After the war
Kate Atkinson’s acclaimed 2013 novel “Life After Life” was constructed around an ingenious conceit. Ursula Todd’s life is interrupted again and again, each death sending her back to start over, perhaps with the ability to make choices that will produce a
Atkinson’s new book, “A God in Ruins,” includes much of the same cast of characters, but it is more of a companion to the earlier novel than a traditional sequel. A familiarity with “Life After Life” enriches the reading of “A God in Ruins,” but it is not required.
The focus of the new book falls upon Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy — reluctant model for a series of children’s books, would-be poet, nature writer, devoted husband, baffled father, misunderstood elder. The nonlinear narrative structure catches him and his loved ones at various points in the 20th century, the dates of their experiences skipping here and there between 1925 and 2012.
We are shown Teddy as a boy, secure in the affection of his family at their rural home. Even as the omniscient narrator describes a childhood filled with love, there are hints that a fall from grace is on its way: “They were all happy, this much at least he was sure of. Later on he realized it was never as simple as that. Happiness, like life itself, was as fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, as fleeting as the bluebells in the wood, but while it lasted, Fox Corner was an Arcadian dream.”
The loss of that Arcadian dream haunts not only Teddy but the next two generations as well. As Teddy ages, his daughter matures and his two grandchildren grow up, they all feel as if they have missed out on something important, something once in their grasp but now fallen away.
The bulk of the chapters of “A God in Ruins” are centered on Teddy’s years as a World War II bomber pilot for the RAF. He regularly flies into the heart of enemy territory to deliver deadly payloads to soldiers and civilians alike, risking his own life and those of his crew, all while having no idea of what the future might hold once the war is over.
These episodes echo Ursula’s wartime experiences in “Life After Life,” which included surviving the Lon- don Blitz. Atkinson knows how to create an air of historical verisimilitude without overstuffing the story with unnecessary detail, and the harrowing scenes aboard Teddy’s Halifax bomber are rendered with great care, insight and suspense.
Without an instantly captivating narrative hook like “Life After Life,” “A God in Ruins” is not as flashy as its predecessor. But Atkinson is an especially canny author, and she constructs this fiction more slowly, allowing the ironies to simmer as characters and situations are viewed from different perspectives of time and space.
The fractured narrative structure offers special insight into one of Teddy’s most emotionally fraught relationships, that with his perpetually unhappy daughter Viola. From the start, she is portrayed as selfish, self-deluding, neglectful of her children and dismissive of her mild-mannered father. But even as she wreaks havoc across the decades, Viola’s dreadful behavior becomes, if not excusable, at least understandable, thanks largely to the wry authorial voice and the way in which the narrative time-jumps reveal the context of her worldview.
Without being the least didactic, “A God in Ruins” is a very philosophical novel, concerned with the nature of fiction and the power of the imagination. Each character wants to do the right thing, if only he or she could be sure of its correct definition.
During a bit of R&R at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Teddy and Ursula debate whether “there’s a spark of the divine in the world.” No conclusions are reached, although Teddy ends up making a promise to himself: “Afterwards — because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy — he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do.”
It doesn’t sound like a complicated credo, but Atkinson’s characters demonstrate exactly how hard it is to live with kindness in a fallen world. Their struggles in the face of life’s fragility are part of what makes “A God in Ruins” so affecting and so memorable.