What Book to Read?

Kate Atkinson describes A God in Ruins (2015) as a ‘companion’, rather than a sequel, to her 2013 novel Life After Life, which I reviewed here. It deals with a number of the same characters as the earlier book, but you can read them quite discretely. I had to go back and re-read a summary of Life After Life – which has quite a complicated story – but perhaps that was only because I actually had read it before, and you wouldn’t feel the lack if you hadn’t read it.

All the same, it is a bit hard to talk about the two books separately. Both focus on World War II and the years leading up to it, though A God in Ruins goes well beyond. Both have a member of the Todd family as a main character –Ursula in the first, and her brother Teddy in the second. In Life After Life, Atkinson used the idea of ‘what if things had been slightly different’. This involves, for example, going back several times to Ursula’s birth in 1910; each version is different. And so are the versions of what else happens to her, and to others in the story. The centre of A God in Ruins is Teddy’s experience as a bomber pilot during the war, but this story is not told in a linear fashion; it jumps from before the war to after the war, to almost the present day and back again, so that in complete contrast to the earlier book, the reader already knows more or less what will happen – though of course not how it happens. While this could be said to heighten the tension, I found it a bit depressing waiting for things of which I had been forewarned to actually happen. We see Teddy’s life before the war and during it, his marriage to Nancy (who was murdered in one version of the story in the previous book), the birth of their child Viola, her life, and those of her two children, Sun (Sunny) and Moon (Roberta/Bertie). Mostly we see through Teddy’s eyes, but Viola and her children also present parts of the story, sometimes covering the same ground, but rounding it out with different perceptions and reactions.

Atkinson says the books is about ‘fiction (and how we must imagine what we cannot know)’ and war – ‘the Fall (of Man. From grace).’ I’ll come back to ‘fiction’ in a moment. Certainly one of the main themes is the horror and the grandeur manifested in war: the bravery shown, the sacrifice demanded, the waste and loss endured. Courage, endurance, stoicism and all their opposites appear throughout. Death, and the varied circumstances in which it occurs, are central to the book. But there are other themes, related to how one lives one’s life, marriage and bringing up children being the most obvious. I’d like to say that for every bad relationship or decision about how to live, Atkinson shows a positive one, but while there certainly are positives, I found her exposition a further reason for finding the book rather depressing. It seems that no matter what good intentions a parent may have, they are bound to be disappointed. Bertie says they are ‘the family that put the “fun” in dysfunctional.’ How could a Teddy have produced a Viola?

I’ve always enjoyed Atkinson’s writing, with its characteristic parenthesis. Here, she makes a lot of use of it, frequently giving the text an ironic twist. ‘Wait until Viola was old, he thought (‘older’, Bertie said). ‘I’m nineteen,’ Sunny muttered. ‘I can vote, get married and die for my country (would he do any of these things, Teddy wondered?) but I can’t have a quick fag?’ ‘For himself, he had something called a ‘rise and recline’ chair (‘suitable for the elderly’) … He didn’t like the word ‘elderly’, it invited prejudice in the same way that ‘young’ once had.’ These quick comments on the action don’t always reveal self-knowledge or truth; Viola is particularly self-deluding; ‘she wished she had asked [Teddy] about his war when he was still compos mentis. She might have been able to use his memories as the basis of a novel. One that everyone would respect. People always took war novels seriously.’ Atkinson can be lyrical as well as cynical; you can follow certain images throughout the book, such as those involving flying – both planes and birds. And the war sections are strong and moving; all are based on real-life incidents. But is there a bit too much parenthesis this time?

Having said all this, I need to come back to ‘fiction’. Atkinson says that not only are novels fiction (obviously); ‘they are about fiction too.’ I’m not entirely sure what she means by this. But there is a major fictional trick in this book. Towards the end, there is what Atkinson describes as ‘a great conceit hidden at the heart of the book to do with fiction and the imagination’. I can’t tell you what it is (obviously again). I might have been tempted to treat it as an alternate ending of choice, such as there is, for example, in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But Atkinson says in her Author’s Note that this conceit ‘is in a way the whole raison d’être of the novel’, so it can’t be lightly dismissed. I can see that the alternative ending fits with reality. But that means discounting much of the fiction in the book, which seems strange. I guess that Atkinson can do what she likes, since it’s her creation. But it feels a bit too tricksy for me.

You can read more about Kate Atkinson and her work here. I’ve reviewed all of her Jackson Brodie books, as well as an earlier social satire, and Life After Life. Links to the earlier reviews can be found in that review.