Friday, November 19, 2021

BOOK REVIEW: A writer's opinion

 

Kate Atkinson

A God In Ruins (Costa Award Winner 2015)

Not The End Of The World (short stories)

 

I am a great fan of Kate Atkinson and, if I could write like her in even a small way, I would be thrilled. Ever since I read ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, in my early twenties, I have loved her work.

I particularly enjoyed the Jackson Brodie series, helped by the TV dramatisation starring Jason Isaacs at the height of his sex appeal. Atkinson is an award-winning, literary writer, ambitious, confident and original, but she also has the ability to write in an extremely compelling and readable style, and the capacity to bend, combine and reinvigorate genres. I have tried to analyse her technique but it is difficult to actually see it, which I think is the point. She writes in an apparentky effortless way.

There is a pacy fluidity to her prose, which is tightly packed with narrative detail but still not bogged down in unwieldy imagery or purple prose. Her characters leap off the page, poignant, plausible, monstrous. Her plots twist and turn, taking the reader down unexpected alleys. She is not averse to making use of magic realism and exploring new ways of telling a tale, but her writing never seems forced or precious.

This year, I have read two of her books. One was a collection of short stories I downloaded when I was doing my MA in Creative Writing last year, as I had to write an essay on the short story as a genre. However, I never actually got round to reading her collection at the time as I had so much else to read. I started reading it a few months after I graduated and found myself rapidly pulled into the linked but independent tales, which was quite a surprise as I don’t generally read volumes of short stories very often (except for the purposes of university essays!).

 



I’m not generally keen on volumes of short stories, though I like the genre in itself. I prefer to read short stories in occasional small doses and collections tend to invite you to keep reading. Generally, I find I end up with a cloying feeling of having read too much, my mind clogged with different characters and events that each exist in its own bubble.

Atkinson’s collection overcomes this by being a series of interconnected short stories, bound together by the classical myths that underpin them, though this classical inspiration is not always obvious to a casual reader despite several newspaper reviewers implying that the magical realism aspect is overdone. Personally, I felt it was often very subtle, as when a dead woman who later comes back to life sees pomegranate seeds in a dish, reminding us of the tale of Persephone. Where it is more obvious, as when the nanny, Missy’s, boots turn into silver sandals and a quiver of arrows appears on her back, it felt quite natural and thematically appropriate. One critic I read suggested that Atkinson’s use of Latin and Greek quotations at the start of the stories serves mostly to highlight the triviality of the tales themselves, and that it was unclear why Atkinson had chosen Ancient Greek mythology as her underlying inspiration, as opposed to myths from other cultures. However, I would counter this by asking why not?  And I would also say that, for me, these stories sparkled with vivacity and were a sheer pleasure to read, so if Atkinson wishes to indulge herself and show off her knowledge, that’s fine by me.

            The links between the stories aren’t always obvious, particularly on a first reading. Some characters are referred to in different stories, and there is an echoing here and there of themes and ideas. One review I read claimed that Atkinson was in love with the sound of her own voice in these stories, implying that they lacked depth and genuine meaning, and I can see how readers might feel this, certainly with some of the more superficial tales. However, I felt that even the most obvious, the ones that used most literary trickery and experimentation for its own sake, were still highly readable, and some of the stories have stayed with me months after I read them – particularly the story of the boy whose prostitute mother is dying of cancer.

              What makes these stories so compelling is Atkinson’s characteristic verve and energy. They fizz along and carry the reader with them. I found the characters vivid and convincing, though their stories were often far from realistic. The stories also radiate with flashes of Atkinson’s wonderful dark humour. All collections of short stories are going to contain individual pieces that appeal more or less to different readers, that are objectively various in terms of quality even, but I enjoyed even those stories I felt were the weakest in the collection. I have read this collection twice this year, which I can’t say about any other volume of short stories I’ve read, including those of the fabulous Alice Munro.

 

RATING: Not The End Of The World *****

 

 




The second Atkinson book I read this year was a long novel which won the Costa Prize in 2015. I had downloaded a few of her novels, and decided, quite randomly, to read this one, not realising quite how long it is until I was well into it and fully involved in the story.

It tells the story of Teddy Todd, a World War 2 fighter pilot, beginning in his childhood and narrating his life story and those of his daughter and grandchildren.  Having not read ‘Life After Life’, I didn’t realise that Teddy is actually the much-loved younger sibling of a character from that novel, Ursula, but that doesn’t matter at all as this novel stands entirely on its own.

              As I write this, I haven’t finished the book so this review is rather pre-emptive. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the chapters I have read very much. The novel moves about in time with little warning – the reader simply has to keep up – but this didn’t feel like a chore, and I found it easy to work out where we were in chronological terms. Teddy is a charming child, realistic and sympathetic. He has the fortune/misfortune of being immortalised by a family friend in a series of popular children’s novels (clearly based on Richmal Crompton’s Just William books) about the redoubtable Augustus, novels he is vaguely embarrassed by. Teddy grows up to be a decorated war hero, but his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Nancy Shawcross, is an unhappy, unfulfilling one, and his daughter, the hideous Viola (a brilliant monster of a woman whose behaviour made me laugh and cringe simultaneously), is a disappointment. He has a better relationship with his grandchildren, however, who are both damaged to some degree by their ridiculous, self-centred mother.

              I had to leave the novel at the point where Atkinson is just beginning to describe Teddy’s experience of the war, which has been hinted at in previous chapters but not fully explored, but the writing so far makes me know that I will return to it soon to finish reading it. I have an inkling of where the story is going due to reading some online reviews, and I now want to read ‘Life After Life’ too. 

             

RATING: A God In Ruins *****

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