War story brings smiles while punching holes in your heart
THIS IS Kate Atkinsosn’s second book dealing with World War II following the successful Life after Life which explored the premise of infinite chances.
Who would have thought you could become attached to people who die and then are alive again only to die once more. But Atkinson is an extraordinary writer with an imagination that takes no prisoners or shortcuts.
She makes you laugh and cry, but always sticks to a story that makes sense even in weird circumstances and when she’s playing with literary forms.
It’s never simply an intellectual exercise that excites academia and no one else. She always serves her readers and stories best. All these experiments are to see what Atkinson tried in the first novel and how she goes about telling the next story in her World War II homage.
Living in Britain, where memories must be part of most families’ lives, it makes sense that she would like to reflect on this horrific chunk of history that so impacted on the lives of Britons.
And she gets it done with so much individuality and such innovation that getting to know Ursula Todd best of all in the first novel, and with this one, her younger brother Teddy, is a blessing.
Not only does Atkinson capture the terror of a fighter pilot/airman who hurtles into that vortex of violence night after night with many around him dying, she manages to climb into the mind of someone who has witnessed that kind of fear and what happens to them when everything has subsided and they have escaped not only the nightmare but also death.
Everyone is changed or transformed by such world-shattering occurrences and if you were in the centre of it, harmed or not, life is different in the aftermath and that can have catastrophic effects even on a family’s bloodline.
Atkinson is so smart at finding a way to look at things in a way that few do, but when you read her thoughts and explanations, it makes perfect sense. She makes it feel like common sense and often makes you smile even while punching holes in the heart. –