Kate Atkinson’s long-awaited companion novel to her 2013 masterpiece, Life After Life, was released in May this year. The book has met with a strongly approving critical response, and a generally positive reader reaction, although commentary has been less exuberantly enthusiastic and one-eyed than was seen when Life hit the shelves. It’s my view that this more subdued reaction is entirely justified; although Life was a hard act to follow for any book, I don’t think Atkinson sticks her landing in this story, and thus the companion novel is not a peer, but rather a poor cousin, to Life’s brilliance.
Titled A God in Ruins, Atkinson picks up the story a secondary (but important) character from Life After Life – Teddy Todd, the younger brother of Life’s protagonist, Ursula Todd. Teddy is one of the most beloved characters in Life, both to Ursula herself (he’s her favourite brother, and equal favourite sibling with her sister Pamela) and to readers. Indeed, it is her actions to save the life of Teddy during the war that finally brings Ursula’s groundhog-day multiple life cycles to a close, suggesting that the saving of Teddy was the key purpose of Ursula’s lives.
A God in Ruins, then, promised much, in giving us the story of the life of this most special boy, as he moves through childhood into adolescence, young adulthood, maturity and old age. Unlike in Life After Life, Atkinson doesn’t use an ostensible device in this novel; Ursula’s repeating lifespans, which showed the butterfly effect principle to such devastatingly powerful effect, isn’t replicated here.
Teddy’s life travels in a seemingly straight line from where the book opens, with young Ted being schmoozed by his feckless aunt Izzie into giving up details of his life to provide fodder for her childrens’ novels, to its close in Teddy’s extreme old age. Certainly, Atkinson plays around with backward looks and forward leaps, but in a seemingly conventional mode; there’s no sense that something strange is at play. This is itself an illusion, because there is in fact a catch; but it more closely resembles the surprise gotcha used in Atkinson’s earlier work, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, than the frank foregrounding of the repeated timeline in Life. (So much so that to say more on this subject would constitute a spoiler, so I will not).
While Life After Life concentrates much of its action in the pre-war and war years, especially focusing on the question of whether World War II was preventable, it doesn’t ever feel like A Book About War, writ large. Rather, it’s a book about decisions, about human volition, about the permeable nature of reality. War, and particularly the Blitz, provide a backdrop for Ursula and her lives, but it is not the dominant theme.
Interestingly, though even less of the words of A God in Ruins take place during the war, this book does feel and read like a book about World War II, albeit one focusing, as all Atkinson’s novels do, on individual, familial consequences. In her postscript to the novel, Atkinson is explicit about her desire to write a book about the Second World War from an intimate perspective; Teddy, a Halifax pilot in Bomber Command, gives her the window to achieve this goal. And while the majority of the book either precedes or follows Teddy’s time in the air, that phase of his life shapes and colours all the rest much more profoundly than it does for Ursula in Life After Life.
There are some lovely, resonant sidelights in this book, especially for fans of Life After Life. The extra flesh on the bones of some of Life’s characters, and the different perspective on them provided by the Teddy-eye view, is deeply satisfying, and helps fill in the narrative holes that even the most beloved books leave behind. In particular, the greater insight into Izzie, and Teddy’s view of his mother Sylvie, casts a new light on how those characters are read in the earlier book.
That said, this story is much less about Teddy’s birth family (somewhat excepting Ursula, who is very important to Teddy) than it is about the family he creates with wife Nancy, who is also a character brought forward from Life. Nancy, their daughter Viola, and Viola’s two children Sunny and Bertie, are really the main supporting cast to Teddy’s life, and his interactions and relationships with them across the course of his long life.
There is no doubt that Atkinson has characterisation down to fine art. Despite being less engaged with this book than I had hoped to be, I was thoroughly drawn in to the characters of Viola, Sunny and Bertie in particular. Nancy, for all that she is central to the action, remained more aloof, but this was perhaps intentional.
Viola is a brilliantly awful narcissist, a terrible daughter and an even more terrible mother; in her grasping, self-centred, thoughtless cruelty, she looms large on the page, although the causative basis for her antagonisms isn’t shown until late in the book. (That’s another gotcha, which it would spoil to reveal). Despite her horribleness, I liked Viola, because she read as deeply real – making stupid decisions and suffering genuine consequences for them, uneasily aware all the time of how much she was stuffing up but unable to turn the ship around. Her late-breaking literary success is splendidly ironic, and I’m pretty sure it’s Atkinson having a tongue-in-cheek poke at herself.
Viola’s children are likewise multi-layered human beings, especially Sunny, her eldest child. Sunny is a revolting toddler – or is he? We only see his preschool self through Viola’s discontented and jaded eyes. What’s undeniable is that Atkinson gives Sunny a hard row to hoe in his life, and inflicts more direct traumas on him than anyone else in this sad bunch of miseries. I was pleased that she allowed him a kind of serenity in the end, even though it had to be accomplished by cutting off his family entirely.
When trying to put my finger on exactly why I feel this book is much less successful than Life After Life, I came to the conclusion that it’s two things. Firstly, this book is much more grim than Life After Life. “Life, essentially, is disappointing,” seems to be its message. “Whatever you hope or dream for, it’s meaningless and probably will come to nothing. So give up now.” Teddy’s life is a surprise, and not a good one, to him – he does not become who he thought he would, he does not live the life that he felt he either wanted to or owed to the world. I am most certainly not the right audience for this particular brand of nihilism, and it sat poorly with me.
Secondly, the device deployed at the end (the gotcha) made me really cranky, and soured my impression of the rest of the book. It is a tired, rarely well-used device, and frankly, I didn’t think Atkinson used it well. Far from adding depth or dimension to the story, it actually destroyed the plot to a large extent for me. Because the reveal came so very late in the text – 5 pages from the end, in fact – it means the whole book suffers from the late pivot effect in my mind. This is what I call it when a major surprise or reveal happens in a story – the later the reveal occurs, the greater its overall impact (positive or negative) on my overall reading of the text.
Thus, A God in Ruins for me is quite a good book, but in no way is it a great book, and it’s not in the same class as Life After Life or even Atkinson’s earlier Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It will be interesting indeed to see if it longlists for the Booker.