2010/78: Started Early, Took My Dog -- Kate Atkinson

Schrödinger, whoever he was, and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora's box and were dining on a can of worms. Jackson felt the beginnings of a headache, another one, on top of the one he already had. (p.144)

Another twisty, witty, knotted plot from Kate Atkinson (whose work I've read and enjoyed before). I don't want to dive into details of the plot, not least because it would ... well, it'd take a novel to explain and explore, and Atkinson has already written it.

Jackson Brodie, familiar from Atkinson's other novels, is on the trail of the biological parents of Hope McMaster. (Her name is probably not coincidence: Jackson and Julia discuss Pandora's box more than once, and as another character points out, a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen (p. 293). That's a useful mantra to keep in mind whilst reading Started Early, Took My Dog. The novel is strewn with apparent coincidences, minor intersections, that make or break lives: a lost USB stick, a birthmark shaped like Africa, a half-finished sentence.

Jackson, on impulse, acquires a dog: ex-DI Tracy Waterhouse acquires, in comparable circumstances, a child. One is slightly more trouble than the other. One attracts the attention of Tilly, a once-successful actress who's falling prey to senility. One attracts the attention of Brian Jackson, who's investigating a client's background and could do with some more context. And everything seems to come back to the murder of a prostitute in 1975, and the discovery three weeks later of her corpse and her filthy, starving child.

For a novel about murder, abuse, senility, abduction and deception, this is a remarkably cheerful read. Atkinson has a lovely wry sense of humour (not least in Jackson's blithe acceptance of his flaws) and while there's plenty of desperation herein, there's also a strong sense of hope -- not only for the children (and dogs) who are rescued, but for those who aren't, for those individuals who 'live their lives against all the odds.'

There are a few loose ends, which may or may not be picked up in future novels (who was Kitty Winfield's famous ex?), and some connections that are never made explicit (who killed the woman whose corpse Tracy finds?) but resolution's achieved, happy endings abound, and hope is fulfilled.

2011/52: Human Croquet -- Kate Atkinson

The rooks are coming home late, hurtling on their rag wings toward the Lady Oak, racing the night, caw-caw-caw. Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape.

What's it like to be a caw-cawing crepuscular rook ripping through the sables of night? (p.64)

Not my favourite of Kate Atkinson's novels, though it's growing on me as I reflect on the story and the way it's told.

It's 1960: Isobel is sixteen, and lives with her geeky science-fiction-reading brother Charles, her father Gordon, her stepmother Debbie and Aunt Vinnie in a house named Arden on 'the streets of trees', a housing estate built where once a forest grew. (Isobel's ancestors were lords of the forest; Isobel's glamorous fairytale mother Eliza was, possibly, last seen in the small remaining patch of woodland.)

Isobel begins to experience what she believes are time-slips: visions of earlier times, messages from the past. But do they actually mean anything? Are they simply dreams and nightmares? Is her adoration of Malcolm Lovat (who's inexplicably oblivious to the bond between them) really doomed to end in tragedy? Is Charles onto something when he claims that aliens abducted their mother? And maybe Debbie's not so mad after all, talking about how every object in the room moves as soon as she turns her back ...

There are a lot of fairytale motifs in Human Croquet, more than initially met my eye. Hansel and Gretel lost in the wood, of course; but there's a lost girl and a telltale slipper (Cinderella), and Eliza is described as having 'rook-hair, milk-skin, blood-lips'. Charles, fostered by a nice couple, is returned with a thin-lipped 'he bites'. The greasy lodger, Mr Rice, might be victim of a rather more modern transformation. Isobel holds onto Malcolm through transformation after Tam-Lin-esque transformation. At the root of it all is the myth of the faery bride, who came out of the forest to old Sir Francis Fairfax and vanished back into the greenwood before his eyes. And like all good fairytales there's an underlying current of human nastiness: concealed pregnancies, mistaken identity, incest, rape, murder, betrayal.

The twist at the end doesn't quite work for me, and lessens what's gone before: but Atkinson's writing is as joyful, poetic and witty as ever, and again she manages to transform a grim (or Grimm) tale into a light, amusing and thought-provoking story.

Also, unsure why Ms Atkinson mis-spells Yggdrasil as 'Ysggradil' throughout ...

2011/23: When Will There Be Good News? -- Kate Atkinson

Jackson Brodie had cared about missing girls, he wanted them all found. Louise didn't want them to get lost in the first place. There were a lot of ways of getting lost, not all of them involved being missing. Not all of them involved hiding, sometimes women got lost right there in plain sight. Alison Needler, making accommodations, disappearing inside her own marriage, a little more every day. Jackson's sister stepping off a bus and stepping out of her life one evening in the rain. (p.170-1)

Thirty years before the start of the novel, Joanna Mason was six years old. A stranger murdered her mother and brother as they walked back from the bus stop: her mother's last words were "Run, Joanna, run!" She ran: she survived.

Now the murderer is due to be released from prison -- the event that precipitates everything that happens in When Will There Be Good News?.

Jackson Brodie is travelling north when his journey's interrupted in the most catastrophic of ways. As he wavers in and out of consciousness, his fragmented memories patch over the events subsequent to Case Histories. Jackson's life has changed drastically: yet, as in Atkinson's other novels, everything is connected and one of his earliest triumphs, his earliest 'lost girls', is about to re-enter his life.

There's a plethora of mistaken identities: there are kind lies (it's easier for one character to describe her mother without mentioning that she's not actually alive), and deceptions more cold-blooded and considered. Atkinson's characters are richly individual (and that includes their narrative voices: Louise Monroe's run-on sentences in the quotation that heads this review reveal a personality quite different to hard-boiled orphan Reggie or Jackson Brodie's protective armour.

There's also a great deal about parents and parenthood: Joanna Mason lost her mother in the most appallingly abrupt way, and that experience has altered her own attitudes to motherhood. Reggie lost her mother in a ludicrously random accident: she never lets her mother-figures realise what they are. Possibly doesn't realise it herself.

I'm not 100% sure I made sense of the logistics of the final twist, but all the better: it'll keep me thinking. Not that there's a dearth of thought-provoking material -- connections, observations, coincidences that aren't wholly random -- in any Kate Atkinson novel: that's what makes her one of my favourite contemporary crime writers.

2011/24: Case Histories -- Kate Atkinson

Even the police had brought a clairvoyant in, but they hadn't briefed him properly and he had thought they were looking for a body when, of course, they already had one. The clairvoyant said the girl's body was 'in a garden, within walking distance of a river', which pretty much narrowed it down to half of Cambridge ... How many girls were out there, unturned by the plough, unseen by the passerby? If only you could lock girls away, in towers, in dungeons, in convents, in their bedrooms, anywhere that would keep them safe. (p. 141)

Case Histories starts by setting out the details of three murders: Olivia, a little girl who goes missing from a tent in the family garden, Cambridge 1970; Laura, a young woman murdered at random whilst working in her father's office, Cambridge 1994; and Michelle, a woman in a remote farmhouse suffering post-natal depression, who finds herself watching her baby daughter screaming as her husband lies dead. Typically for a Kate Atkinson novel, these three crimes are linked by a complex cobweb of circumstance, coincidence and hidden connections. The man who brings them all together? Private Investigator Jackson Brodie, divorced, ex-military, ex-police.

Atkinson brings Cambridge to life, and she's refreshingly rude about tourists, foreign-language students and local eccentricities. ('Madness was endemic in Cambridge', p. 110) There's a punt expedition to the Orchard Tea Rooms, during which Julia expounds at length about Rupert Brooke and nude bathing. There are nudists on the riverbank (reading Principia Mathematica) and adulterers in the bland estates of Cherry Hinton.

The novel is full of lost girls -- not all of them dead, but all of them uprooted, cut off from their pasts. Julia and Amelia, sisters of lost Olivia, are both stuck, psychologically, at the ages they were when Olivia vanished from the garden. (Their elder sister Sylvia ran away to a convent.) Michelle's daughter keeps running away, and stops coming back. Theo, Laura's father, defines his whole life by the fact that his daughter -- one of his daughters -- was murdered. When he succumbs to a life-threatening asthma attack on Christ's Pieces, it's a homeless girl who helps him. (The woman of whom she demands an inhaler is Amelia. That's coincidence.)

Jackson agonises about his own daughter, who is about to be taken away from him. He'd seen too many crimes to be complacent about her safety. And he knows what it's like to be left behind when someone's murdered. Jackson's life, like Julia's and Amelia's, like Theo's, falls into 'before' and 'after'.

Jackson does have some other problems, which he deals with by pretty much ignoring them: they're mostly alluded to after the fact, rather than described as they happen. Suffice to say, taking pity on bigotted old widows in search of their lost kitties isn't the sinecure it might appear.

At first I wasn't sure how Michelle's story fitted with the two other threads, both of which are set in Cambridge and both of which concern the grief and guilt of survivors. Gradually it became clear that Michelle's story is intimately entwined, albeit at one remove, with Theo's and Jackson's and Amelia's.

Not only are all the cases resolved (albeit not in the 'book him, Danno' mode) but there are some surprising happy endings. I was especially happy that Amelia, spinsterish and miserable, found joy on the banks of the Cam.

NB: I haven't been watching the TV adaptation, but I'm inclined to agree with that the story makes much less sense, sheerly for meteorological reasons, transposed to Edinburgh.

2023/008: Shrines of Gaiety — Kate Atkinson

The Bright Young Things were idiotic lotus eaters, but their inane excesses could provide a bitingly cynical chapter ... Not to mention the potential for piling up the corpses, because someone ought to murder those awful people, even if only between the pages of a book. [loc 5236]

Shrines of Gaiety opens with the release of Nellie Coker -- night-club supremo, single mother of six, epitome of the view that 'there was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself' -- from prison, where she's served six months over the trifling matter of a liquor license. Immediately surrounded by her adoring offspring, she is also keenly observed by DCI Frobisher and Miss Gwendolen Kelling. Frobisher is eager to infiltrate Ma Coker's emporia, and Miss Kelling, recently come into a fortune and in London to seek two teenage girls who've run away to seek fortunes of their own, has the makings of an excellent double agent.

There's a wealth of period detail -- Molinard’s Habanita perfume, sensational novel The Green Hat, cocktails and champagne, silver shoes and Egyptian decor, Mrs Coker's Lenormand cards and their uncannily accurate predictions -- and a strong cast, predominantly but not wholly female. (The Great War, and its generation of dead soldiers, is less than a decade in the past. Niven and Gwendolen both have war stories.) Despite the title, though, there is surprisingly little gaiety, even for would-be novelist and repressed homosexual Ramsey Coker. Instead, the relentless commerce of the city, under and over the counter, is evident in every chapter. For the Cokers, there is nothing that cannot be bought or sold. For naive runaway Freda, like so many of the lost girls of London, there's the sordid trade of unwanted touches, leering looks.

Like many of Atkinson's novels, the plot is a tangle of coincidences and connections. Gwendolen's handbag is stolen by a member of the notorious all-female Forty Thieves gang: Mrs Coker's eldest, war veteran Niven, is in a position to return it. Freda's friend Florence sends postcards home, from a stall which may be surreptitiously trading cocaine. Edith Coker seeks an abortion from the Cokers' ex-landlady, whose house Florence and Freda are living in. And so on and so forth. There are uncoincidences, too: missed opportunities, almost-encounters, glances not met. Atkinson plays with our expectations right up to the final pages. I did feel somewhat short-changed at the end of the novel. There's the jolt of an unexpected death (foreshadowed early in the novel) and a number of threads left hanging. 'And there they must remain, suspended between coming and going for ever' made me shriek with thwarted expectations. Nevertheless, I liked this a lot, though perhaps not as much as Life After Life.

2015/31: A God in Ruins -- Kate Atkinson

‘But what about the war?’ Nancy said. The war? he thought, secretly amazed that she could think that something so shattering in its reality could be rendered so quickly into fiction. ‘Life then,’ she said. ‘Your life. A Bildungsroman.’

‘I think I would rather just live my life,’ Teddy said, ‘not make an artifice of it.’ And what on earth would he write about? If you excluded the war (an enormous exclusion, he acknowledged) then nothing had happened to him. [loc. 1385]

A God in Ruins complements Atkinson's Life After Life, which was the story of Ursula and her many lives. A God in Ruins focusses on her brother Teddy, the golden boy who becomes an RAF pilot in WWII. Rather than describing a multiplicity of lives, this novel focusses on a single life, and on the simultaneity of incidents in that life: the past is present, inescapable, and -- perhaps as an illustration of the confused time-sense of dementia -- more vivid than 'reality'.

Teddy is getting old, but he has his family: his daughter Viola, her offspring Bertie and Sunny. He has loved and lost. He is the kind of man (the generation?) who sees no point in unburdening himself of the past, of speaking to others about pain and guilt and suffering. As the mosaic of his life is built up -- scenes from his childhood with the aunt who uses him as template for her books about a mischievous schoolboy; scenes from the war, his marriage, family life -- the picture they make becomes clearer. It's evident that Teddy was most alive in wartime, and afterwards his life is, at least externally, rather dull. (Meanwhile a whole universe exists in his head.)

The structure of the novel, that freeform skipping around in time, lets Atkinson play with foreshadowing and recollection, interjecting authorial asides in a way that, in a more linear novel, would jar. "Teddy supposed his own son would have to go there too, although this boy existed in a future that Teddy couldn’t even begin to imagine. He didn’t need to, of course, for in that future he had no sons, only a daughter, Viola" [loc. 91]. But, in a sense, everything is happening at once. Teddy's wartime memories, beautiful and horrific, are as immediate to him as the 'care home' in which Viola visits him.

I found this a powerful and distressing novel, because so much of it brought to mind my father and my relationship with him as dementia set in. (Not to mention my mother, and the fact that I read this soon after a landmark birthday, having survived beyond the age at which my mother had a personality-changing cerebral hemorrhage.) I saw far too much of myself in the unlikeable Viola. A God in Ruins is captivating, splendidly written and yet not a book I think I will wish to reread for a while.

2024/079: Normal Rules Don't Apply — Kate Atkinson

No matter how hard she tried to keep them at bay, every new beginning [of the universe] led to the same old end – people. They always came back. Unlike everything else, they couldn’t be got rid of. [loc. 2620]

A collection of eleven stories, some more connected than others. We start with 'The Void', which takes place in 2028 and threatens humanity as we know it: much later, in 'Gene-sis', we encounter God's sister, Kitty, who's juggling reboots of the universe (they start with a 'ting!' and the smell of violets) and her job in advertising. En route, there are several iterations of a chap named Franklin (actually his middle name) who is given a racing tip by a talking horse; who becomes engaged to Connie (short for Constance) and finds her sisters predatory; who was writing a novel called What If, an infinitely recursive exploration of diverging timelines; who meets a fairytale princess, Aoife, who's lost her way home... Some of the stories (like the 'talking toys' dystopia of 'Existential Marginalisation' or the doomed romance of a Hollywood starlet and a British prince) don't seem to fit with the others, but even then there's the soft sound of a bell, and the scent of violets ... or at least a stuffed toy named Violet.

I couldn't help feeling that there was a novel hidden inside there, waiting to get out. Franklin would be in it, and Aoife, and the delightful Florence, the vicar's daughter (‘Did you just use the F word, Florence?’ her father asked mildly. ‘I am the F word,’ Florence muttered.). And there would be fewer loose ends and unresolved fates. What did happen to Mrs Peacock? What was Pamela's horrible past? Why did Mandy's afterlife look like wallpaper?

I do love Atkinson's prose but I don't think these stories are anything like her best work.

I remembered reading Atkinson's previous collection of short stories Not the End of the World and can see from my review that it shares some characters and elements with Normal Rules Don't Apply -- Hawk, Green Acres... Maybe time to reread that earlier book and see what other connections are revealed -- and whether it changes my perception of this later work.

2014/02: Life After Life -- Kate Atkinson

Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? [loc. 2437]

A snowy night in the early years of the 20th century. Sylvie hopes the doctor will arrive in time. Will her daughter Ursula live or die?

But time's a loop, and though one Ursula dies at birth (for lack of a pair of surgical scissors to snip the strangling umbilical), others survive the experience.

It turns out there are many, many ways that a little girl (and, eventually, a grown woman) can die. And a great many other terrible things that can befall her.

The surprising thing, perhaps, is that Ursula starts to remember:

They mustn’t go downstairs. They mustn’t see Bridget. Ursula didn’t know why this was so, where this awful sense of dread came from, but she pulled the blankets over her head to hide from whatever was out there. She hoped it was out there and not inside her. [loc. 1047]

Aware of previous deaths, she becomes determined to survive, though she has no idea of what is happening to her, or why, or why she alone has this gift or curse.

Habituees of the alt.hist genre will quickly appreciate that Ursula, forearmed with knowledge of the future, might set out to change history. I don't think that's supposed to be a surprise: it's foreshadowed several times. What sets this book apart from a run-of-the-mill alternate history or time-travel narrative is Kate Atkinson's writing. Ursula is not an especially likeable character (though much more accessible than her mother, Sylvie) but she's so resilient and indomitable -- and her experience is at once representative of 20th-century Englishwomen, and uniquely filtered by her sense of deja vu -- that she is a fascinating protagonist.

Some of her experiences are shocking or incomprehensible to me. (This is not the airbrushed heroic Blitz Spirit.) Other aspects resonate uncomfortably: Ursula's anxiety that she's "a magnet for unsavoury types ... and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn’t read herself." [loc. 4413] And her sense of inadequacy: why is she coming back again and again, if she can't make a difference? Is she somehow responsible? Or is she simply not up to the challenge?

The reason for, the cause of, the timeloop is never made clear. I think there are hints, though. And I don't think it's only Ursula. And that makes me dizzy, makes the novel a bleaker reality. But Kate Atkinson manages to inject humour into the grimmest of predicaments: there's also beauty, in Ursula's relationship with her sister Pamela, and in the moments when she glimpses the darkness about to fall, about to reach out and embrace her.

She had become almost indifferent to death. Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire. And again she was somewhere else, a little flicker in time.[loc. 5801]

#85: Not the End of the World -- Kate Atkinson

Thirteen linked tales (or possibly eleven linked tales and a framing narrative): recommended by several friends, and I can see why. Atkinson's stories don't always have a beginning, a middle and an end -- at least not on the page -- and, though they echo Greek myth, they don't precisely mirror it. The Persephone figure is a mother: Atalanta's immortality draws as much on modern myths as ancient ones: Artemis is a nanny, and really rather good at it.

Most (though not all) of the stories are told from the point of view of a female character, and the same characters appear again and again: Hawk, the seducer of older women (who may also be the Egyptian sun-god, who falls prey to a rather unusual cat); Heidi and Trudi, the twins; the myriad Zane women; Pam McFarlane, English teacher and ineffectual mother ...

And there are recurrent themes too: wedding favours, the number five, twins and doppelgangers, a soap opera called Green Acres, a rare beast called the wolfkin, a striped grey cat, Buffy, Playstation games, and rosy-fingered Dawn.

Though the stories are influenced by, rather than derived from, Greek myth, there's a strong sense of a familiar setting: as though, if I sat down and mapped all the relationships, the dysfunctional families and absent fathers and metamorphoses, and then filed off the names, the shape of the tree would be familiar.

Not all the stories would be as effectual without the supporting structure of the others. I'm especially intrigued by the post-apocalyptic city (possibly, as in so many of the stories, Edinburgh) that's the backdrop to the first and last stories in the book, 'Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping' and 'Not The End of the World'. Atkinson's definitely of the 'never apologise, never explain' school of writing, which can lead to confusion: but her cultural references and recurrent motifs provide enough context for the engaged reader.

2025/008: The Greatcoat — Helen Dunmore

It seemed as if she could put out her hand and touch thousands of lives which had never ended but had broken off into a silence that hung more heavily than any noise. [p. 56]

Set in Yorkshire in the 1950s, this short novel is, I suppose, a ghost story: except that the ghost is more alive than most of the living.

A prologue set on an air base during the Second World War shows us the crew of a Lancaster bomber preparing for their twenty-seventh mission, with all their superstitions and songs and the knowledge that if they survive this and the next three missions, they'll be stood down. The body of the novel, though, focuses on Isabel, newly married to Philip, living in a rented flat in a town where Philip is the new GP and Isabel knows nobody. Their landlady, Mrs Atkinson, is a malevolent grey presence, her footsteps audible overhead all night: Isabel suspects that she noses around the flat when Isabel is out. It's a cold winter, and Isabel, looking for another quilt or blanket, finds an old RAF greatcoat in a cupboard. She spreads it over her bed. Then there's a tapping on the window...

The shadow of the War hangs heavily over this novel: Isabel's parents died in a Japanese labour camp, Mrs Atkinson lost her whole family, and everyone is accustomed to bad food and not enough of it. The old 'hostilities-only' airfields are running wild, overgrown with brambles. Isabel, lonely and isolated and inevitably self-centred, is as lost as Alec, who was tapping at the window. 'He had missed so much. He’d been outside for so long, in the dark and cold. Why not let him come in?'

Dunmore's prose is clear and unsentimental, and she doesn't attempt to explain everything, simply sets out the story with an implacable inevitability. I should ration her novels -- there will be no more -- but I've read three in the last year (The Siege, The Betrayal and The Greatcoat), all very different, all set in WW2 or its aftermath. And I think I own all the others...

2018/10: Behind the Scenes at the Museum -- Kate Atkinson

I had thought that when she died it would be like having a weight removed and I would rise up and be free of her, but now I realize that she'll always be here, inside me, and I suppose when I'm least expecting it I'll look in the mirror and see her expression or open my mouth and speak her words. [p. 327]

A rambling, discursive story of four generations of women: Alice, her daughter Nell, Nell's daughter Bunty (short for Berenice); and Bunty's daughter Ruby, the narrator. The novel begins with Ruby's conception in 1951, and progresses in thirteen chapters to 1992: but each chapter has a 'footnote', telling the story of another family member. Sometimes the footnotes mirror what's happening in Ruby's narrative, and sometimes they add context to a name, or an object (a pink glass button, a lucky rabbit's foot, a locket).

The women of the family are prone to flight (Alice, Lillian, Patricia), and tend to regret not running when they have the chance. (None of them really marries for love, at least not the first time around: all of them long for love, even if they don't recognise it.) Each of the four main characters, at some point, believes that she's living the wrong life: this epiphany sometimes arrives as a spiritual or supernatural event, sometimes in more mundane form.

Alice's story begins in 1888: Ruby's ends in 1992. The wider world is relentless: many of the family (especially the men) fall victim to one war or another. But growing up in York, a town where 'the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there's no room for the living', gives Ruby, in particular, an air of disrespect for life and death. Or is this just children (or the children in this novel) in general? Ruby's pragmatic lack of empathy (wondering, for instance, how a dead sibling's Christmas presents will be divided between her and her remaining siblings) was horribly credible.

Bunty is not a good mother. She is unhappy and unloved, and bestows unhappiness and emotional abuse on her daughters. Learning about her past -- and her mother's history, too -- granted me compassion for her. (If only real life came with a crib sheet about one's parents' heartbreaks, disappointments, secret shames and grudges!)

There are so many secrets in Behind the Scenes at the Museum: and secrets, kept, turn toxic. Children are born out of wedlock; die (as do adults) in mysterious circumstances; remember minutiae, forget life-changing events. Atkinson is excellent at seeding the narrative with clues, hints, and coincidences: connections fray and are rewoven, lost children turn towards home, similes foreshadow (or echo) parallels in different lives.

I note that this review is also rambling and discursive. And I've forgotten to mention that this intricately-constructed novel is often very funny (though the humour can be pitch-black), as well as poetic, poignant, and sometimes farcical.

And it makes me want to write a version with the women of my own family. Plenty of gaps to fill: plenty of women running away in search of different selves. Plenty of women surviving.

2018/83: Transcription -- Kate Atkinson

Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (‘The clowns are the dangerous ones,’ Perry said.) [loc. 1234]

Transcription opens in 1981: Juliet Armstrong, sixty years old, has just been hit by a car on her way home from a Shostakovich concert at the Wigmore Hall. She remembers hearing the Leningrad symphony at the Proms in 1942: and that seems to open the floodgates, for almost at once we are back in 1950, when Juliet works for the BBC (a producer in Schools), and receives a warning: 'you will pay for what you did'. And thence back to 1940, when Juliet works for MI5 transcribing the treasonous utterings of Nazi sympathisers in the flat next door.

Wartime Juliet is a capable spy, going undercover as a vacuous socialite, assuming and discarding other identities with ease and aplomb. Her colleagues, both male and female, are equally mutable. Despite her competence, though, Juliet is possessed of a certain naivete: she fails to spot that her boss, Perry, is gay; and more importantly, is oblivious to the double-agent dealings happening around her. (To be fair, the spy genre was in its infancy at this point: the tropes we regard as cliched -- for instance a newspaper left by one man and swiftly collected by another -- were probably cutting-edge tradecraft in 1940. On the other hand ... "It was rather exciting, as if she were in a Buchan novel or something by Erskine Childers.")

Post-war Juliet is rather less in her element. She is unmarried; she encounters people from her past, but they pretend not to know her; she's haunted by something terrible that happened when she worked for MI5; she is brittle, aimless, and bored.

I would probably have enjoyed this novel more if I'd liked Juliet, but I think that's part of the point: to be drawn into her life, to see things as she does, to share her fears and her exasperation -- Juliet is frequently exasperated, by sexism, by stupidity, by the inconveniences of post-war life. Perhaps she does feel superior to those around her. Perhaps she's right.

When I finished the novel I noted that I felt the climactic revelations (or some of them) had come out of nowhere: that the ending felt rushed. On reflection, I think those revelations were signalled throughout -- indeed, from the brief 1981 introduction, the accident after the Shostakovich concert. A masterful construction, with (as is usual in Atkinson's novels) recurring themes and motifs -- small dogs, dead mothers ...

Incidentally, this novel contains a line which I found depressing: Juliet is musing on why she doesn't play the piano any more, though she does own a gramophone.

Listening, not playing – in the same way that reading was the opposite of writing. [loc 2761]

I think I disagree. Or perhaps I think that consuming and producing are two sides of the same activity.

2020/057: Big Sky -- Kate Atkinson

He’d been out of the real business of detecting for too long. Entrapping unfaithful boyfriends and husbands wasn’t dealing with criminals, just high-functioning morons. [loc. 2408]

I've enjoyed Atkinson's previous Jackson Brodie novels, though not as much as I've enjoyed her other work (see various reviews here): Big Sky, however, left me cold. Jackson Brodie -- sharing custody of his teenage son with Julia, carrying out run-of-the-mill investigations in Yorkshire, starting to feel as though he may be past his best -- is peripheral to the main stories here, which are definitely in 'lost girls' territory. There is the lingering rumour of a third man involved in a historical paedophile ring; there is the lucrative Exotic Travel, which is more of an import business; there is a child getting into a car, observed by Brodie, whose instincts tell him something is wrong.

There are some splendid women here, notably Crystal, who has remade her life after a shaky start and is now the wife of a successful businessman, raising her daughter to want for nothing. She's tacky and superficial, in some respects: but she has an iron will.

Big Sky redeems itself, in part, by a denouement that involves true justice rather than literal facts: but the theme was so grim, and Jackson's middle-agedness so hopeless, that even a week after reading I am happy to have forgotten most of the details of the plot.

#35: One Good Turn -- Kate Atkinson

A novel like a set of Russian dolls (matroyshka, as we're reminded throughout): each character's story intersects with many others.

It begins with what seems to be an everyday case of road-rage outside an Edinburgh Festival venue: a Honda hits a Peugeot, and the Honda driver goes for the Peugeot driver with a baseball bat -- only to be deflected by the laptop of a passing crime writer. The police are called, the 'victim' carted off to hospital, and a chain of events is set in motion that includes adultery, murder, corruption, prostitution and Matalan underwear.

Yes, really.

The dead woman's clothing .. displayed Matalan labels. This was why you should wear matching underwear, Louise reminded herself, not for the off chance of a sexual encounter but for eventualities like this. The dead-on-a-fishmonger's-slab scenario where the whole world could see that you bought your oddly matched underwear in cheap shops.

One Good Turn is subtitled 'A Jolly Murder Mystery', and -- inasfar as such a thing's possible -- that's what it is. Those who die are either richly deserving of their fate, or oblivious to it, or victims of mistaken identity.

The 'jolly' tag is also applied by Martin Canning's literary agent to his wholesome series of post-war crime novels starring Nina Riley. Martin has ambitions, though:

[He] imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on. Not Nina Riley obviously -- linear narratives were as much as she could cope with -- but rather something with intellectual cachet (something good).

Is Martin voicing Atkinson's own ambitions here? The novel is certainly replete with unexpected connections (see fig. 1, though don't peer too closely or you'll find spoilers). It makes Edinburgh seem like a small town where everyone knows everyone else -- though it's essential to the plot that there are enough other people on-stage, as it were, to provide red herrings, alibis and concealment. And there are a few unresolved sub-plots.

Most interesting was the contrast between those who've left behind their personal tragedies -- three of the four protagonists have lost a sibling -- and those whose dark secrets lurk behind every action they take. The contrast, in fact, between the four central characters: crime writer Martin, ex-detective Jackson, newly-promoted DI Louise Munroe, and middle-aged middle-class Gloria. Their fates are entwined, and deliciously dramatic, and all pivot on that incident of road-rage and its repercussions.

Some lovely writing (Gloria imagines the mysterious Russian Tatiana to taste "of raw reindeer meat and smoky black tea and the iron tang of blood. Someone else's.") and a plot that twists and turns (echoing the title) right up to the last line. Impressive and engaging.

#07: Every Day is Mother's Day -- Hilary Mantel

"I hardly like to explore my own mind," she said softly. "I think I imagine things. I hope I imagine them. There are connections I make between events in my life, between people, and I hope they're not real connections. I tell myself it would be too much coincidence. But coincidence is what holds our lives together." (p. 75)

Coincidence is what holds Every Day is Mother's Day together in a dark, blackly comic cat's-cradle of claustrophobic relationships and suburban hell. Prequel to Vacant Possession, the novel focusses on the Axons, Evelyn (a part-time medium given to pronouncements such as "your husband Arthur is roasting in some unspeakable hell") and her daughter Muriel. Muriel is backward, or autistic, or 'special needs': certainly neither sane nor intelligent. She's not nearly as stupid as her mother believes her to be, though, and it seems that some (all?) of the paranormal nastinesses haunting the house -- mystical and mis-spelt notes, the disappearance of raw meat, strange noises and objects in disarray -- are a result of Muriel's manipulative and creative behaviour. Muriel's certain that her mother can read her thoughts, but not all her thoughts: she takes considerable pleasure in thinking of murder. ("She has murderous inclinations," says Mrs Axon, darkly, to one of a series of hapless social workers.)

Muriel doesn't say much. In fact, almost everything she does say is given as reported speech, rather than direct speech:
"How many times have I told you about going to the door?"
Oh, once, twice, thrice, Muriel replied uncaringly.
"You dare to cheek your mother!" Tears sprang into Evelyn's eyes. (p. 66)

When her words appear on the page, it's a turning point, an awakening.

And Muriel is pregnant. (The circumstances are only hinted in this novel, but they're part of the cat's-cradle.) Her mother -- with talk of changelings and ghosts, her fear of her own dead husband's spirit returning -- manages to conceal this fact from Social Services, including their latest social worker, Isobel Field.

Isobel is, in her own way, pretty hapless. (That's her talking, in the quotation at the top of this review.) She embarks on an affair with a married man who vows to leave his wife and three (ghastly) children. The affair is bleak in a very Seventies way: a black farce of lies, long phone calls from filthy phone boxes, excuses, service station coffee. Coincidentally, Isobel's lover's mother is a former client of Mrs Axon's. Coincidentally, Isobel's lover's sister is Mrs Axon's next-door neighbour. (They don't get along.) Coincidentally, the father of Muriel's child is ... And it's probably coincidence that places Isobel's 'Axon' file in the hands of her lover's colleague, rakish inebriate Frank: "It's all about two dotty women. It's a gift. Grist to the mill. I'm going to turn it into a novel." (p. 159)

Everything's tangled together in this nameless, isolated town. Nobody ever leaves. Perhaps it's hell. Colin plays John Souza marches on the record player, because ''you wouldn't kill yourself after that -- after you'd marched about a bit. It would be too ridiculous.'' Nobody in this novel is happy, not even the children. Nobody is especially moral. Nobody is particularly likeable.

So why read Every Day is Mother's Day? Why read Mantel's novels at all?

Her prose, bleak and comic, tellingly observed and cleverly wound, is a joy to read. Discovering those webs of connection (reminiscent of Kate Atkinson's more convoluted novels) is a fascinating journey. And there is so much that's not told: so many juxtapositions, balances and counterbalances, tit for tat.

Without causality there is no time, and there is no causality in Muriel's head. Evelyn's speech is just a noise, like the clatter of dustbin lids or the crack of bone, the incessant drip of the guttering. Events have no order, no structure, no purpose. Things happen because they must, because they can. Each moment belongs in infinity, each infinity cherishes its neighbour like turtle-doves on a bough. Muriel's heart is a mathematical place, a singularity from which, in time, everything will issue. (p. 45)

2021/033: Light Perpetual -- Francis Spufford

Something is moving visibly, though, even with time at this magnification. Over beyond the table, by the rack of yellowed knitting patterns, something long and sleek and sharp is coming through the ceiling, preceded by a slow-tumbling cloud of plaster and bricks and fragmented roof tiles. Amid the twinkling debris the tapering cone of the warhead has a geometric dignity as it slides floorward, the dull green bulk of the rocket pushing into sight behind, inch by inch.... they can’t see it. Nobody can. The image of the V-2 is on their retinas, but it takes far longer than a ten-thousandth of a second for a human eye to process an image and send it to a brain. Much sooner than that, the children won’t have eyes any more. [loc. 61]

I very much enjoyed Spufford's first novel, Golden Hill, set in 18th-century New York: this one was less engaging for me, perhaps because the period it spans -- 1944 to 2009 -- encompasses much of my own lifetime, though not necessarily my own experience. That said, Spufford's prose is often intoxicating, and he has a knack for showing us the littleness of human lives against the history of the great city of London.

The novel opens in 1944, with a tour-de-force account of the sudden arrival of a V2 rocket in a branch of Woolworths in the fictional London Borough of Bexford. (Reading this scene was enough to persuade me to buy the novel.) Spufford was inspired by the 1944 V2 strike that destroyed Woolworths in New Cross, killing 168 people including 33 children. He imagines the lives of five of those children if the bomb had had a very slightly different course.

Light Perpetual gives us vignettes of Vernon, Alec, sisters Jo and Val, and Ben, at fifteen-year intervals: five working-class Londoners living through years of social and personal change. Vernon is a rapacious (though not very competent) property developer, somewhat redeemed by his love of opera; Jo is synaethetic, seeing music in colour, but her musical career is blighted by her lack of confidence; Val takes up with a beautiful but violent young man who turns out to be a far-right activist; Alec achieves a career in newspapers, only to find himself obsolete after the technological advances and industrial disputes of the 1970s; Ben is plagued by mental health issues, but finds peace.

These are all very ordinary people living through times that, with hindsight, are extraordinary. Our five protagonists are not paragons: their happinesses seem to happen at random, though perhaps likelier with a degree of open-mindedness, of willingness to seize opportunities. And their miseries, whether personal or professional -- they all work: their jobs matter to them -- are equally random. It's not just character that shapes a life.

I was reminded, at times, of Kate Atkinson's Life after Life, though that's much more about a single life reiterated. Light Perpetual did have a particular appeal to me, living within a couple of miles of fictional Bexford; I was fascinated by the snippets of history, and the sweeping sense of social change that the area has undergone over the last three-quarters of a century. However, I didn't find the protagonists especially likeable or relatable (I'm not a real Londoner) and, though there's an underlying sense of the numinous, it didn't counteract the bleakness of these unlived lives.

#100: Emotionally Weird -- Kate Atkinson

Emotionally Weird could be said to be 'about' the act of story-telling, in all sorts of different ways. On one level it's an ongoing argument between Effie (the narrator) and her allegedly-virgin mother Nora: an argument that's almost a game ("I bet you a pound we don't hear of Davina again" and 100 pages later, "you owe me a pound"). On another, it's the story that Effie tells herself about her origins -- about her mother, and her family, and her noble ancestors. (Why else would the two of them be sitting in a decaying mansion on a wet and windy Scottish isle?) On yet another level, it's the entwined stories of the members of a creative writing group at Dundee University -- not just the stories of the individuals (each of whom is neatly and economically sketched, three-dimensional and unlikeable as anything) but the wildly different novels that they're writing.

Those novels are a neat conceit. They're all genre fiction (if you count 'pretentious literary fiction' as a genre, which I do) and each -- with deliberately, and distinctively, awful prose -- is shown in a different font: gothic for the fantasy novel, serif-italic for the Romantic novel, and so on. And each character's novel says more about its writer and his or her aims than is at first apparent. (If there's one thing that didn't quite work for me about Emotionally Weird as a whole, it's the afterword, in which the commercial successes and Booker wins of some of the minor characters are revealed.)

Effie's story is an intriguing one, because it's perfectly reasonable (though not inevitable) for the reader to work out the twist before Effie herself does. She, by the way, is not the Emotionally Weird one: she thinks of herself as normal, and she probably is more normal than the other characters -- boyfriend Bob, for example, with his TV-SF references (it is, by the way, possible to date the action of the novel precisely, by reference to episodes of Doctor Who). But then again, she's writing and rewriting and commenting on her own story, even while Nora argues with her about the details, and reveals twists and turns of which Perfectly Post-modern Effie (help, I just wanted to diverge into word-play about 'ineffable') is wholly ignorant.

It's also a very, very funny book -- not just because of the setting (1970s student life in Dundee) but because of the characterisation, the cleverness, the quiet affectionate mockery of every single character including Effie herself. A joyful book, too, because of a complicit enjoyment in the prose, a sense of the author grinning and inviting you to share the joke, to write yourself in.