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Novel of the Week Kate Atkinson sprang to fame and fortune in 1995 with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the remarkable novel about a family in the 1950s that every woman educated at a northern grammar school had always intended to write. It won the Whitbread Prize and basked in mild scandal when newspapers such as the Times promptly claimed that the author was a chambermaid. In an act of generosity all too rare in literary circles, Hilary Mantel sprang forward to write a magnificent essay on the novel in the London Review of Books. Among other things, she pointed out that Atkinson had only worked temporarily as a chambermaid; actually, she was a respectable graduate of English Literature. Given the overall setting for Emotionally Weird, it is hard not to wish that Atkinson had avoided university altogether. Every page of this, like Human Croquet, is suffused with literary references and theories. The central character, Effie, is a young woman staying with her mother, Nora, on a remote Scottish island in 1972. While the latter brews disgusting concoctions out of oatmeal and seaweed, Effie describes her life reading Eng Lit at Dundee University. She is living with Bob, a fellow student who lives on biryanis and "sincerely thought he was going to be a Time Lord when he grew up". An assortment of stereotypical characters inhabit the novel, ranging from a lesbian separatist feminist to Mrs McCue, who uses Scottish words and has a family of hamsters chewing through her house. Effie attends creative-writing sessions and sit-ins, rescues an injured dog, struggles with an essay on George Eliot and, within the framework of her stay on the island, learns more about her family's myths and legends. Everyone who endured this period has probably thought of writing a comic novel about it. Atkinson has lost none of her verve for capturing the essence of a character's appearance - the feminist whose nipples, like the eyes in certain portraits, seem to follow you around the room is one of many delicious observations - nor has she lost her wit. As in Human Croquet, she is playing to her weaknesses, not her strengths. Effie's narrative, like that of Ruby in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is strongly influenced by Tristram Shandy, so that when she faints the page goes black. Her mother (or is she?) interjects like a Greek chorus, weaving in tales of her own doomed Scottish family. "Why is it that everyone has had an interesting and dramatic life except for me?" Effie asks, before discovering the melodramatic truth of her own conception and birth. The characters' attempts at fiction form the best part of the novel. Some are helpfully reproduced in different typefaces; others - such as Kara's Lawrentian novella about a woman who goes back to the land to discover her emotional and sexual roots, "a journey which seemed to involve unnecessarily large amounts of dung and mud and seed of all kinds, but mainly male" - are left to the imagination. The vanity of the would-be authors is horribly funny. But it does not, any more than the descriptions of bad music, food and theory, make a good book. Atkinson is brilliantly,
defiantly playful with the stuff of fiction - playful in a way that
few women novelists besides Muriel Spark and Carol Shields have permitted
themselves to be. She is angry, too. Such anger is sorely needed,
given that women writers are still expected to write gentle, genteel
works of fiction. Yet this seems too close to flogging a dead horse.
I would lay good money on Emotionally Weird having been written long
before Atkinson's first and second novels, put away, then reworked
because the grotesques that it skewers were too irresistible. It entertains
on a superficial level, by means of the vigour of its prose and the
eventual unravelling of Nora's secret, but the setting and the endless
"exploration" of narrative and language make it tedious.
In the end, the reader's rage outstrips that of the author. You blame
her for putting you in the company of these dunces, and hang her with
her own rope. |