Human Croquet

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The novel. The novel and the nature of telling stories is sort of what is going on in this book. The basic gist, without giving away too much is a young woman is telling a story, which may be true or may be a novel she's working on, to a woman who may be her mother or may not be. The story is about a few weeks in the winter of 1972 at a college in Dundee, Scotland. The narrator is an English major (is that what they call them over there across the pond?) who is writing a detective novel for a creative writing class, so the story breaks every now and then to have some of the awful student novel given in the text. Along with the interjection of this novel within the story, the 'real world' intrudes on the text too, with dialogue between the narrator and the woman who may or may not be her mother, and to give one last tweak to the stories within stories structure the woman who may or may not be the narrator's mother has her own story to tell. She’s definitely not herself,’ Templeton murmured to the barman as they watched Nellie toasting the empty air.”

All the world and time is Atkinson’s stage, and this is certainly an ambitious and clever novel that offers alternative readings of not only scenes, but characters’ interpretations of events. What the reader accepts is up to her or him, but nothing is predictable. It’s 1926, and eight years after the end of the Great War, England is still recovering. However, in London, the dazzling nightlife has become a magnet for a diverse range of people, from peers of the realm to gangsters, to corrupt cops, and everything in between. This isn't a book to read if you need a linear structure, an easily comprehensible plot or a really satisfactory resolution. On the other hand, if you think you come from a dysfunctional family then you haven't met Isobel's relatives and maybe you should make their acquaintance. Or maybe Isobel's family isn't so dysfunctional after all. At the end of the novel I wasn't entirely sure about that point. Frobisher (lived in Ealing-but prefer the police station to his Ealing terrace), had a fixation on the Cokers, particularly Nellie.

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I’m just giving you a flavour of the dialogue; trying to have the sort of fun that Atkinson must have had writing it. And which I didn’t really get reading it.’

I loved the setting, as Atkinson captures the feeling of 1920s London. From the gritty streets to the posh clubs to the dirty underbelly of the elite, I was transported. In addition, there are drugs, mob wars, the sex trade, the chase of fame and fortune, and murder to contend with. No, it’s more involved than that: for example, Nora’s sister turns up in Effie’s tale before Effie even knows who she is; elements of magical realism and all that. Also, Effie is taking a Creative Writing course, where her assignment is a detective novel featuring a “Madam Astarti”, and elements of that story are intertwined too. Ironically, the Astarti story is stilted and full of clichés, just as you’d expect a novice might write.’ This time Atkinson takes us to London in 1926, principally to the night life and the exotic clubs where the very rich, the powerful and criminals mixed as one. We meet Nellie Coker, just out of prison, who owns five of these night clubs all of them set up with the proceeds of crime. She is an amazing character. Why has a crowd of well dressed toffs and some early shift workers gathered outside Holloway Prison so early one morning in 1926? It’s for ‘her’ - the her in question being Ma (Nellie/Ellen) Coker, the Queen of Clubs, the shrines of post war gaiety as she’s released from a six month stint inside. Watching Ma leave and the crowd disperse is DCI John Frobisher and he has a plan and Gwendolen Kelling, a librarian from York finds herself in the midst of it all.While I expected time travel to play a more significant role in the book it seemed almost an afterthought . I usually don't enjoy that type of thing but this was fun. I did get somewhat frustrated by all the alternate realities in the final quarter of the book. The traditionalist in me wanted to know the "real" story, but that is Atkinson's point...that lies with the storyteller who "knows how it ends". I alternated between admiring this book - and getting quite cross with it. I thought it was a mess. But a brilliant one. On one level I admire the author's ambition. The book tries to be everything. It's a romance, a historical novel, a medidation on time and nature, a work of magic realism, a homage to Shakespearean comedy, and an inspired set of variations and improvisations. matter if a reader recognizes every gesture in Atkinson's literary high-wire act, because the multitude of characters are defined with such vivid specificity that they -- and what happens to them -- matter the most. is an elusive task. Atkinson has a deft ability to convey that quality of simultaneous knowing and not knowing that is fundamental to human thought. In this way, both her novels feature a Muriel Sparkish motif of the narrative voice alternately

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. It's a dream (or halucination) we and we arent' told it's a dream until the very end of the book. It's not real. And it's a cheat. It took a while for me to get into the novel, as I found myself initially as annoyed by Isobel's smart mouth and sulleness as I had been charmed by Ruby, the narrator in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. After a while, the narrative became more compelling - but almost unbearably sad - as the reasons for Isobel being the way she is became clearer. Well, sort of clearer, because in many ways what's true and what's not is never entirely resolved as the narrative skip between various realities (or possibly unrealities).WHAT is ''human croquet''? According to an explanation at the end of the novel, it's a party game in which pairs of people with raised arms act as ''hoops'' while a blindfolded person, ''the ball,'' MY THOUGHTS: It took me some time to become engaged in his book - purely a reflection of me and my state of mind, not Kate Atkinson's writing, I have come to realise. As the 1960s unfolded, Atkinson submitted readily to the work ethos of the single-sex Queen Anne Grammar School in York, where her parents ran a medical- and surgical-supplies shop. By the time she left home for Dundee University and an English degree, she was ready to break away, but clueless as to what she might find. "I knew nothing about life," she says, "I didn't even know where Dundee was." As with many Atkinson novels, there are small elements of magical realism which add to the colour and atmosphere but which don’t detract from the main story. Around the Coker empire, and its police ‘associates’, clients, and suppliers, is a broad cast of characters ranging from young girls seeking their fortune in London to Distressed Gentlewomen living in a boarding house.

In essence, this is a novel about words and story-telling. Effie and her mother or possibly not her mother Nora are the two narrators. Together in a rundown house on a desolate island off the coast of Scotland, they tell each other stories. Effie tells Nora about her experiences at university in Dundee, where she studies English literature and lives with Bob, a fellow student who spends more time stoned than he does studying. Nora, rather more relunctantly and cryptically, tells Effie about their family history. Effie's story is interspersed with extracts from the not-very-good crime fiction novel she is writing for her creative writing class. In time, the two narrative strands become increasingly tangled and eventually, as was always going to happen, they merge. In this boarding house is my favourite character, Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has gone to London with a tidy inheritance and is on the lookout for a couple of missing young girls, whose families want to know if she can find them in the dance schools somewhere.

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This sounds like a mess, but the way Atkinson handles these stories within stories is not nearly as difficult as I'm making it sound, it's more confusing to think about then to actually read. The use of different fonts for different narrative levels keeps the reader from getting lost. What would have cleared it was if Ms. Atikinson had told us the truth. If she had mentioned that our protagonist has hit by a falling tree, everything from there on out would have been okay with me. I wouldn't need to be told that the protagonist was unconcious. I would have been okay with any of the strange happenings, I only needed to be told that something happened.