Review of A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (2015, Black Swan)

Peter Todd has led a full life. At times eventful, much mundane. A God in Ruins charts its path in a non-chronological order, and that of his wife, self-centred daughter and grandchildren. His childhood in the stockbroker belt and wartime exploits as a bomber captain flying over Germany and Occupied Europe haunt his subsequent trials, tribulations, and attempts to live a good life. The hook and strength of the telling is its eloquently realised characterisation and charting of familial relationships. Peter and his family are three dimensional characters with depth and the social situations are freighted with realism, and Peter’s wartime experiences have an insider quality and perspective. There is strong emotional resonance throughout. The to-ing and fro-ing across time added to rather than detracted from the story, though it sometimes felt too much time was spent with Viola, his awful daughter. While it was an interesting and at times captivating read, it lack the novel hook of its companion book, Life After Life, and the ending might make little sense without knowledge of the idea explored in that book. An engaging, well told read.

Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013, Black Swan)

Ursula Todd is born on 11 February 1910 and promptly dies. History repeats but she lives, the doctor having made it through the snowstorm. It is a pattern that Ursula is set to repeat dying multiple times in several different ways, sometimes a sense of déjà vu saving her from the same fate in a subsequent life. Mostly her lives follow a very similar trajectory, occasionally they diverge and take a different track. At some point, she realises that she could potentially save the world from the darkness of the Second World War. But can one person stop fate?

Life After Life follows the multiple lives of Ursula Todd, the middle child of five of an upper-middle class family. She’s born at Fox Corner, a large detached house in a small village on a commuter line to London and grows up – except when she dies early in childhood – with her family, and a maid and a cook. Her father is a banker and serves as a captain in the First World War. Her mother is a somewhat a snob and her aunt is a flirtatious socialite. Her elder brother becomes a senior civil servant. Ursula sometimes attends secretarial college and sometimes university, studying languages; sometimes she takes a year to travel to Germany, Italy and France. She nearly always has the same friends and takes the same lovers, though sometimes she has a disastrous relationship. In none of them does she have a long-term happy relationship or her own family. If she reaches her twenties she nearly always ends up in London working in the civil service and as an air raid warden during the Blitz, though occasionally she ends up in Germany. She seems destined to keep living variations of the same life, each living having echoes of those previous. All of her lives are somewhat ordinary as Ursula is not destined for fame; indeed, she lives a relatively small life.

Atkinson uses the repeating lives idea to explore the notion of history as a palimpsest, constantly being re-written over the top of itself where the previous iteration echoes through, as well as the tension between fate and contingency. A small alteration sets a different path, but the overall trajectory always remains similar since so much stays constant – family, home, friends, personality, education, etc. Thrown into the story is a mix of literature and philosophy on the nature of life (and death). By tracking Ursula’s various lives, the reader is asked to reflect on whether their lives would be roughly the same if they lived it over again? Would they seek to derail fate and seek something radically different? And would they sacrifice themselves for a greater good? It’s an interesting narrative form, with obvious echoes with Groundhog Day. It occasionally gets a little tedious always resetting to the day of her birth, though Atkinson does a good job of telling that event from many perspectives, but overall it works well. The temptation must have been to run major events through ‘what if’ scenarios, but keeping the focus on a small life makes the reflective questions more personal and grounded. The result is an engaging, thoughtful literary novel that asks big questions but not in a highbrow, inaccessible way.

Review of Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2004)

1970 and Olivia and her older sister, Amelia, camp out on the lawn of their parent's house in Cambridge. The next morning Olivia has disappeared into thin air. 1994 and teenage Laura is stabbed to death for no apparent reason in the offices of her father’s law firm whilst temping for him. 1979 and young teenage mother, Michelle, snaps and plants an axe into her husband’s head when he wakes the baby. Three separate crimes linked by seemingly little more than the fact that they have surfaced in Jackson Brodie’s life at the same time. Brodie is a former police inspector turned private eye. On the death of their father, Amelia and her sister, Julia, discover Olivia’s toy in his desk and want Brodie to find out what happened to the young girl. Overweight father, Theo, can’t shake his obsession with Laura’s slaying and wants her killer found. Shirley wants to track down her niece, who was taken into care when her mother was jailed. And along with his wife running off with another man, taking his daughter with her, Brodie has his own case histories to contend with – the death of his sister, snatched, raped and dumped into the canal on her way home from the bus stop and the fate of his brother. Dealing with other people’s cases is proven a burden, especially when somebody seems to be trying to kill him.

Case Histories is a rich and layered book. The various case histories swirl around and entwine with each other through the central figure of Jackson Brodie. The prose is excellent and the characterization well developed. Brodie, in particular, is a complex and appealing investigator, with his own foibles and faults, but a decent sense of right. Atkinson’s style is to provide an enormous amount of back story and descriptive narrative, some of which ploughs the same ground repeatedly. With respect to personal taste it’s not my preferred mode of storytelling – I favour more tell and less show, and the prose to be much tighter. For my money, a hundred pages could be edited from the book and the story itself would be little affected. I have the same feeling when I read Tana French. That said, I appreciate that this is a style issue and Atkinson does this form of storytelling very well. This raises the problem of whether to judge the book on its merits or my enjoyment. If on its merits, and if this is your kind of thing, then it’s probably a 4.5 star book, but based on my taste it’s a 3.5. Interestingly, I’ve warmed to the book post-read, as the various layers and intersections condense with reflection, but at the time of reading I found the overly long and repetitive description tiresome. Overall, an enjoyable, but overly long, story with an interesting central character.