Human Croquet

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We see how run down everyone is after the war, while most of the characters didn't serve at the Front, the ones left behind still feel the pain of it. And we see how the clubs bring a gaiety and a release after so much grief.

There is a large cast of characters: Nellie and her six (largely adult) children; Frobisher and his dog; Gwendolen who is, I think, the star of the story; Freda and Florence, just two of the many who run away to London seeking fame and fortune; a couple of bent policemen; Frobisher's mentally fragile wife Lottie; a man with several identities intent on regaining his ill-gotten gains; a journalist; many 'Bright Young Things' (read idiots); and a number of bodies, mostly fished out of the Thames. Even the young paperboy in the opening chapter makes a cameo appearance at the end. Each of these characters is clearly depicted and memorable in their own right. There's no chance of confusing any character with any other.

Atkinson's writing continues to be wonderful. A group of 12-year-old girls is "all fruity lipgloss and incredibly tedious secrets". Young Joanna's father, a famous novelist, is "'the Howard Mason' (or sometimes, not smiling, 'that Howard Mason', which was different although Joanna wasn't sure how)". "I have no idea how to love another human being," Louise Monroe says, "unless it's by tearing them to pieces and eating them." It's as if the writer is having so much fun recalling her own time as an English student, satirising her would-be-radical classmates and dysfunctional lecturers, that she loses sight of the fact that this territory has been thoroughly covered by other novelists. (It's like a post-modernist take on David Lodge.) Despite her inventiveness there's something stereotypical about many of the (large) cast of characters. I couldn't work out whether the author was being lazy, or had just got carried away. I don't often think that I would have enjoyed a novel more if it had been shorter. This was one of those times. The increasing craziness of Effie's story grew a bit tedious after a while and, much as I love Atkinson's writing, I was relieved when she shifted into wind-up mode. For me, this was more of a 3.5 than a 4 star read. The ending itself is quite weird. Seemed rushed in some parts, and somewhat confusing (Gwendolen and Niven's part, and particularly Florence's part. It just seemed so out of place, odd and pointless). It took a while for me to get into the novel, as I found myself initially as annoyed by Isobel's smart mouth and sulleness as I had been charmed by Ruby, the narrator in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. After a while, the narrative became more compelling - but almost unbearably sad - as the reasons for Isobel being the way she is became clearer. Well, sort of clearer, because in many ways what's true and what's not is never entirely resolved as the narrative skip between various realities (or possibly unrealities).

Shrines of Gaiety" definitely has all the usual hallmarks of a Kate Atkinson novel, and as mentioned above, her writing style, vocabulary, imagination and attention to detail is superb as usual. But the plot itself is too slow to develop, and the characters themselves are bland and non-engaging and underdeveloped, and these factors definitely hurt the novel. This one was really 2.5 stars for me. I rarely dole out half stars and I don't usually have to deliberate over star allotment. But Emotionally Weird left me conflicted. I liked the first half, was bored for the second half but it does have a pretty good ending with clever last lines. I was disappointed that I didn't love Emotionally Weird, as I usually love Kate Atkinson's experimental novels. But you win some, you lose some. No, though at times the dialogue between them is. Nora is a reluctant storyteller, but sometimes interrupts Effie to tell her what’s “wrong” with her tale – too many characters (which is true), an improbable turn of events or a character killed off (which Nora says you can’t do in a comic novel) - and Effie obliges by changing her story to suit.’ As the 1960s unfolded, Atkinson submitted readily to the work ethos of the single-sex Queen Anne Grammar School in York, where her parents ran a medical- and surgical-supplies shop. By the time she left home for Dundee University and an English degree, she was ready to break away, but clueless as to what she might find. "I knew nothing about life," she says, "I didn't even know where Dundee was."

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Crime never sleeps — it was quite easy to be killed on the streets of London either by accident or design”. I like it here, it's more restful than the present, wherever that is. I shall gather nuts and berries and make myself a nest in the hollow of a tree and become as nimble as a squirrel in my great sylvan home. Does this forest have an end, does it have distinct boundaries, where the trees stop, or does it go on forever, curling like a leafy shawl around the earth, making an infinity of the great globe?" hen Kate Atkinson's first novel was named the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year in Britain, equal attention was paid to the failure of Salman Rushdie's matter if a reader recognizes every gesture in Atkinson's literary high-wire act, because the multitude of characters are defined with such vivid specificity that they -- and what happens to them -- matter the most. I said, don’t tell me! Can you just get on with it? Plus you still haven’t mentioned anything that sounds remotely comic.

After Behind the Scenes came Human Croquet , the novel she regards as her darkest and also her best. For Emotionally Weird , subtitled "A Comic Novel", she drew on her childhood Alice obsession to engineer a bravura shaggy-dog story, complete with a migraine-inducing array of typefaces, a riotous campus and a stray canine. It may sound like a lark, but writing it was tough. Atkinson was "so written out" that she threw away her first year's work, and insists that she didn't know what she was doing until the end. Then, "in a vague, mystical way", it all came together. Absence of Eliza has shaped our lives,'' Isobel says of her vanished mother before anything else is explained, adding that her father, Gordon, also went missing soon after her mother's disappearance, only to return seven years His real passions were esoteric, as a little interest to the common man or his colleagues in Bow Street, certainly not to his wife—the Berlin Treaty between Germany and the Soviets (how could that end well?) or a demonstration of a ’televisor’ to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird (like something from a H. G. Wells novel). He had an enquiring mind. It was a curse. Even sometimes for a detective”. WHAT is ''human croquet''? According to an explanation at the end of the novel, it's a party game in which pairs of people with raised arms act as ''hoops'' while a blindfolded person, ''the ball,'' Not at all,’ the toff said, swaying affably. ‘It’s a cause for festivities. Old Ma Coker is being released.’later ''with a different wife altogether.'' Small children at the time, Isobel and her older brother, Charles, were left with Gordon's sour old mother, a k a the Widow, now deceased; her death was another traumatic Well, there isn't one really. Effie is writing this comic story based on her life and reading parts of it to her mother Nora, who lives on a bleak remote island off the west coast of Scotland. The story is an inducement for Nora to respond by telling her more about her family and origins, of which she knows nothing at all.’