Kate Atkinson
Ten years ago, to mark the opening of the Churchill Museum in London, I interviewed two women who had worked with the great man during the Second World War in the claustrophobic depths of the Cabinet War Rooms. They came to work each night as the bombs of the Blitz fell, and danger was the only thing not in short supply. It must have been awful, I said to the two women, Olive Margerison and Lady Jacqueline Iliff. They looked at each other and smiled, and Lady Jacqueline said, "It really was the happiest time of my life. It's a terrible thing to say because so many people were suffering so dreadfully. But being a young girl, it was the most exciting thing you could imagine."
That's one of the great paradoxes of war, to feel so alive in the midst of carnage. Edward "Teddy" Todd lives this paradox every day on the pages of Kate Atkinson's new novel, A God in Ruins. As an RAF wing commander flying a Halifax bomber during the war, Teddy is both the god who is ruined by war, and the one who rains destruction from the sky. The war saves him from a life of crushing boredom in a banker's office ("the war, when it came, was a relief for Teddy"), and marks him forever ("he had personally helped to ruin poor Europe.")
But wait. Let's pull back a moment and look at the larger picture. This is a gorgeous novel, though how you feel about it may depend on how you felt about Atkinson's last book, Life After Life. If you haven't read that novel, stop now, and go read it. Go.
Life After Life divided readers, and left some people cold, but for me it was an unparalleled joy, the exquisitely unspooled tale of Ursula Todd as she lived and died over and over again during the upheaval of the Second World War. Sometimes she died violently, sometimes in despair, but always at the centre of her heart was the person she loved best, her decent, kind brother Teddy.
A God in Ruins is Teddy's story. Which Teddy, you may wonder: Which of the various Teddys in Ursula's many lives gets his own tale? This Teddy is his own man, and the tale is new, though many characters from the previous novel appear; Ursula is only a minor figure. Atkinson calls this book "a companion" to Life After Life, and there's no need to have read the previous novel to enjoy this one (though you really should. Go).
What remains in both books is Teddy's fundamental decency ("he had the soul of a country parson who had lost his faith") even as he's raining hellfire on Hamburg. As his life reaches its maximum usefulness in the sky ("flying on bombing raids had become him"), he refuses to lose his humanity there. Pretty much everything you need to know about Teddy – and about Atkinson's marvellously vinegary sense of humour – is revealed when he looks at his new baby, Viola, and thinks how lovely she is. "But then all babies were perfect, he supposed. Even Hitler."
His utility expended in the war, Teddy lives out his life as a sedately conformist English gentleman. He gardens, loves his wife Nancy and his grandchildren Bertie and Sunny, and frets over Viola, whose self-absorption defeats him at every turn. He worships things that outlive the war – birds and flowers and dogs.
That does not begin to convey Atkinson's extraordinary grace and control over the story. As in Life After Life, she plays with time like a cat with a string, moving between periods – between war and nursing home, say – often in the same paragraph. It is unsettling and exhilarating, and reminds the reader that while the past lives with us at every moment, the future does, too, in every decision made or unmade. That narrative control extends to the bravura set pieces (particularly descriptions of the unearthly beauty of bombing raids), and sly parenthetical observations on every page (an Atkinson specialty).
Then, just as I'm reading along, enjoying this novel despite (or because of) the lack of narrative trickiness of Life After Life, a thing happens. A thing I can't write about, without ruining the entire book. All I can say is that it left me with the same "what the hell?" feeling I had upon coming to a similar junction in another great war novel, Ian McEwan's Atonement.
In her Author's Note, Atkinson hints at what she was trying to achieve, but I'm not sure a book should require the author tapping you on the shoulder to understand its purpose. I won't say this twist undermines her splendid novel, but it did make me want to talk to someone about it, which is surely one of the reasons we read fiction in the first place. I might just have to join a book club now.
Elizabeth Renzetti is a Globe and Mail feature writer and the author of the novel Based On A True Story.