Human Croquet

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. In a way. Nora could be too, for that matter, as there’s barely any corroboration of her story either. Except at the end where ...’ I think the reason the story works so well is down to the voice of Isobel. She's an intelligent, witty girl, but self-critical and lonely. She has a huge crush on Malcolm, one of her school-friends, and you root for her to win him over. But I also enjoyed the mysteries of the plot - the riddle of Eliza is one thing, but the apparitions Isobel experiences left me scratching my head in wonder. No, though at times the dialogue between them is. Nora is a reluctant storyteller, but sometimes interrupts Effie to tell her what’s “wrong” with her tale – too many characters (which is true), an improbable turn of events or a character killed off (which Nora says you can’t do in a comic novel) - and Effie obliges by changing her story to suit.’ Have you ever read a comedy of manners that involves time travel? Or a Gothic novel that takes place in the 1960s? Or a coming-of-age story whose rites of passage include meeting Shakespeare, witnessing several murders, burning down a house, and turning into a tree?

Isobel and Charles have been more or less raised by vinegary Aunt Vinny, ''who wears funereal shades as if she's in permanent mourning for something. Her life.'' The household also includes Mr. Rice, ''the lodger who Effie moves almost passively through all this in a kind of daze, trying to avoid her professors because she’s never quite ready to hand in any work, while constantly slipping into the Astarti assignment ...’ go right'' -- burned down in 1605). Shakespeare-steeped readers might suspect Atkinson of alluding to the play ''Arden of Feversham,'' about the 1551 murder of Thomas Arden, which was published in 1592 and 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.

Book Review: Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

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. 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. Atkinson is a striking mixture of alarming self-assurance and nervous fragility. Take, for example, two things that happened shortly after she garnered the Woman's Own award. First, she got an accountant, because she'd decided that "women have to be grown-up about money". Then, when she hit 40, she had a peculiar crisis that resulted in a year-long bout of agoraphobia. Psychiatrists proving useless, she got herself through it by reading vast numbers of books on phobias. With hindsight, I wouldn't have done so many interviews," she says. "I wouldn't have indulged them - most of them were bitches." Considering that she was described in one banner headline as the writer who "rejects marriage and the family, and believes we should live in tribes ruled by women", this response might be viewed as mild.

Here's the thing. I really enjoyed 'Case Histories,' and was looking forward to reading Human Croquet. Anticipated it. will not leave,'' who might be romantically involved with Vinny (whose ''narrow spectrum of emotions'' consists of ''irritable, irritated, irritating''), although Gordon, now returned to 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.

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Absence of Eliza has shaped our lives,'' Isobel says of her vanished mother before anything else is explained, adding that her father, Gordon, also went missing soon after her mother's disappearance, only to return seven years He had no liquor licence, but did have tame police, and Nellie learned the trade well. When a young Irish girl, Maud, died of an opium overdose, Nellie dealt with it by suggesting a couple of army chaps take her body to the river to dispose of her. 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. To be honest there was a section in the middle where I would have given up if I'd been the sort of person who gives up on books, this only happens when they are very,very dire. This certainly wasn't that, the writing was proficient and it was well edited and so on, but it was so gloomy and a bit depressing to be honest.