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The Best of All Parallel Worlds? In Kate Atkinson's novel,
history repeats itself backward and forward. No matter what category her second novel, ''Human Croquet,'' is ultimately slotted into by the literary establishment -- magical post-modern metafiction? post-magical realism? post-modern magicalism? -- it offers further proof that she is off and running in a quite fantastic direction of her own devising. Isobel Fairfax, the heroine of ''Human Croquet,'' is an omniscient narrator who, paradoxically, often hasn't a clue about what has really happened. Like Ruby Lennox, the droll narrator of ''Behind the Scenes at the Museum,'' Isobel is a child with knowledge of family history and world events beyond and outside herself -- but somehow her possession of such wisdom is nevertheless plausible. She knows the past, she knows the future, but comprehending the present is an elusive task. Atkinson has a deft ability to convey that quality of simultaneous knowing and not knowing that is fundamental to human thought. In this way, both her novels feature a Muriel Sparkish motif of the narrative voice alternately running ahead and lagging behind the steadily advancing sequence of events. ''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 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 event for the Fairfax siblings. Isobel and Charles have been more or less raised by vinegary Aunt Vinny, ''who wears funereal shades as if she's in permanent mourning for something. Her life.'' The household also includes Mr. Rice, ''the lodger who will not leave,'' who might be romantically involved with Vinny (whose ''narrow spectrum of emotions'' consists of ''irritable, irritated, irritating''), although Gordon, now returned to the bosom of his family with ''the Debbie-wife'' in tow, thinks such a thing could happen only ''when time goes backward.'' It's not immediately apparent, but the present-day action of the novel all takes place on April 1, 1960, Isobel's 16th birthday. Set in chapters that alternate past and present, ''Human Croquet'' opens with an excursive yet breezy account of the first few million years of the great Forest of Lythe. There, once the English began to chop down the trees, ''the unwashed children of Eve'' (the angry, bad-tempered fairies in the forest) ''loitered with intent on banks of wild thyme listening furiously to the encroaching axes.'' In 1580, one Francis Fairfax was given ''a great swath of land'' by the Queen herself, and there at the edge of the forest he erected Fairfax Manor. His red-haired wife, a mysterious dryadic figure, quite literally vanished (history repeats itself backward and forward in this novel) in front of the Lady Oak tree, leaving a curse on the Fairfax name. The tree still stands in sight of Isobel's window, ''solitary and ancient,'' emblazoned with a ''WS'' that might have been carved by William Shakespeare, who is said to have spent his lost years at Fairfax Manor. Isobel's family, such as it is, lives in a house called Arden, built after World War I on the long-lost foundations of Fairfax Manor (which, true to the family curse -- ''everything will always go wrong just when it looks as if it might go right'' -- burned down in 1605). Shakespeare-steeped readers might suspect Atkinson of alluding to the play ''Arden of Feversham,'' about the 1551 murder of Thomas Arden, which was published in 1592 and was, for a time, attributed to Shakespeare, whose own ''As You Like It,'' published in 1599, is probably set in the Forest of Arden in north Warwickshire. But there is also the possibility that Atkinson was thinking of the 1864 Tennyson poem ''Enoch Arden,'' about a vanished husband who returns years later to find that his devoted wife has remarried. Or could she be tipping her hat to the turn-of-the-century British author E. Nesbit, whose children's book ''The House of Arden'' concerns a brother and sister -- living beside their ancestral home, a ruined castle called Arden, with an aunt who takes in lodgers -- who travel through time looking for their father? In the hands of a lesser writer, these sorts of allusions could freight the book with too much significance, but Atkinson is, above all, out for a good time. What makes ''Human Croquet'' so successful is that it really doesn't 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. Charles, an 18-year-old shop clerk, is obsessed with vanishing and time travel and parallel worlds. '' 'They're out there somewhere,' he says, gazing longingly at the night sky. ('If they've got any sense they'll stay there,' snorts Vinny.)'' As a child, he was dedicated to finding his missing parents, and he is still perpetually searching for clues about Eliza's disappearance, though before long readers will begin to realize that he and Isobel have known all along -- and rejected in favor of not knowing -- what has really become of Eliza. Isobel, meanwhile, pines for a boy called Malcolm Lovat, who doesn't understand that they are destined for each other. She dreams that she goes to a well and finds his severed head in the bucket. (''I am, I know, a seething caldron of adolescent hormones and Malcolm Lovat is the cipher of my lust, but decapitation?'') Two hundred and fifty pages later, those who know their Iris Murdoch will twig to the homage, en passant, to ''A Severed Head.'' (The Debbie-wife suspects that all the objects in Arden move around behind her back, another conceit familiar to readers accustomed to thinking that if it's animus mundi it must be Murdoch.) The hallucinatory aspects of ''Human Croquet'' begin to overwhelm the sensibilities of the narrative toward the end, when Isobel's omniscience ranges disturbingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) into the future. Not every reader will tolerate the book's multiplicities of possible reality. Ambiguities are as plentiful here as neat surprises, and one can never know with certainty all that is ultimately ''real'' down this rabbit hole of a story. 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,'' is propelled forward by another, ''the player.'' Atkinson tells us that ''hoops must never move from their stations, and must give no indication of their whereabouts to oncoming balls. When one game has been played the players and balls exchange roles.'' Isobel's next-door neighbor, the beleaguered yet touchingly maternal Mrs. Baxter (maker of marmalade ''the color of tawny amber and melted lions''), has the rules in a book, ''The Home Entertainer.'' ''Human croquet, that's a wonderful game -- of course we need more people for that,'' says Mrs. Baxter wistfully. The game is never played in the course of the story. But that doesn't mean that everyone hasn't been following its rules just the same. - July 6, 1997: Katharine Weber is the author of a novel, ''Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.'' |