacity to go that far away though I wish I could swim in whole reservoirs of novels rather than coming up to check my email every half an

I am reading to banish pity and brittle bones. I'm reading to evade guilt and avoid consequences.

That may be think of your sister and I was wondering if if you feel survivors guilt over her death or even when she was living did you feel some guilt because of your healthiness. Yes I did is the short answer. The way I dealt with it was to behave as if it was a kind of law of the universe that I was fine so I didn't let myself think it's not fair that I should live and she shouldn't but at the same time I felt overwhelmed by the scale of what would have been the right

“kind of order of compassion. So I think I showed less of it than I should have done and”

yeah there's guilt in that now and I didn't know her as well as I could have because I was

so aware of her as a kind of potentially pitiful person or as in fact she was a funny and rather peppery and witty person as described by other people and I kind of missed that because I was nonnier and because I was going no no I can't look it's too awful. I miss her very much. I wish now at 61 I had a 58 year old sister who had passed through all of these decades with me and who I could compare notes with but I don't and I haven't seen her for how long it's 35 years now.

“Well I think of her often. We haven't spoken about your novel light perpetual but that imagines”

what would have been the lives of five children who were actually killed by a bomb during the

blitz and I was wondering if in that book although she's not a character then you know whether you were also imagining what your sister's life would have been like if she had lived in an indirect way yes absolutely so on can be a presence without being a character and and once the shock of of somebody dying young is over I think the sorrow of it settles in around all of the things that they're then missing and all of the stages of life that they don't get to go through. There were

“some reviews of like a patch of you know saying you know the children who die in the first chapter”

and then get given a kind of ambiguous literary resurrection people were complaining that they didn't have remarkable lives and they grew old and died anyway and I thought yes but that's the prize what you want is to grow old and die anyway going back to what I said in the memoir about about reading to banish pity um that changes and I don't read to banish pity anymore and it writes to banish pity either I I write to try and find concrete and fully felt ways to give

pity a place to live and endure and in some ways I suppose I'm trying to make up for looking away in those those early years I'm trying to to look straight at these days you have another nonfiction book called unapologetic why despite everything Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense which to me is a funny subtitle because it sounds like it's apologizing a little bit there already but um but anyway this is a somewhat salty I don't know if you like the word defense

of your Christianity um but you said as a young man you were an atheist even though your wife became a reverend but that you did something bad in your marriage you don't get into it we don't need to know what it was but you and your wife were miserable and one morning you went to a cafe and heard um Mozart's clarinet concerto via adagium movement and you were transformed this was the moment of the rebirth of your faith um let's hear a little bit of that movement um and this

is a version from the Berlin Philharmonic with the clarinet Sabine Meyer [Music]

that was the clarinet concerto the music that our guest Francis Spufford heard that converted

him to Christianity you know that's a lovely piece of music to my ears it's not particularly sacred so how do you get from that music to becoming a believer well i'm gonna steal some words here from the novelist Richard Powers who described that movement as as what mercy would sound like

“and although i didn't get to that kind of way of describing it for a long time after that's what”

it felt like in the moment it felt like an announcement of a completely unillusioned kind no self deception no cherry misleading optimism something that all of the kind of possible darkness is

a mess of the human condition acknowledged and yet it said and yet there is also this to consider

as well there is this undistroyed merciful sound rising up out of the confusions of the of the world and you are in fact deceiving yourself more it said to me if you don't reckon for the existence of of this as well um i wouldn't say that you know three minutes of mates art and i was a I was a Christian again um but on the other hand it it it was what started a process in which i thought a world with mercy and it where would i go and and look for some

more of that at what address and gradually got from there to it to a sense that the Christian story was the richest and deepest and again least illusioned story of human beings that i could find and had the best fit with my experience where you are in the scale of belief in the tenets of

Christianity i'm and i don't always manage it but i'm a pretty solid kind of creedal Christian

i believe in the resurrection i believe in in miracles i believe in the the the strangeness and convincingness of what traditional Christianity has got at its heart i'm a rather liberal Christian

“in american terms but nevertheless that's what there is there to be believed and that's that's what”

i try my best to believe it's probably helpful to have your wife be a reverend to it is i people ask me my favorite the religion is and i only have to look across the breakfast table which is a very very good preacher um but she wasn't the spurred for me to write that book that book is is for a particular date and time right you called it salty by which is a nice way of saying it's got a lot of swearing in it um and it was written in 2010 around the the kind of absolute

apex of the the new atheist movement which you have to understand landed a bit differently in England than it did in the United States in England Christianity is very much a minority pursuit so we do not have the sense of it as this overbearing and sometimes alarming monolith that might be

“forcing other people into melving words they don't they don't want to say um it's not a”

book that tries to convince people it's a or convert people it's a book that merely wants you to notice that Christian faith is this highly recognizable thing that humans do um which answers to to universal human needs and you may not think it's a good answer but it's not just a fairy tale out of the air by which people deceive themselves it's one of the world's answers to the big stuff well Francis Buffard I want to thank you so much for talking with me today thank you for having me

Francis Buffard's new novel is called "Nun such" he spoke with our executive producer Sam Berger after we take a short break TV critic David Biancoli will review the new movie sequel to the TV series Peaky Blinders this is fresh air this message comes from sports in America with a David Green the world of sports is filled with stories that go beyond the highlights of the game join former morning edition host David Green for sports in America from WHY and PRX a weekly show featuring in-depth conversations with star

athletes coaches parents and the millions of fans whose lives are touched by the game here about the personal and transformative moments that make fans want to stand up and cheer each week on sports in America with a David Green listen wherever you get your podcasts Peaky Blinders was a bridge series that premiered in 2013 and ran for nearly 10 years it starred Killian Murphy long before he won an Oscar for starring in the movie "Up and Himer"

power in the early 20th century despite a poor background the series created by Stephen Knight

“developed a strong following and now is back with a movie length sequel and with Murphy returning”

to star the new entry Peaky Blinders the immortal man already opened in theaters and will be available on Netflix this Friday our TV critic David Biancoli has this review during his decade on the BBC period drama Peaky Blinders Killian Murphy matured visibly as a man and also as an actor Stephen Knight wrote such a challenging and nuanced role for him as gangster Tommy Shelby that it wasn't surprising at all that when the series concluded Murphy was tapped

to star as Jay Robert Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan it also wasn't surprising if you devoured all six seasons of Peaky Blinders that Murphy would be not only willing but eager to revisit

“the character of Tommy Shelby one last time especially when the script is written by Knight”

and brings the story to a dramatic conclusion the drama in the immortal man is provided by both personal and historical challenges we last saw Tommy Shelby in the final episode of Peaky Blinders in the 1930s prohibition had been repealed in the US the Nazi party was rising in Germany and Tommy's volatile brother Arthur was about to die the movie Peaky Blinders the immortal man jumps ahead to November 1940 when England already is at war with Germany a munitions factory

staffed by women in Birmingham Tommy's hometown is bombed by aerial strikes from the Nazis and claims more than 100 victims Tommy has long since secluded himself far away isolated in a remote farmhouse haunted by wartime memories and what he fears are family ghosts but the bombing brings a visit from his sister Ada played by Sophie Randall she informs him not only of the devastation to burning him but the fact that his estranged son has taken control of his old gang the Peaky

Blinders and is making new and dangerous moves and alliances Tommy you've got to come back with me it speaks in words of the grace of the dead and speak to your son before he gets himself home

by the law or lynched by the people hey don't I see things yeah you always did

it's off the diet it's all the diet it's all the diet it's all the diet it's like a dawn on me had it's gone oven it can't lock safe Tommy would prefer to stay distant and uninvolved but the recklessness of his son Duke played by Barry Kieogen leaves him little choice Duke meets with Beckett a British Nazi sympathizer played by Tim Roth who finds in Duke an

“important and agreeable collaborator their meeting begins with Beckett handing Duke a British”

pound note yeah you can keep that freshly printed counterfeit five pound note

planning over that came from on much more three hundred and fifty million pounds more it's my job

to introduce the money into the British economy using organized criminal gangs so Peaky Blinders gets a twenty percent cut that's seventy million pounds to use as you see fit but be ready for the anarchy that comes after I'm ready yeah obviously the then woods much preferred if I was talking to your father once that's in play very early on Tommy Shelby finds himself having to take sides and do battle either defending or betraying his own country and either saving or opposing

his own son the stakes couldn't be much higher or in writer Steven Knight's hands more unpredictable

or gripping he always populates his dramas with terrific actors and vibrant characters and in the

immortal man we get delightful return visits from among others Peaky Blinders series players Rebecca Ferguson Steven Graham and Paci Lee and most of all we get nights brilliant approach to his period dramas the way he folds the fictional and the factual he's done it so well so many times for so many outstanding TV series and I've given rave reviews to most of them a thousand blows

but which I've caught up with and have been delighted by like taboo from twenty seventeen which featured

“great early performances by both Tom Hardy and Jesse Buckley who just want a best actress Oscar”

for Hamlet you can watch the immortal man all by itself but if you're uninitiated in what's come before you shouldn't all six seasons of Peaky Blinders were available on Netflix and there are only six episodes per season so even if you start from the beginning you'll get to this new

“movie sequel before you know it like any good Steven Knight drama and they're all good Peaky Blinders”

is addictive easy to consume and impossible to forget David Biancoli reviewed the new film Peaky Blinders the immortal man it starts streaming on Netflix Friday tomorrow on fresh air our guests will be

Grammy winning singer Jill Scott she's releasing her first full-length album in more than a decade

“she'll talk about growing up in Philadelphia breaking through with the Neo soul movement”

and building a career that spans music film and TV I hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews follow us on Instagram at NPR fresh air fresh air's executive producer is Sam Brigger our senior producer today is Theresa Madden our technical director and engineer is Audrey Benton our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Myers and Rebuilder Nato Lauren Crenzel, Monique Nazareth

they are a challenger Susan Yucundi and Abamun and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler our digital media producer is Molly Sivine Sperr we're going to show our directs the show our co-host is Tanya Mosley I'm Terry Gross from WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes classical music happier a new podcast posted by me pianist Maniacs each episode will speak with a special guest listen to musical gems play music

inspired games and answer questions from our listeners the first episode drops March 4th listen

on the NPR app