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Sophie Cunningham delves into the life of Virginia Woolf’s devoted husband Leonard.Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui

The title is taken from Leonard’s own reflection on sexual desire,but for Alice,Cunningham’s narrator,who is also writing a novel about Leonard,the phrase resonates throughout the book in more than sex:the current pandemic and its Spanish Flu precursor a century ago;the ominous political rumblings that presage war;the looming threat of climate disasters.

The title becomes a touchstone as Cunningham takes us into more than the last century’s history of ideas – she tethers us to her side as she creates a fugue of her obsession with the past while wrangling the present. Alice’s Leonard becomes invasively real to her – not just as a trivia-winningHard Quiz obsession but tangible,visible.

Alice sometimes remembers to tell us that these visions are parts of herself;here the narrator is splendidly both omniscient and unreliable,and our ride with her is wild. There are abrupt temporal shifts that create a palimpsest – the past is continually breaking into Alice’s present,but her concerns become ours as we see through her eyes.

As she sits with boxes of letters and diaries in archives,the fourth wall is broken again and again. Charlotte Brontë did it once inJane Eyre with “Reader,I married him”,but Cunningham does more:she takes us into conversations that Alice has with her literary agent and lets her address us directly about the difficulties of writing the book. The process of novel creation is laid out as clearly as a Michelin-starred chef showing us how to cook a densely layered terrine,demonstrating the method and the mise en place,describing the taste as she goes.

These conversations are as bitterly funny as the best stand-up:the agent’s flat,banal pragmatism balanced against Alice’s obdurate fervour. The agent doesn’t want footnotes:the resultant novel is bristling with wonderful,pointed and necessary footnotes. Some people don’t like them;I found them to be yet another pleasure when readingThis Devastating Fever.

Another great pleasure of this book is the blessed assurance of its voice in third-person past tense:prose as confident as any Victorian and as contemporary as climate grief. This flies in the face of current conventions about how one should write a novel:show don’t tell;be sparing with adjectives and adverbs – nah. This is not the pale,careful Hemingway-lite that so often gets published.

Cunningham’s vivid clarity and insight whip up greedy reader engagement as easily as Wodehouse,as deeply as Joyce. For the book is sometimes extremely funny (often wickedly so in the Alice/agent conversations),yet sometimes heartrendingly sad,when she contemplates the Bloomsbury Set’s many untimely deaths from illness and suicide,or the environmental disasters that face us all now.

For Leonard Woolf’s personal and political failures epitomise many well-meaning blunderers;he was ineffectual as a colonial diplomat in what was then Ceylon. His attempts to educate the local population out of slashing and burning their environment are seen as imperialistic imposition;it becomes a matter of national pride to reject his more scientific agricultural advice.

There is a telling incident when Leonard tries to tame a restive horse,a mare that will not submit to him. After doing violence both to the horse and to his own feelings,he is forced to accept that he has ruined any prospect of forming a useful relationship with her. She avoids him,looks at him only with rejection and contempt. The comparison with his wife is patent:he cannot control or save anyone,least of all the person he most loved.

What resonates throughout is insight into the damage and futility of imposing will upon others’ boundaries,whether those be personal,environmental or national. This is a great novel of enduring significance and enormous beauty. With Alice,Sophie Cunningham moves us through the wreckage of civilisation as one who tries to heed the warnings around her,yet ultimately grieving like a Niobe for the lost.

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