BOOK REVIEW: A GOD IN RUINS, by Kate Atkinson

    


     Very close to the end of this book, which is built on the framework of the Second World War, Atkinson gets into the numbers.  "Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from [presumably only British] Bomber Command."  By that point, having not quite emerged from the long, ordinary, astonishing fictional life of one Edward Beresford Todd, the reader understands the significance of the number.  Those were 55,573 similar stories never told, similar lives never lived.
     You don't need to have read Atkinson's TIME AFTER TIME (here's my review) to appreciate this beautiful new companion novel.  In fact, not having read it might spare you some confusion, because didn't that book end (and also begin) with Ursula Todd, Teddy's sister, killing Hitler in front of a roomful of his hangers-on just as his political star was starting to rise?  Her lifespan from that point on could only have been counted in seconds, and very few of those.  But now, in A GOD IN RUINS, don't we see Ursula surviving the War and dying in late middle age following a stroke?  And wait - if Hitler had been killed in the early 1930's, would there even have been a War? 
     But you would not have been confused for long, because you would have known before even cracking the cover of A GOD that Time, as we know it, does not bind Atkinson; it's her plaything, not her prison.  Which is not to say that Teddy, Ursula's beloved younger brother and their mother's favorite child, is not slowly and inexorably being crushed - ruined - under its weight, just as the rest of us are.  And he lacks Ursula's handy-dandy knack (see TIME AFTER TIME) of repeatedly dying and then popping back up again in what start out, at least, as the exact same circumstances as before.  But Atkinson doesn't need the flashy gimmicks to prove to us that Teddy will come back again.  All she needs is a few lowkey mentions of the Buddha, and the song of a skylark.
     The pre-War Teddy Todd is an amiable, bright-enough young man of no particular talent or ambition who seems destined to remain in a despised career in banking because he can't think of anything better to do.  When the War arrives, he hits rather haphazardly on the idea of training to be a bomber pilot.  Then he goes off to serve his country.  Years later, when his plane is shot down over Germany, he is taken prisoner.  After the War ends, he marries the literal girl next door, the one he's loved since the age of three.  Teddy stumbles into a job as a columnist ("Nature Notes") for his local newspaper, which eventually becomes the editorship, which eventually becomes his career.  He and Nancy have a daughter.  Some nine years later, Nancy develops a brain tumor, and dies not long after.  Teddy raises Viola by himself.  She grows up to be a one-woman horror show.  When she abandons her own two children, Teddy raises them by himself too.  He gardens.  He cooks.  He does not travel, or fall in love again, or develop meaningful friendships, or have epiphanies about the meaning of life.  Time passes.  Teddy retires from the newspaper; quietly grows old, then very old;  misses all those he has loved and lost; dies.  An uncomplicated story about an uncomplicated man.  Neither of which is even possible.
     Teddy's is a life lived with decency, and Atkinson shows us, step by step, how it's done.  Teddy has fulfilled his duty to Bomber Command after 30 runs, but he knows he's a good, steady pilot who inspires confidence in his crews, so he signs up again.  And then again.  By the time he's captured, he has completed 72 bombing runs. Rained death and destruction on the Germans; done much more than his part to crush the German was machine. The postwar Teddy is well aware of the cost of his bargain with the devil, although in hindsight he would have made the same choices, and  Atkinson includes those numbers too, lest we forget: 7 million German dead, including 500,000 killed by Allied bombers. 

 

                                            Hamburg (one of the cities Teddy's crew bombed)

Five hundred thousand, including, perhaps, a white-haired, mechanically-inclined orphan boy whose song Anthony Doerr sings to us in ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE. Who's to say that fictional people don't exist in the same dimension as each other, especially during the chaos and displacement of wartime?
     Before her mind has been ravaged by the tumor, Nancy asks Teddy to help her die when the time comes.  Although he cannot bring himself to make the promise, he does bring himself to keep it.  Of course, this act of heroism is not without consequences either: unbeknownst to Teddy, Viola is a silent witness of the scene. Could it be part of the reason she becomes such an inhuman adult?  Why she eventually becomes so relentless in her efforts to move Teddy along the old-age conveyor belt toward his demise? 
     Without drama, without expecting anything in return, Teddy saves the lives of his grandchildren, Sunny and Bertie, with his patient, quotidian love for them.  But this good deed somehow goes unpunished: unlike Viola, they love him in return, each in his or her own way.
     The lesser joys of reading a Kate Atkinson novel are too many to list.  Bertie's hilarious parenthetical commentary on her mother is the voice in our ear of the snarky best friend we wish we had. Teddy, much to his chagrin, is the involuntary subject of his flamboyant, childless Aunt Izzie's  hugely successful series of boys' books, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGUSTUS ( "What makes you you?  What do you like doing?  Who are your friends?  Do you have a thingamajig, you know -" she said, struggling for alien vocabulary, "David and Goliath - a slingshot thingy?")  And then, as if Augustus were not enough of a cross to bear, Viola becomes a novelist, specializing in thinly-veiled revisionist history, and he becomes her antihero ("He also failed (apparently) to understand that the book - young girl, brilliant and precocious, troubled relationship with her single-parent father, etcetera - was about them.  Surely he knew that?  Why didn't he say something?")  Ah.  Point well taken, Kate Atkinson.  Not all literary incarnations are rewards for a life well lived.
     "A man is a god in ruins," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature.  Atkinson has the heart and wisdom  to celebrate both aspects of the dialectic.  Thanks to her, Teddy's song lives on.  Happy Father's Day, Edward Beresford Todd.

LIFE AFTER LIFE

                                                               

 



 I just finished reading Kate Atkinson's LIFE AFTER LIFE (Little, Brown, 2013).  And even though it's being reviewed everywhere, including in today's New York Times Book Review, I have thoughts about it too, and isn't sharing thoughts what blogs are for?
     I'd previously read Atkinson's STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG, and found it weirdly compelling, and I was fascinated by an early review of the current book, so I went to an uptown Barnes & Noble in New York on April 17th to hear the author read an excerpt of it and to get my newly-purchased copy signed by her.  After the reading, I actually had a dialogue with her that lasted perhaps 20 seconds.  I told her as she signed my book that I had a feeling she'd be incredibly charming, and that I'd been right.  She replied, "I'm not really that charming.  I'm going to go back to my hotel room and - " and here she hissed and made a feral gesture with both hands, like a lion extending his claws.  We both laughed, and I said, "Yes, but we [the audience] don't know that!"  Yes, Kate Atkinson and I shared a moment.
     The fact is that Atkinson was (is) incredibly charming.  Someone asked her at the reading if LIFE AFTER LIFE was about reincarnation, and she furrowed her brow and answered that she never knows what to say when people ask her that, because after all, isn't the essence of reincarnation coming back as someone else?  Which led her to share with us, in her delightful dotty/brilliant style, that her mother had died in December, which had prompted Atkinson's young granddaughter to ask, "If Nanny comes back as an animal, can we keep her as a pet?" and to confess that she herself found that prospect absolutely terrifying (as a result, Atkinson seemed to hint, not of her own fear of reincarnation, but of her fear of her mother in any form).  Evidently this then led to a family discussion of reincarnation, during which that same granddaughter (or possibly a different one?) announced that if she could come back, she would like to do so as chicken pox, "because then I'd always be warm, and I'd always have friends."  And to me, it seemed perfectly right for Atkinson to have exactly that kind of granddaughter.
     So, about the book.  It is not, as Atkinson accurately pointed out, about reincarnation, because although Ursula Todd does repeatedly return to life after she dies, it's always as herself, and always into the same circumstances, although she never ends up quite the same twice.  It's disorienting at first to read of a baby who dies immediately after her birth in 1911, strangled by her umbilical cord because the doctor couldn't get there in time, only to next see her rescued from that same circumstance by that same doctor, who this time managed to beat the snowstorm.  But you get used to this sort of time travel after a while, and after a longer while, you begin to discern a pattern.  Each time Ursula survives an incident that had previously killed her, a fog lifts for her infinitesimally.  Little Ursula, a child at Fox Corner again and again, doesn't know about any of her past experiences, but she eventually begins to recognize events and places that she has no reason to recognize; to develop a sixth sense about people and neighborhoods and days like Armistice Day in 1918; to suffer inexplicable terrors at certain junctures, that cause her to act in slightly different ways than she might otherwise have.  So, although at first Ursula stumbles through her life as blindsided and infuriated and tortured by circumstances as the rest of us, she is very, very slowly given opportunities to learn.  To, in Atkinson's words, "get it right."
     Once, on her sixteenth birthday, Ursula, feeling completely powerless, is raped in her own house by her older brother's visiting friend.  Her mother, unaccountably, blames her and ceases to love her, and Ursula 's ensuing loss of self-respect leads her later in that particular life into alcoholism and an abusive marriage.  On her next sixteenth birthday, Ursula stops the would-be rapist in his tracks by punching and kicking him.  Never again does she have a drinking problem.  Never again does she subject herself to emotional or physical abuse.
    Time and again, Ursula lives through waking nightmares - in particular, the London Blitz, which mars each of her adult lives no matter what she's done in the previous ones.  But if it weren't for the
nightly bombing raids and her eventual role as a witness to them, Ursula would never have learned of her own courage, stamina, power.  She would never have been able to finally carry out the deed for which she ultimately realizes she had been born.
     TIME AFTER TIME is prefaced by quotes from Nietzsche, Plato, and one Edward Beresford Todd, the latter being Ursula's beloved, irreplaceable younger brother, who says: "What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right?  Wouldn't that be wonderful?"   Yes.  It would be.  It is.  As wonderful as it is to learn that an assassination can be committed not out of hatred and rage, but out of self-sacrifice and love.  As wonderful as it is to come to know Ursula and to watch her complete her circle.