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Critical Perspective

Kate Atkinson made a spectacular debut with Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), winning the prestigious Whitbread Prize as overall Book of the Year, and her two subsequent novels have also been enthusiastically reviewed. Her books are exotic and highly entertaining hybrids, for which the term 'tragi-comedy' seems insufficient. Some critics have even seen her as inventing a new, implicitly parodic, fictional genre: the anti-Family Saga novel. Certainly all three of her books are informed as much by parody as by poignancy; they are crowded with births, marriages, and deaths, outlandish incidents and eccentric characters. To call Atkinson's writing lushly detailed is an understatement; it is frenetic, and relentlessly joking. Declarations are made only to be instantly cancelled or qualified (such narrator's after-thoughts being put in brackets). Alongside what has been called an unparalleled feel for 1950s English provincial life go states of mental dislocation and disorientation: in her books, reality is 'a relative kind of thing, like time'. Her characters may suffer from psychological pressures, the effects of hallucinogenic drugs - or, equally as often, from the author's send-up of 'Magic Realism'. Though nominally set in 1950s York, the Forest of Arden, or 1970s Dundee, her books are equally in the realm of the imagination, where anything is possible. They are also busily games playing, sometimes in ways reminiscent of the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, and especially the 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne. (Emotionally Weird (2000) even directly alludes to Tristram Shandy with a black half-page). This inherent sense of fun continues in Human Croquet (1997): there are a few pages with only two words. 'A BABY!' is found on the Fairfax family doorstep during the 1950s, and later on an Edwardian nanny returns to her pram after an altercation only to find 'NO BABY!'. In Emotionally Weird, differing typographies indicate extracts from the books - variously Mills & Boon romance, hard-boiled detective fiction and Tolkien-type sagas - being simultaneously written by its own characters.

Above all, Atkinson plays with chronology, shifting the flow of seasons, decades and centuries, with ease. Characters move about in space and time; they can be observed dying in one chapter, only to re-appear as their younger selves in the next. Young and confused Isobel in Human Croquet is forever 'dropping into random pockets of time then popping out again', able to enter Shakespeare's 16th century through her fantasies. In Atkinson's fiction the basic elements of family life are jumbled 'like a box of broken biscuits'. Parents disappear, children turn out to be changelings; characters can be entirely forgotten about, re-appearing many years later in differing guises. All of these disorientating devices serve to open up a family's history, unravelling it layer by layer to reveal painful truths long kept hidden: infidelity, illegitimacy, violence, sexual abuse, even incest. These secrets tick away like wartime bombs submerged for generations, only to be unearthed and potentially lethal. Her narrators find - to recall a phrase attributed to Philip Larkin - the first half of their lives ruined by parents, the second half by children. And these close-knit families represent at best a survival test, at worst a murderous threat, to the children growing up within them. Does all this make Atkinson's novels sound depressing, or heavy going? No - they are a delight.

This is definitely true of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Atkinson's most (comparatively) conventionally narrated book, and certainly the most satisfying. Like many a Family Saga novel, it depicts the struggles of four generations of a northern working class family. But it parodies the genre, beginning like Tristram Shandy with the narrator's conception, and sardonic commentary, on the family situation into which they are about to be born. Ruby Lennox is conceived on the stroke of midnight within a flat above George and Bunty's pet-shop in the shadow of York Minster, just before the 1951 Festival of Britain. Ruby's story, especially her 1950s childhood informed by the first years of mass television culture, moves forwards year by year to 1992. The intervening chapters, marked as 'footnotes', move back to the two World Wars and into the late 19th century to present the fates of those appearing in an old photograph. This structure enables a wonderful juxtaposition to be made between past and present, as family members are seen at crucial times in their lives. The gradual revelation of long-suppressed secrets builds towards Ruby's emotional acceptance of the past. Atkinson's native York itself participates in the book, as a museum of memories inhabited by the ghosts of its past, seen by Ruby at the end as 'a fake city' with 'white cardboard settlements', its streets full of strangers.

After such a multi-layered but very clear emotional trajectory, Human Croquet by comparison leaves the reader, like narrator-heroine Isobel Fairfax herself, at times 'lost in an endless dark wood'. Isobel's search for the truth of what happened to her darkly seductive mother Eliza, and her own adolescent yearning for love, precipitates an excessively playful and capricious narrative. We find ourselves in 1950s-60s suburbia and the 16th century, 'Street of Trees' and A Midsummer Night's Dream; in the young girl's mind there are doors marked 'Past', 'Present' and 'Maybe'. Unpleasant scenarios (notably a car-crash at Christmas with her boyfriend) are played out first one way, then replayed in another. In a parody of 'Magic Realism' Isobel escapes a gang of boys at a disastrous party by turning into a tree; Aunt Vinny becomes a cat. The mock-science of Parallel Universes allows this multi-dimensional murder mystery to be interrupted every so often by another time shift, so that Isobel can retrieve the situation - or be kissed by Shakespeare.

The subtitle of Emotionally Weird, 'A Comic Novel', is a heavy-handed nudge to readers of what is a fairly lightweight satire, with many of Atkinson's previous storytelling gambits. These are being told by Effie and her mother Nora in a crumbling house on 'a peat and heather' island off the coast of Scotland. Effie is recounting her life and high times in the English Department at Dundee University during 1972. There is plenty of opportunity for fun here, particularly in farcical episodes involving bumbling Professor Cousins and randy Marxist lecturer Archie. There are parties, sit-in demos, and student squalor; cannabis, eaten by Effie in home made biscuits, and the LSD taken by her lethargic boyfriend Bob give an aptly hallucinogenic glow to proceedings. Nora's much darker tale of murder and shenanigans in the Stuart-Murray family dynasty gradually interrupts, and then takes over, bringing the two life stories together and forcing both to confront events in the past that have brought them to the Island. As in her previous books, loose ends are tied up by telling us 'what happened' to the characters in their later lives. Having wonderfully subverted the Family Saga, Kate Atkinson returns at the last to its most basic convention.

- Copyright © 2002 Dr Jules Smith