A God in Ruins

An Amazon Best Book of May 2015: Talk about being your own tough act to follow! Having accomplished a near miracle with Life After Life, in which she used a literary-do-over trope to tell the story of a British woman living between and after the two World Wars, Kate Atkinson now dares to write a companion novel that focuses on Life’s heroine Ursula Todd’s brother Teddy. Never mind that careful readers of the first book came away with the impression that Teddy most often turned up dead, in this one he’s an old man trying to come to grips with his post-War life and with a modern world and family. Switching back and forth in time (Atkinson can’t seem to help it...) between memories of his childhood and his present, Teddy emerges as a befuddled and somewhat stodgy old-man version of himself, a startlingly oblivious husband to stalwart Nancy and a wittily rueful father to a grown up daughter (“Viola was the solitary arrow they had shot blindly into the future, not knowing where she would land,” Teddy thinks. “They should have aimed better.”) Teddy never quite got over the War and he suspects that the “fact” of his being alive is as arbitrary as Ursula’s demise(s). (“He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.”) Scenes from his past bring back Ursula and other characters from the earlier book so that readers who’ve come this far with Atkinson will feel a tiny thrill of recognition; but new readers needn’t fear they’re missing the joke. There’s way less gimmick here than in the earlier book, and sometimes I almost longed for more; it was so provocative. But whether read alone or as a follow up, A God in Ruins is a novel to savor, another beautiful, tender and sly Atkinsonian glimpse into the world of a so-called ordinary mid-century British family. --Sara Nelson