Review by New York Times Review
IN RECENT YEARS, a number of talented novelists have experienced a sudden and alarming loss of faith in their chosen literary form. David Shields thinks most novels are boring and disconnected from reality. Nicole Krauss is "sick of plot and characters and scenes and climax and resolution." Rachel Cusk has decided that conventional fiction is "fake and embarrassing." Karl Ove Knausgaard goes even further, dismissing the entire enterprise: "Fictional writing has no value." This distaste for the clunky machinery of traditional narrative fiction has spread quickly Some of the most interesting "novels" of the past few years - Teju Cole's "Open City," Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation," Ben Lerner's "Leaving the Atocha Station," not to mention Knausgaard's epic, "My Struggle" - are barely novels at all. They read more like memoirs, or a series of lightly fictionalized journal entries, recounting the mundane lives and off-kilter ruminations of their first-person narrators, who are either post-graduate students or blocked writers. There's a bracing smallness to these books - even those of Knausgaard, who's a miniaturist on a gargantuan scale - and a serene indifference to what has long passed for ambition in the novel. There's no plot and barely any action, very few characters, no shifting points of view or tricky chronologies, no attempt to recreate a distant era or illuminate the inner workings of a particular society at a particular moment in time. There's just the writer, eating his omelet, putting her child to bed. And the thing is, they're all terrific books - fresh, unpredictable, intellectually stimulating and often quite funny (especially OffilPs and Lerner's). It's enough to make even the most committed advocate of conventional fiction wonder if Shields and company are on to something: Maybe the realistic novel has outlived its usefulness. (God knows we've all read some boring ones.) Maybe it's time to wean ourselves off plot and character and scenes and conflict and all the rest, just leave those things to television. Maybe the most we can hope for on the page is a pinpoint focus on the writer in front of us, the adventures of a single consciousness at play. But then you read a novel like Kate Atkinson's "A God in Ruins," a sprawling, unapologetically ambitious saga that tells the story of postwar Britain through the microcosm of a single family, and you remember what a big, old-school novel can do. Atkinson's book covers almost a century, tracks four generations, and is almost inexhaustibly rich in scenes and characters and incidents. It deploys the whole realist bag of tricks, and none of it feels fake or embarrassing. In fact, it's a masterly and frequently exhilarating performance by a novelist who seems utterly undaunted by the imposing challenges she's set for herself. "A God in Ruins" is especially impressive because it's a sequel of sorts - a "companion volume," in the words of the publisher - to "Life After Life," Atkinson's fascinating 2013 novel, which introduced readers to the Todds of Fox Corner, a well-to-do British family whose lives intersect in various ways with the major historical events of the first half of the 20th century. "Life After Life" employed an unusual storytelling strategy - important characters sometimes die and then resume their lives on a different narrative trajectory - infusing what would otherwise have been a fairly conventional historical novel with a playful sense of uncertainty and almost infinite possibility. In some of her various incarnations, Ursula Todd, the main character, dies immediately after being born, drowns in the ocean, is raped by a friend of her brother's, becomes an alcoholic, suffers through an unhappy marriage, shoots Hitler, and endures the Blitz in London as a plucky single gal with a complicated romantic life. Readers enchanted with this device - and there are many - may be disappointed to learn that Atkinson shelves it in the new novel. Characters in "A God in Ruins" have only one life, usually a pinched and diminished one that they're looking back on with melancholy or regret. Every now and then, Atkinson winks at the reader, reminding us of what she's renounced. Here's Teddy Todd, Ursula's golden-boy brother, examining a painting in the home of a rich woman with whom he's having a wartime fling: "He lifted the veil on a small Rembrandt every time he passed it on the staircase. No one would miss it. ... If he took the Rembrandt his life would be quite different. He would be a thief, for one thing. A different narrative." One could easily imagine the Atkinson of "Life After Life" devoting an entire chapter to Teddy's criminal career. But here it's just a passing thought, quickly deflated: "In later life he wished he had appropriated the painting....The London house was hit by a V-2, the Rembrandt lost forever." The god mentioned in the title of the new book is none other than Teddy himself, a kindhearted, almost saintly man who improbably manages to survive more than 70 bombing runs over Nazi Germany as an R.A.F. pilot in World War II. The book is split between chapters recounting Teddy's heroic and often harrowing wartime exploits, and those that map out his placid, mostly uneventful postwar existence as a provincial journalist and lonely widower. Along the way, we also get to know his wife, Nancy; their sour and unlovable daughter, Viola (an ex-hippie turned popular novelist, "almost as good as Jodi Picoult"); and Viola's long-suffering children, Bertie and Sunny. Unlike "Life After Life," which begins at a full sprint - Ursula shoots Hitler and dies twice in the first 30 pages - "A God in Ruins" takes its time getting started. The novel opens with a series of seemingly random jumps: a quick glimpse of Teddy the pilot, followed by a long chapter set at Fox Corner in 1925, and suddenly it's 1980 and Viola's raising her kids on a commune with an unstable jerk named Dominic. These episodes are never dull - Atkinson's a sly and witty observer, with a gift for finding the perfect detail - but the reader can't help noticing a lack of narrative momentum that begins to feel deliberate. There's no mystery in the book, no drive toward discovery, no evolving story lines. Important events are telegraphed hundreds of pages in advance. The main characters seem frozen, locked inside themselves. Teddy makes no effort to change his life - never travels, experiences no sexual desire after the death of his wife, simply accepts his inevitable decline into old age. By the time we meet Viola the famous writer, she's already disillusioned with success and resigned to unhappiness: "But it didn't seem to matter how many new beginnings she had, Viola always somehow found herself in the same place, and no matter how hard she tried, the earliest template of herself always seemed to trump later versions. So why bother?" Both Teddy and Viola seem to be experiencing the same insight Nancy does when she finally accepts the certainty of her own untimely death: "Now it was settled, now there were no more possibilities." Taken together, "Life After Life" and "A God in Ruins" present the starkest possible contrast. In the first book, there's youth and a multitude of possible futures. In the second, there's only age and decay, and a single immutable past. This applies not only to the characters, but to England itself, which is portrayed over and over as a drab and diminished place. The culprit is obvious - it's the war itself, "the great fall from grace." And yet "A God in Ruins" is by no means an antiwar novel. If anything, it's a love letter to the men and boys who fought on the British side, infused with an attitude closer to "The Greatest Generation" than to "Catch-22." Atkinson doesn't romanticize the war - there are stomach-turning scenes of horror, and an acknowledgment that the R.A.F. bombers targeted civilian populations - but she, like Teddy, never questions its necessity, or minimizes its costs. For Teddy, these costs include the loss of his future, the possibility of becoming a different sort of man: "The truth was there was nothing else he wanted to do, could do. Flying on bombing raids had become him. Who he was." He's trapped forever in his Halifax bomber, fighting the good fight against impossible odds, raining destruction on the guilty and innocent alike, a god already ruined, always about to fall. An old-school novel that traces postwar Britain through the microcosm of a single family.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Atkinson calls her latest novel a companion piece to her previous book, Life after Life (2013), which vividly depicted the multiple lives led by Ursula Todd during WWII. This one follows her much-loved younger brother, Teddy. He only leads one life as a husband, father, grandfather, RAF pilot, teacher, and writer, but the ever-inventive Atkinson encompasses many phases of Ted's life within one chapter. At one moment, we are up in the air with him during one of his harrowing bombing raids (The dead are legion), and the next, we are at Teddy's nursing home, where he resides while in his nineties, witnessing his tenderhearted granddaughter reading to him from his favorite Trollope novel, though he can barely hear. Atkinson often revisits the same scene from a different perspective, adding key details, and always, there is her wry humor. She also continues to write, as she did in Life after Life, about the savagery of war in clarion prose that is graphic in detail and possessed of a singular melancholy. And whether it is the stoic Teddy, his practical wife, his unbelievably selfish daughter, or his neglected grandchildren, every one of Atkinson's characters will, at one moment or another, break readers' hearts. Atkinson mixes character, theme, and plot into a rich mix, one that will hold readers in thrall. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's legion of fans, both of her Jackson Brodie mysteries and Life after Life, will be eagerly anticipating her latest, which has a 150,000 first printing and will be backed by numerous promotional efforts, including book-club outreach.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The life expectancy of RAF pilots in World War II was notoriously short, with fewer than half surviving the war. But Teddy Todd-the beloved younger brother of Ursula Todd, whose life in all its variations was the subject of Atkinson's Life After Life-beats the odds. Inner peace means resuming a life he never expected to have in a now-diminished England. He has nightmares; a wife he loves, although not necessarily enough or in the right way; and, eventually, a daughter who blames him for her mother's early death and never misses a chance to mention the blood on his hands. As much postwar story as war story, the book is also a depiction of the way past and present mix. Atkinson fans know that she can bend time to her will, and here she effortlessly shifts between Teddy's flying days and his middle and old age, between his grandchildren and their awful mother, and back again. And, as in Life After Life, Atkinson isn't just telling a story: she's deconstructing, taking apart the notion of how we believe stories are told. Using narrative tricks that range from the subtlest sleight of hand to direct address, she makes us feel the power of storytelling not as an intellectual conceit, but as a punch in the gut. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The best novels reward readers at every level of engagement, from the casual listener seeking an engrossing audiobook with great characters to others in pursuit of a more intellectual study of structure and craft. Atkinson's latest, a companion to Life After Life, succeeds on all levels. While the two books speak to each other in ways that will entertain fans of both, A God in Ruins, the story of Teddy Todd, an RAF pilot in World War II, stands on its own. The novel presents an epic, kaleidoscopic view of Teddy and his family over the course of nearly a century. A single event is often recalled in several different ways, both from the point of view of different characters and through Teddy's subtly differing perspectives on a single event from the vantage point of multiple stages in his life. The result is a profoundly moving meditation on memory, perception, and time. Atkinson is a master of detail and character, and plot points are revealed skillfully and with purpose. The controversial ending delivers a gut punch that should remind readers what's at stake in war, in real life, and in fiction. Alex Jennings's subtle, affecting performance does Atkinson's powerful novel perfect justice. Verdict A must-listen! A God in Ruins gives fiction lovers reason to proclaim that the demise of the novel has been greatly exaggerated. ["Beautifully written but emotionally withheld; there's more to disappointed lives then just disappointment": LJ 5/15/15 review of the Little, Brown hc.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Fresh from the excellent Life After Life (2013), Atkinson takes another sidelong look at the natures of time and reality in this imaginative novel, her ninth.Transpose Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" to the skies over Europe in World War II, and you'll have some idea of the territory in which Atkinson is working. Ursula Todd, the protagonist of Life After Life, returns, appearing from time to time at just the right moments, in the manner of a chorus. The lead in this story, though, is her brother Teddy, who, having survived both childhood and the air war, is now disillusioned"The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination"and suffering from more than a little guilt that he lives while so many others do not. If Bierce might be a silent presence in the proceedings, so too might be The Best Years of Our Lives, which treats just that issuesave that we know how things turned out for the players in William Wyler's 1946 film, whereas Atkinson constantly keeps us guessing, the story looping over itself in time ("This was when people still believed in the dependable nature of timea past, a present, a futurethe tenses that Western civilization was constructed on") and presenting numerous possibilities for how Teddy's life might unfold depending on the choices he makes, to say nothing of things well beyond his control. Atkinson's narrative is without some of the showy pyrotechnics of its predecessor. Instead, it quietly, sometimes dolefully looks in on the players as, shell-shocked by a war that has dislocated whole generations and nations, they go about trying to refashion their lives and, of course, regretting things done, not done, and undone as they do. But do we really have just one life, as Ursula insists? It's a point worth pondering. A grown-up, elegant fairy tale, at least of a kind, with a humane vision of people in all their complicated splendor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
