Human Croquet

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Although, if you do fancy a visit to 1926 London, this novel definitely takes you there with its vivid, lifelul descriptions.

Kate Atkinson once again blew me away with this book. I had just finished reading "Case Histories" (5 stars), an unforgettable non-traditional mystery and expertly woven tale of identity and attachment, when I found "Human Croquet" on top of a phone box in my neighborhood. This copy has been read by a young adult who circled all the words she didn't know (quite a few in this very British book). 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.’ 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. 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. I'm not giving this book 5 stars, but I would give it four-and-a-half if I could. There are a few spots where, even in a book of alternate universes, there are some consistency problems, and a few places where the writing gets bogged down in descriptions of either philosophy or trees. (Interesting place to get bogged down, can't see the forest for, etc.)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 Of course, the world in which Nellie Coker exists is a very dangerous one, there’s always someone wanting to take the very lucrative crown, and so it is, that Nellie’s empire comes under threat from various sources, including enemies at the gates and also within the walls! mother and onetime chambermaid from Edinburgh. (Never mind her degree in English literature.) One of the Whitbread judges even had the temerity to suggest that Atkinson had written a post-modern novel but might not know it. His real passions were esoteric, as a little interest to the common man or his colleagues in Bow Street, certainly not to his wife—the Berlin Treaty between Germany and the Soviets (how could that end well?) or a demonstration of a ’televisor’ to the Royal Society by a chap called Baird (like something from a H. G. Wells novel). He had an enquiring mind. It was a curse. Even sometimes for a detective”. 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.’

later ''with a different wife altogether.'' Small children at the time, Isobel and her older brother, Charles, were left with Gordon's sour old mother, a k a the Widow, now deceased; her death was another traumatic Isobel's next-door neighbor, the beleaguered yet touchingly maternal Mrs. Baxter (maker of marmalade ''the color of tawny amber and melted lions''), has the rules in a book, ''The Home Entertainer.''''Human Beneath their costumes people could be anyone, their intentions anything. It was a frightening idea.Isabel’s narration is something that I suspect a reader will either love or hate, but for me it was one of the book’s main attractions. Isobel Fairfax, the heroine of ''Human Croquet,'' is an omniscient narrator who, paradoxically, often hasn't a clue about what has really happened. Like Ruby Lennox, the droll narrator of ''Behind the Scenes at the Museum,'' tolerate the book's multiplicities of possible reality. Ambiguities are as plentiful here as neat surprises, and one can never know with certainty all that is ultimately ''real'' down this rabbit hole of a story. 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,''

It isn’t a bad book, and I liked Emotionally Weird a little more after I’d reflected on it myself; it was clever if nothing else. But I think it would have been much better if it had been shorter. 'Nuff said?’ This is a novel most likely to be appreciated by (a) those who studied English literature at university during the 1970s (b) readers familiar with the conventions of postmodern fiction and (c) fans of Kate Atkinson's quirky style and predilection for writing about dysfunctional families.

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breezy account of the first few million years of the great Forest of Lythe. There, once the English began to chop down the trees, ''the unwashed children of Eve'' (the angry, bad-tempered fairies in the forest) ''loitered