Things we forget to remember

Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Life After Life, told and retold versions of a woman’s life as she met her fate over and over again, changing the course of events with the smallest swerve of a choice or chance. In Atkinson’s new book she revives the same main characters, the same Second World War focus and gives the dice another shake, this time telling the story of Ursula Todd’s younger brother Teddy, previously believed killed by enemy action.

It’s not a sequel but a companion piece, Atkinson says in a careful postscript; pivotally (and probably wisely), she doesn’t repeat the Groundhog Day “trickery” of the earlier book but tells this story more or less straight. 

Teddy Todd himself is straight as a die: decent, modest, lovable, almost boring, living an “afterwards” that he had no reason to believe possible during his war. But the contented marriage he ambles into with his childhood friend Nancy proves more of a challenge in some ways than the desperate moment-to-moment demands of bomber command. His intimacy with his wife seems elusive, his only child Viola is pathologically selfish, his grandchildren cause chronic concern and, worst of all, he lives to extreme old age, his enviable luck and skill at surviving ending in nappies and helplessness.

As always in Atkinson’s novels, there are some wonderful awful characters — the vile grandma Antonia Villiers, with her fur coat “that looked as if it were made from rat skins and her teeth … as yellow as daffodils”; her loser son Dominic, “doing some brilliant shit” with paint and drugs, whose death on impact with the 3.30 from King’s Cross is one of the book’s many masterly set pieces.

Atkinson is horribly funny, especially the nearer she gets to the present day: modern parents “all seemed in thrall to their children, each one a version of the Second Coming”, a hen party on the razzle prompts the thought “was this why Emily Davidson threw herself beneath a horse? So girls could wear light-up penises on their heads?”, and a women’s wholefood co-operative turns out to mean “basically … that they bought big ugly sacks of chaff and husks, masquerading as muesli, and then divided it up between them”.

Atkinson loves asides, quotes, verbal connections, and every page has some vividly original phrase. A grumpy housekeeper has a “lard-hardened heart”, excited dogs “boil” around their master’s legs. But the tour de force is her treatment of Teddy’s experience as a bomber pilot, recreated as memorably as the Blitz scenes in Life After Life.

Atkinson’s bibliography is witness to careful research for these sections but nothing can quite account for the imaginative leaps she has made, recasting data about sorties, technical information about fighter planes and ordnance, bomber boys’ memoirs and biographies into nail-biting narratives. She is deeply sympathetic to the emotional force generated in the crews, their rituals, superstitions and tender mercies to each other. It’s a really affecting memorial to the huge numbers of bomber crew who died — more than half — but not in the least sentimental. The writing here is almost tight-lipped.

What one forgets and remembers, reports or makes up, is the book’s lasting  obsession. Teddy’s childhood is made over by his aunt into Just William-style adventures. Viola — another of the novel’s novelists — lies to her therapist but reasons that “as you got older and time went on, you realised that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history”.

Things really exist while you are reading them, Atkinson seems to be telling us — so be warned. This book will stick like one of your own memories or dreams.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16.50, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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