Kate Atkinson 9781526148537

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Kate Atkinson

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CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVELISTS Series editor  Daniel Lea

already published J.G. Ballard  Andrzej Gasiorek Julian Barnes  Peter Childs Pat Barker  John Brannigan A.S. Byatt  Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos Jim Crace  Philip Tew Howard Jacobson  David Brauner James Kelman  Simon Kővesi Iain Sinclair  Brian Baker Graham Swift  Daniel Lea Irvine Welsh  Aaron Kelly Jeanette Winterson  Susana Onega

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Kate Atkinson Armelle Parey

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Armelle Parey 2022 The right of Armelle Parey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manche​ster​univ​ersi​typr​ess.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4852 0 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Series editor’s foreword Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1 2 3

4 5

Introduction: Kate Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity Coming-​of-​age novels: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird Forays into other genres: theatre and short stories Defamiliarising detective fiction with Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky Re-​imagining the war in Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription Of endings in Kate Atkinson’s novels

Bibliography Index

page vi viii ix 1 34 76

98 138 182 208 228

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Series editor’s foreword

Contemporary British Novelists offers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory, Contemporary British Novelists explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts. The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious identifications of a cultural framework that must be continuously remade and renamed. The contemporary British novel defies easy categorisation and rather than offering bland guarantees as to the current trajectories of literary production, volumes in this series contest the very terms that are employed to unify them. How does one conceptualise, isolate and define the mutability of the contemporary? What legitimacy can be claimed for a singular Britishness given the multivocality implicit in the redefinition of national identities? Can the novel form adequately represent reading communities increasingly dependent upon digitalised communication? These polemical considerations are the theoretical backbone of the series, and attest to the difficulties of formulating a coherent analytical approach to the discontinuities and incoherencies of the present. Contemporary British Novelists does not seek to appropriate its subjects for prescriptive formal or generic categories; rather it aims to explore the ways in which aesthetics are reproduced, refined

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and repositioned through recent prose writing. If the overarching architecture of the contemporary always eludes description, then the grandest ambition of this series must be to plot at least some of its dimensions. Daniel Lea

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Acknowledgements

A section of Chapter 1 is a revised version of articles that appeared in The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies 20 (2013) and in Nathalie Martinière and Estelle Epinoux’s Rewriting in the 20th –​21st Centuries: Aesthetic Choice or Political Act? (Houdiard 2015). A much shorter version of Chapter 3 appeared in Etudes britanniques contemporaines 58 (2020). Part of Chapter 4 appeared in Etudes britanniques contemporaines 62 (2022). As Kate Atkinson has Effie say in Emotionally Weird, adapting John Donne, ‘No woman is an island’ (EW 219). Genuine thanks to Paul Clark at Manchester University Press and the anonymous experts and reader for supporting the project. Warm-​ hearted thanks are due to family, colleagues and friends for their support and notably to Josephine McNamara for her generous encouragement and faith, to Georges Letissier and Isabelle Roblin for their valuable advice, to Andrew Guy and Sandra Robinson for their helpful proof-​reading, to James and Jacques McNamara for simply being there. This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Annick and Gérard Parey.

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Abbreviations

Works by Kate Atkinson which are cited parenthetically throughout this book are abbreviated as follows: BSM HC EW Ab NEW CH OGT WWGN SETD LL GR Tr BS

Behind the Scenes at the Museum. 1995. London: Black Swan, 1996. Human Croquet. 1997. London: Black Swan, 1998. Emotionally Weird. 2000. London: Black Swan, 2001. Abandonment. Traverse Theatre/​Nick Hern Books, 2000. Not the End of the World. London: Doubleday, 2002. Case Histories. 2004. London: Doubleday, 2006. One Good Turn. 2006. London: Doubleday, 2007. When Will There Be Good News? 2008. London: Doubleday, 2009. Started Early, Took My Dog. 2010. London: Doubleday, 2011. Life After Life. London: Doubleday, 2013. A God in Ruins. 2015. London: Doubleday, 2016. Transcription. London: Doubleday, 2018. Big Sky. London: Doubleday, 2019.

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Introduction: Kate Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity

Kate Atkinson arrived at the forefront of the literary scene when her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won both Whitbread Book of the Year and First Novel awards in 1995. The novel, which begins with a narrator in the guise of an omniscient foetus and then alternates chapters in the present tense on the main character growing up with episodes from the family past, was acclaimed for its high degree of inventiveness and originality (Parker 2002, 74–​75; Tolan 2008, 13). About twenty years later, Atkinson won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Novel Award in 2013 and 2015, respectively, for Life After Life, which tells the story or stories of one Ursula Todd who lives her life over and over again in the period that encompasses the two world wars, and A God in Ruins, which goes back and forth across the twentieth century with a focus on the Second World War since the main character, Ursula’s brother, is a pilot. In between, Atkinson was awarded the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2005 for Case Histories (2004) in which she introduced the character of private detective Jackson Brodie, who was to reappear in four subsequent novels to date. What these prize-​ winning novels taken as landmarks indicate is Atkinson’s continuing concern for storytelling, the writing of the past and her remarkable versatility in terms of form and narrative. Born on 20 December 1951, a single child to a couple running a medical and surgical supplies shop, and an avid reader, Kate Atkinson grew up in York before studying for a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Dundee, followed by a doctorate on American fiction that was however ‘refused at its viva’ (Clark 2001)1 but which informed her writing.2 Atkinson turned to writing short stories in the early 1980s, when in her thirties.

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‘In China’ won a competition by Woman’s Own magazine in 1986 and ‘Karmic Mothers –​Fact or Fiction?’ won the Ian St James Award in 1993. She was forty-​three by the time she published Behind the Scenes at the Museum. As of today, Atkinson is the author of eleven novels, one full-​length play and one collection of short stories.3 Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) was shortly followed by Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000), all marked by firework-​like expansiveness and a high degree of self-​reflexivity. Emotionally Weird was written approximately over the same period (1997–​99) as Abandonment (Atkinson ‘Behind the Scenes’ 2000), a play eventually performed by Traverse Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival in July 2000. Because she felt she had been ‘writing herself into a metafictional corner’ (Atkinson The Scotsman 2010) with her first three novels and especially with Emotionally Weird, she went back to writing short stories and published her collection Not the End of the World, only three stories of which had appeared or been read elsewhere before. Atkinson then returned to novel writing, now exploring realism (Tolan 2008, 10) with Case Histories (2004) followed by One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008) and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), all featuring and developing the character of detective Jackson Brodie. Following the BBC adaptation (2011, 2013) with Jason Isaacs in the leading role, Atkinson abandoned the character until she could ‘get the internal Jackson back’ (after his being externalised by the actor): she ‘kind of reclaimed him’ (Atkinson 2019, 361) in Big Sky (2019). In the meantime, the writer went back to writing about the past, mainly the Second World War and its aftermath. Life After Life (2013) offers successive versions of Ursula Todd’s life as the heroine is born, dies, is born again and so on, each time hoping to improve the world she lives in. Its companion piece, A God in Ruins (2015), intertwines different periods but focuses on Teddy Todd, Ursula’s favourite brother, his war and his life afterwards, including that of his offspring. With a similarly complex time frame, Transcription (2018) evokes London in 1940 and 1950 through a different set of characters, mostly focusing on young Juliet Armstrong enrolled as a Secret Service worker by MI5. The reception of Atkinson’s work has been consistently positive. Life After Life featured as number 20 in The Guardian’s 100 best books list for the twenty-​first century established towards the end

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of 2019. Atkinson’s novels are widely reviewed in Britain and in the USA and the critical academic interest in her work, not restricted to her prize-​ winning novels, extends beyond Britain. Human Croquet is the main object of full chapters in Julie Sanders’s Novel Shakespeares and Kevin Paul Smith’s The Postmodern Fairy Tale. Critics have pointed to Atkinson’s ‘originality and individual style that have marked her out as a significant talent’ (Rennison 12) and she has been deemed ‘a unique voice in British fiction’ (Tolan 2008, 11). Yet, her work can be said to be ‘underrated’ (Clark 2018) as it is considered in relatively few studies in contemporary fiction. The only book-​length study to date dedicated to Atkinson’s oeuvre is Brian Diemert’s introductory Understanding Kate Atkinson (2020) after Emma Parker’s seminal Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader’s Guide in the Continuum Contemporaries Series in 2002. Nick Rennison included her in his Contemporary Novelists in 2005, while Fiona Tolan interviewed the novelist for the collection Writers Talk (2008) edited with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson. Her work is mentioned in Glenda Norquay’s The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing (2012) in relation to genre fiction and in David James’ edited collection, British Fiction since 1945 (2015), in relation to feminism. James Acheson’s The Contemporary British Novel since 2000 (2017) includes Glenda Norquay’s scholarly analysis devoted to Atkinson’s work. Contrary, for instance, to Zadie Smith or A.S. Byatt who have published critical essays or prefaces and contributed many pieces to the Guardian or Ian McEwan who is regularly interviewed on current affairs, Atkinson is a private writer who does not often take a public stance in public affairs, literary or otherwise, even if she has occasionally prefaced re-​editions.4 She thus wrote introductions to Jane Austen’s The Watsons (2007) and Pride and Prejudice (2010), Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (2011) and Richmal Crompton’s William the Good (2016), on whose character she based her Augustus in Life After Life. Atkinson remains however an ‘outsider’ (Tolan 2008, 4) in the sense she was never part of the London literary scene as she lives in Edinburgh and often locates her novels in the north of England and in Scotland; a number of her novels focus on women’s lives, and like other women authors (such as Pat Barker, Carol Shields, A.S. Byatt), she started writing after her marriage and the birth of her children.

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At the beginning of her public career, her winning the Whitbread Book of the Year award with Behind the Scenes at the Museum over Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh was somewhat marred by sexist and snobbish comments. As pointed out by Hilary Mantel: On the day after Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian’s headline read: ‘Rushdie makes it a losing double.’ Thus Rushdie is reminded of his disappointments, Atkinson gets no credit, and the uninformed reader assumes that this year’s Whitbread is a damp squib. But read on. ‘A 44-​year-​old chambermaid won one of Britain’s leading literary awards last night.’ Was this the Guardian? Was this 1996? One felt spun back in time to, say, 1956. (Mantel)5

Literary snobbery was apparent too in the fact that ‘Richard Hoggart, chairman of the Whitbread judges, said that Atkinson had written a Post-​Modern novel, but might not know it’ (Mantel).6 Atkinson’s work, has, however, since continued to garner praise and recognition. Atkinson was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 2011. She won the E.M. Forster award granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. On top of the awards already mentioned, Case Histories was on the shortlist in 2004 for the Whitbread/​Costa awards. Life After Life won the Independent Bookseller Book of the Year award, the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Woman’s Prize for Fiction in 2014. One Good Turn (2006) was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year and Transcription for the British Book of the Year in Fiction award in 2019. Possibly dissatisfied with the system of literary awards, she asked her publishers in 2019 not to enter her work in book competitions anymore (Hughes). Academia’s relatively moderate interest in Kate Atkinson and her never once having been selected for the Booker Prize may partly be due to her best-​selling results.7 In his glowing review of A God in Ruins, Matt Cain notes: ‘Life After Life notably missed out on many of the major literary prizes, perhaps because of critical snobbery; I’ve heard critics and fellow authors deride Atkinson because in the past she’s worked in genre and her novels have sold in their millions’. As Atkinson noticed herself, ‘there’s that curiously

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British form of intellectual snobbery which proposes that if you’re popular you can’t be good, if you sell you must have sold out. This is insulting to readers and audiences alike’ (Atkinson ‘Behind the Scenes’ 2000). Indeed, as Pierre Bourdieu noted, high art belongs to ‘the field of restricted production’, while ‘average’ or commercial art is mass marketed (Bourdieu 54, 82). Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Atkinson’s fiction on the basis of a popularity which suggests high readability. Regardless of the fact that readability may be considered a quality for the relation it sets up between text and reader, Atkinson’s work is accessible as well as challenging (Clark 2003, 14; Norquay 2017, 119). Her eleven novels tackle different genres and experiment with narrative structure so that, to some extent, Atkinson seems to reinvent herself as a writer each time. Yet, there is of course something quintessential and ‘distinctive’ (Hadley) about Atkinson’s fiction –​as is suggested by the fact that the writer’s name now appears in bigger font than her titles on new editions and re-​editions of her novels. As an American reviewer put it, ‘On whatever shelves they are arranged, her books share some key traits: They are literary and accessible and marvels of construction; they are funny, offbeat and full of parenthetical asides, sharp and sly and tinged with sadness’ (Kaufmann). The main objective of this book is to explore the singularity and significance of Atkinson’s fiction over twenty-​ five years, since the publication of her first novel, while situating her work in the constantly changing contemporary landscape. From the perspective of literary history, with her first novel published in 1995 and the latest one in 2019, Atkinson’s work stands at the turn of the century and thus seems to encompass postmodernism and its aftermath, both of which are marked by a process of hybridisation that combines elements from different sources to create a third ‘species’, a process that, as we shall see, is at work in Atkinson’s oeuvre.8 An aspect of postmodernism mentioned by John Barth and particularly significant when discussing Kate Atkinson’s work is that Barth’s ideal postmodernist novelist ‘aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal … he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of … professional devotees of high art’ (Barth 70, emphasis in original). This ties in with Leslie Fiedler’s earlier injunction to close the gap

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between high and low art forms in ‘Cross the Border –​Close the Gap’ (1968).9 As James Acheson sums it up: One of the features of literary postmodernism that distinguishes it from the high modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s is the difference in attitude to popular culture taken by its practitioners. Where the literary high modernist alludes in his or her writing to only the very best literature, art and music, the postmodern writer readily calls attention to various aspects of popular culture, including comic books, cartoons, films, televisions, pop art and pop music. (Acheson 2017, 7)10

Atkinson certainly straddles the divide too, when she convenes popular songs along with T.S. Eliot’s poetry in Life After Life, for instance, but also when she takes on genre fiction, like detective fiction in her Brodie novels and spy fiction in Transcription. Overall, hybridity –​here used as an umbrella term for any deliberate combination of distinct elements –​seems like a very apt notion to encompass Atkinson’s aesthetics because, throughout her career, she has convened and appropriated genre, from the ‘family saga’ (McDermott 68; Hargreaves 41) in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Life After Life through fantasy in Human Croquet, detective fiction to the historical novel and, more recently, the spy novel. A few critics have recognised Atkinson’s fiction as ‘genre-​ defying’ (Merritt 2015).11 Atkinson does not write within a genre but appropriates it as another intertext with which a dynamic link is established as she instils an uncommon dimension into it and creates what Bahktin calls a ‘hybrid construction’ when looking at linguistic occurrences: ‘an utterance that belongs, by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two languages, two semantic and axiological belief systems’ (Bahktin 304). The process, in general, may thus lead to a wealth of results. As summed up by Vanessa Guignery, ‘The encounters and mixtures triggered off by hybrid processes open up new perspectives on the world and result in artistic forms which can combine different styles, languages, modes and genres’ (Guignery 2011, 3). Interestingly, in the course of hybridisation combining, as Atkinson does, a recognisable style with uncommon features, the well-​known genre is scrutinised, challenged and transformed,

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subsumed into a novel construction. ‘Defamiliarisation’ (Shklovsky 2017), ‘re-​vision’ (Rich), ‘revisiting’ and ‘rewriting’ (Moraru) thus form part of the recurring vocabulary that will be used throughout this book to examine and define Atkinson’s work. Her literary production definitely belongs to her times, a period marked by hybridisation, but within the contemporary landscape Kate Atkinson’s distinctiveness derives from what could be termed her idiosyncratic aesthetics of hybridity that appropriates and re-​ combines well-​ known genres and techniques and resides in her complex yet approachable narratives that enable her to engage the reader in contemporary issues and insight into human concerns. This book purports to consider Atkinson’s fiction mostly in terms of the diverse aspects, instances and effects of the process of hybridisation at work. The following pages will first consider the literary and theoretical background to Atkinson’s work before pointing to some idiosyncratic elements of her aesthetics that will reappear throughout this study: the combination of tradition and innovation particularly noticeable in her alliance of flowing narratives and fragmentation, the use of humour, the concern for history and memory and the feminist dimension of her work.

Beyond the postmodern context Atkinson’s first novel was labelled postmodern because of its playfulness and non-​linearity, and indeed the first three novels are feasts of excess, parody and self-​conscious writing. Atkinson’s subsequent work, after her collection of stories, can be read as an illustration of the aftermath of postmodernism, when ‘there is a retreat from the extreme playfulness of postmodernism and the emphasis on textuality and on difficulty’ (Eaglestone 2013, 14) as ‘writers have clearly learned a great deal from the experimentalism of postmodernism and its forebears, they have integrated it, domesticated it, and returned some way to the more traditional forms of the novel’ (Eaglestone 2013, 15). In Daniel Weston’s words, ‘If the 1980s and 1990s represented the high-​water mark of postmodern, hyperconscious metafiction and formal deviation, then the 2000s have been a decade in which writers have sought to digest these

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trends and move beyond them’ (Weston 174). In 2004, Atkinson published Case Histories, which introduced the character of private detective Jackson Brodie, a character around whom she based her next three novels. These novels seemed to indicate a turn for realism because they tackle contemporary issues and include psychologically believable characters in a familiar environment without offending verisimilitude. Yet, Case Histories and its three sequels were followed by new experimental feasts with three historical novels that use innovative narrative modes to re-​imagine the past, notably the Second World War. These can be seen as part of a more recent trend where ‘[p]‌ostmodernism’s self-​reflexive playfulness’ remains, now coupled with ‘an underlying sense of emotional truthfulness’ (O’Gorman and Eaglestone 2). According to Alison Gibbons, ‘realism is once again a popular mode. Emotions, furthermore, are again playing a central role in literary fiction, as authors insist on our essential relationality –​our connectedness as humans to one another in the globalizing world and with fictional characters as representations of our selves’, while Peter Boxall notices ‘a new commitment to the materiality of history, a fresh awareness of the reality of the past, and of our obligation to bear witness to it’ (Boxall 12). This trend, often linked to the beginning of the twenty-​first century, is sometimes called ‘post-​postmodernism’ since it ‘marks an intensification and mutation with postmodernism’ (Nealon ix) or ‘metamodernism’, which also works in relation to postmodernism: ‘metamodernism should be situated epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism’ as ‘many [postmodern tendencies] are taking another shape, and, more importantly, a new sens, a new meaning and direction’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker, emphasis in original). Either way, what has replaced postmodernism is itself a new hybrid construction grafted on the previous situation. As put quite simply and clearly by artist Luke Turner, ‘Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and

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universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism’ (Turner). In other words, ‘the postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on –​as do those of modernism –​in our contemporary twenty-​first century world’ (Hutcheon 2002, 181) but critics infuse its aftermath with a renewal of seriousness, sincerity, materiality, history, and so on. Looking at Atkinson’s more recent work, Glenda Norquay points to what might look like a similar evolution in this novelist’s fiction: considering it retains postmodern qualities, Atkinson’s fiction has also ‘shifted to encompass larger questions about how the self might be understood in terms of past, present and future’ (Norquay 2017, 126–​127). However, one may add that in Atkinson’s case, despite their complicated construction, her novels always focus on characters as individuals, if in search of their own identity.

On combining tradition and innovation The context for Atkinson’s developing aesthetics of hybridity is thus marked in the 2000s by ‘the fuller gestation’ (Weston 177) of the trend identified by Gasiorek in Post-​War British Fiction: ‘the dichotomy between realism and experimentalism is misleading in the post-​war context because numerous novelists have sought to transcend it in their writing’ (Gasiorek 17 quoted in Weston 177). Daniel Weston gives the examples of Julian Barnes’s evolution from History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters to The Sense of an Ending in which the suspicion of metanarrative is still present but held in check by a realist narrative. He also mentions Graham Swift’s change from ‘hyper reflexive Waterland to Wish You Were Here where disordered chronology is less obstructive’ (Weston 183). Jennifer Hodgson in her chapter ‘Experiment’ admits that ‘today, to speak of an “experimental novel” seems like a quaint anachronism, given that the non-​ linearity, chronological displacement, fragmentary selves, metafictional self-​ consciousness, multi-​ modality and trans-​ mediality that were the markers of twentieth-​ century experiment are seen up and down best-​seller lists (in the works, for example, of Ali Smith, David Mitchell, Jon McGregor amongst

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others)’ (Hodgson 59). Hodgson seems to associate experiment in literature with ‘private language and broken syntax’, authors united in their ‘antipathy towards “the literary” and novelistic convention’, favouring ‘a predominant mode of sincerity’ (Hodgson 58). Yet, Hodgson concludes that literary experiment still builds on literary convention, if in its own way: ‘For these writers the idea that the novel, in its traditional form, is no longer fit for purpose is now a given. But their works seek to demonstrate that the failure and malfunctioning of its narrative principles and conventions can still perform important work. This is metafiction –​but not as we know it’ (Hodgson 65). In Weston’s words, ‘experimentalism and realism do not always exist as polar opposites, but … they cohabit in particular texts and, increasingly over the course of the decade … the accommodation of one to another is perhaps a defining feature of novelistic variation’ (Weston 195). For her part, Atkinson rejects the notion of experimentalism in contemporary fiction, considering that ‘no one is doing anything as experimental as what was being done a hundred years ago’ (Guardian podcast on Transcription), referring to modernism, and she prefers to apply to her work the term ‘innovative’ as she tries ‘to make things new and fresh’ (Hughes). Atkinson’s work is part of the contemporary syncretism or hybridity as her fiction offers what could be called ‘literary page-​turners’: ‘literary’, not merely because of its multiple intertextual references, but because it remains free from genre conventions and innovative; and ‘page-​turner’ because she captures the reader’s interest in her characters and stories. As Jonathan Dee puts it, ‘Atkinson’s exceptional reader-​friendliness has always been a Trojan horse, a way of delivering something pointed in the guise of something smoothly familiar. She occupies that rare cultural sweet spot wherein she scoops up awards for artistic excellence while also reliably hitting the bestseller lists’ (Dee). In fact, Atkinson’s work combines postmodern narrative and stylistic techniques with aspects of realism.12 Atkinson makes no claim to be holding George Eliot’s mirror,13 declaring ‘a novel is about itself’ (Sikka). Yet, her fiction teems with convincing characters whose emotional lives engage the reader. She uses realist conventions (such as precise geographical details of her characters’ progress through the streets of York or London or the research underlying all historical novels and implying a concern with

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verisimilitude and accuracy) but these are deflated by a form of self-​reflexivity. Atkinson’s fiction thus offers complex plots which involve many full-​fledged characters confronted with a multiplicity of events within disruptive time narration as well as defamiliarised genres and events. Alternating despair and humour, her narratives are marked by excess and coincidences with the irruption of the tragic, or the unexpected, with more or less disastrous consequences. Claire Hanson rightly notes similarities with Angela Carter for the ‘bewildering array of characters’ and with Jeanette Winterson for ‘free wheeling narratives in which stories proliferate’ (Hanson 29). The work of all three British women writers is indeed marked by innovation and independence. In this respect, apart from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Atkinson has acknowledged in various interviews (see Tolan 2008, 8) the liberating influence of American writing and authors such as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut and Steve Katz, some of whom she studied for her PhD (Steffens). Her early novels in particular display a high degree of self-​ reflexivity that qualifies them as metafictional. As defined by Patricia Waugh in 1984, ‘Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-​consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions between fiction and reality’ (Waugh 40). ‘The construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion’ (Waugh 43) is a key feature of postmodern literature as it is linked to the ‘sense that reality or history are provisional’ (Waugh 44) that is often achieved through foregrounded intertextuality. Atkinson’s fiction is highly intertextual, ranging for instance from fairy tales, songs, Carroll’s Alice books, du Maurier’s Rebecca14 to Winston Churchill’s war speeches via T.S. Eliot’s poetry, which is another instance of how the novelist reconciles literature and popularity. However, intertextuality in Atkinson’s work is put to different uses and no longer necessarily challenges reality or history, as we shall see when examining her historical novels. The ‘reality hunger’, which David Shields feels and promotes in the contemporary novel, can be felt in the materiality and factuality of Atkinson’s fiction but the novelist never relinquishes a highly imaginative form of storytelling and it is doubtful she would agree with Shields’s statement that ‘[a]‌ll the best stories are true’ (David Shields 50).

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My contention is that Atkinson’s hybrid work combines for her reader the pleasure of storytelling with innovative narrative techniques. In her interview with Fiona Tolan at the time of the publication of Case Histories, Atkinson took on the label ‘old-​ fashioned storyteller’ (Tolan 2008, 7) because of her particular focus on narrative and characters –​which could also be interpreted as an instance of the return to or revival of narrative since the 1990s. Of her own account, she noted a closeness to Charles Dickens (Tolan 2008, 6).15 It is true her novels may remind the reader of Dickens’s expansiveness with their profusion of characters, multiplicity of stories and twists and turns. One might quote as an example the list of Ursula’s fellow wardens during the Blitz in Life After Life (354). Hilary Mantel notices something Dickensian in Atkinson’s sense of the comic alternating with the tragic.16 Indeed, humour is interlaced with darkness in some of her novels that strive to depict squalid conditions, battered childhoods and corruption uncompromisingly, especially in Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky.17 Finally, she also shares Dickens’s ability to be both literary and entertaining. True to John Barth’s definition of the postmodernist writer and despite Atkinson’s un-​modernist love of plot (and comedy), some of her work is also reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s in its focus on a character’s uncoordinated inner life rather than direct depiction of his/​her environment. Indeed, the modernist novel ‘manifested a general tendency to centre narrative in the consciousness of its characters, and to create those characters through the representation of their subjective thoughts and feelings rather than by describing them objectively’ (Lodge 2003, 57, emphasis in original). In keeping with the notion of aesthetics of hybridity developed here, Atkinson may be loquacious like Dickens in her introduction of many minor characters, but the depiction is nonetheless piecemeal and focalised. Third-​person narration in the Jackson Brodie novels and in her historical fiction is never obtrusive nor assertive –​‘there is no trace of an authorial persona, a confiding, commenting, ruminating “I” such as Fielding’s or Dickens’s or George Eliot’s’ (Lodge 2003, 56) –​ but always relays thoughts, events and people through reported speech and the perception of characters, which explains why her characters feel so real to the reader and draw empathy. Finally, one of the elements particularly remarkable in Atkinson’s oeuvre is her relentless exploration of the novel form. Ali Smith

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thus hails ‘the blitheness, the nonchalant courage, with which Kate Atkinson –​whose new novel Transcription (Transworld) is another formal high-​wire act –​regularly renews, as if it’s second nature, the possibilities of the novel form’ (Ali Smith).

Narrative and fragmentation Glenda Norquay has aptly noted Atkinson’s ‘combination of familiar and defamiliarising constructions of “events” and “characters”  ’ (Norquay 2017, 119). Another sign of Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity is that she mixes narrative, understood as the telling of events linked for instance by cause or chronology, and fragmentation, whereas the two tend to be mutually exclusive: ‘the fragmentary narrative comes close to the anti-​novel –​a work that challenges novelistic expectations, such as the employment of a linear narrative, a single protagonist and a consistent setting’ (Guignery and Drag xxii). David Shields thus dismisses the ‘traditional novel’, which he associates with plot, characters and detailed settings, and promotes collage that ‘demands fragmented materials’ (David Shields 77, 78). Atkinson never tries to ‘pull away the thing from narrative and towards contemplation’ (David Shields 82): she never gives up on plot and narrative coherence nor on character. Her novels are marked by the ampleness of their scope as they often embrace many characters over a long, non-​chronological and/​or complicated timeline. They tell stories. Her plots are full of events and complications and the characters are numerous and colourful. If James Wood had read Atkinson, he would no doubt have considered her fiction an instance of ‘hysterical realism’ about which he says ‘Stories and sub-​stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion’ and ‘The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked’ and, for Wood, to be faulted ‘because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself’ (Wood 2000). Yet, at the same time as she multiplies characters and complicates narratives, Atkinson also always delivers fragmentary narratives, i.e. narratives whose ‘most common characteristics … are incompleteness, discontinuity and heterogeneity’ (Guignery and Drag xxi). If the absence of completion is not the most obvious trait of

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Atkinson’s fiction that, on the contrary, seems to tie all the knots, the main storyline (when there is one) in the first three novels is constantly interrupted by elements that supplement it at the same time as they break it down to reflect the trauma at the heart of the narratives. Narratives from the past, real or imaginary, or completely unrelated stories are interwoven with the present or main narrative, illustrating what Merritt Moseley calls ‘the braid’ in his attempt to categorise fragmentary fiction (Moseley 9). These narratives do not articulate the past into a whole either: discontinuity characterises the family histories told in Behind the Scenes at the Museum as in Human Croquet and the past appears as non-​ linear. Heterogeneity rules in Atkinson’s multi-​strand narratives as polyphony or juxtaposition of texts offer different standpoints and convey the sense of ‘a chaotic and problematic reality’, most visibly in Emotionally Weird where ‘the disparateness of textual material, instead of being concealed within a coherent narrative, is explicitly made visible’ (D’Ambrosio 19). Indeed, Atkinson reaches the limits of the hybridisation process in Emotionally Weird (if hybridity implies a degree of homogeneity) as the novel is in a large part made up of juxtaposed independent narratives differing in genre, the heterogeneity of which is highlighted through the use of various fonts. Atkinson’s collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, can be read as a short story cycle or a ‘mosaic’ (Moseley 13) that, by definition, offers fragmentation.18 In Life After Life, the narrative stumbles to a halt each time the protagonist dies before time is wound back and the story repeats itself with a difference as Ursula Todd meets a different situation or makes different decisions. In the end, no single line emerges from the novel. Life After Life seems akin to what Allan Cameron identified in his study of contemporary cinema as the forking-​path narrative that proposes alternative possible narratives or trajectories: ‘the forking-​ path narrative presents us with thinking of time in terms of simultaneity and causal linkage. Rather than dispensing with the temporal, the forking-​path narrative allows us to view time at once as linear (a progression from past to present to future), and as non-​linear (a selection of parallel possibilities)’ (Cameron 12). Moreover, all Atkinson’s novels that are turned to the past embody Jean-​François Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard xxix) that is illustrated in a renewal of historical fiction that made room for

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diverse and differing voices in polyphonic narratives offering sometimes conflicting versions of the past. Even the Jackson Brodie novels, which may seem more traditional, also bear the mark of the fragmentary in the sense that they constantly upset narrative linearity as they make abundant use of free indirect style with different focalisers so that the same scene is repeated from the perspective of a different character. They offer instances of an aspect of ‘a return to a sort of modernism’: ‘the ‘multi-​strand novel’, influenced … by Woolf, … by The Waves, and by Joyce’ (Eaglestone 2013, 16). Eaglestone’s description of this sub-​genre, based on Ali Smith’s The Accidental, fits each Jackson Brodie novel in which, ‘[t]‌he narrative proceeds through the very different consciousnesses of the characters, interweaving in a non-​linear way, shifting and playing games with the chronology’ (Eaglestone 2013, 16–​17). A double-​voiced narrative is often at work in Atkinson’s fiction, when the narrator comments on or complements the main narrative. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum for instance, prolepses like the announcement of Gillian’s death (BSM 19) or complementary information added in brackets –​‘What did you think of when you were drowning? (Not much in Sandy’s case because he was hit on the head by a crate of spam as he fell in the water)’ (BSM 103) –​ bring a rupture in the narrative as they prevent a smooth linear unfolding of events. The overall effect is that ‘fragmentary writing [is] particularly suited to represent the chaos and the contingency of reality’ (Guignery and Drag xxi). Yet, the natural movement of the reader is to try to make sense of what is juxtaposed and apparently ­unrelated. In A.S. Byatt’s words, commenting on Virginia Woolf’s famous statement in ‘Modern Fiction’ that ‘The mind receives a myriad impressions –​trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel’ (Woolf [1925] 2003, 150), ‘We may be hit by random impressions, but if we’re intelligent we immediately put them in order’ (Tredell 60). For Mariano D’Ambrosio, this process of making sense is part of the programme of fragmentary fiction: ‘such polyphonic fragmented novels require each reader to be proactive in choosing a unique order of reading, to assemble the disparate parts and try to realize a unity which is never stable’ (D’Ambrosio 20). While D’Ambrosio’s remark may not be valid for

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all, it does apply to Atkinson’s fiction whose reader is allowed or invited to fill in the gaps and to try and make sense of it through a narrative. The fragmentary tends to fall into the category of Roland Barthes’s ‘writerly’ texts (Guignery and Drag xxiii), i.e. texts demanding more engagement from the reader than the easily intelligible ‘readerly’ texts. Ted Gioia has however noticed that some fragmented novels like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Zadie Smith’s NW are typical instances of twenty-​first-​century novels that reach some form of coherence which makes them more accessible to the reader (Guignery and Drag xxiii–​xxiv). Atkinson’s later fiction can be subsumed under this category but it must be noted that the novelist has always combined fragmentation with a strong narrative drive. In this respect, she somehow manages to conflate the ‘readerly’ and the ‘writerly’ as defined by Barthes, and this accessibility is partly achieved through humour, which is a major feature of Atkinson’s fiction.

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (Beckett, Endgame) Scholars have noticed a recent comic turn in contemporary fiction. Huw Marsh thinks ‘not only that much of the most interesting contemporary writing is funny and that there is a comic tendency in contemporary Anglophone fiction, but also that this humour, this comic license, allows writers of contemporary fiction to do peculiar and interesting things’ (Marsh 67). For Ulrike Zimmermann, ‘Comic writing in recent years seems to have changed its appearance and part of its functions, branching out into genres and topics which do not inherently lend themselves to comic treatment and representation. … The comic seems to appear more frequently in unexpected contexts’ (Zimmermann 149). Even though Emotionally Weird and One Good Turn are respectively subtitled ‘A Comic Novel’ and ‘A Jolly Murder Mystery’, Atkinson does not write comic novels per se but the combination of humour with subjects normally deemed serious has always been a landmark of her fiction. Writing about Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Hilary Mantel notes ‘It is, in fact, outrageously funny on almost every page, and this is a wonder, when you consider what is actually happening’ (Mantel 1996).

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Throughout her work, Atkinson includes humour in what, as will be discussed later, can also be read as narratives of trauma or, in other cases, novels of ideas or war narratives. Samuel Beckett’s paradox is thus appropriate to illustrate this aspect of Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity. After three novels Atkinson came to be described as ‘An author known for her dark, funny stories of domestic life’ (Brown 2004) and her humour is repeatedly underlined (see Carey, Merritt, Cain, O’Donoghue). One may wonder if Atkinson’s otherwise celebrated humour and endorsement of entertainment as an objective have played against her in alienating highbrow critics who think there is no place for humour in ‘serious’ literature (Tolan 2008, 5). Indeed, What may indeed be interrogated is the place and legitimacy granted to comedy, laughter and humour in a British cultural context which often establishes a hierarchy between popular arts and mass production entertainment on the one hand, and noble arts and elitism on the other. Laughter is sometimes perceived as a synonym for an escape from reality and the comic mode as a minor art, whereas some writers and artists strongly claim their status as entertainers. (Guignery §10)

And yet, as pointed out by David Lodge, the English novel includes many comic novels, amongst which ‘the work of Fielding, Sterne and Smollett … through Jane Austen and Dickens … to Evelyn Waugh’ and even novelists with no intention to write a comic novel like Hardy, George Eliot or E.M. Forster have written funny scenes (Lodge 2011, 110). Whatever the case may be, humour is undeniably present in Atkinson’s body of work that also depicts all kinds of violence, deaths and war. In Merritt’s words, ‘Big Sky is laced with Atkinson’s sharp, dry humour, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny, even when the themes are as dark as child abuse and sex trafficking’ (Merritt 2019). Indeed, as pointed out by Guignery: Since the Renaissance and the ‘serio ludere’ tradition, it has been shown that playfulness often conceals a polemical intention and that a humorous tone can throw light on social issues. A delicate balance is therefore established between levity and seriousness, irony and ideology, humour and melancholy, comedy and ethics, laughter and humanism. (Guignery §11)

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Three main theories dominate to identify and classify humour. These theories –​incongruity, superiority and relief –​are not mutually exclusive and indeed all somehow find their way into Atkinson’s fiction. Firstly, incongruity is a major source of humour or laughter. ‘Incongruity is often achieved via a juxtaposition of unlikely or unsuitable elements’ (Zimmermann 149). For instance, in Atkinson’s fiction, intertextual references to fairy tales or other texts in a context that is inappropriate bring together two situations that have little in common. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Ruby is at a loss to understand the unsaid in her mother’s and her aunt’s discourse: ‘Aunty Babs, you notice, has the same cryptic ways of communicating as Bunty. If the Germans had used Bunty and Babs instead of the Enigma coding machine they would probably have won the war’ (BSM 117). The unexpected juxtaposition between her middle-​aged female relatives and war action is a source of humour as ‘humor is a certain kind of reaction had to perceived incongruity’ (Smuts). The superiority theory of humour results in exclusion of a group as when the narrator ropes in the reader to mock her twin cousins in Behind the Scenes at the Museum: ‘they look at you with the kind of cool, level gaze that would get them bit-​parts in Invadors from Mars’ (BSM 84). Finally, the relief or release theory discusses ‘the essential structures and psychological processes that produce laughter’ (Smuts). For Freud, ‘The humorous involves a saving of emotional energy, since what might have been an emotion provoking situation turns out to be something we should treat non-​seriously. The energy building up for the serious emotional reaction can then be released’ (Smuts). In Atkinson’s fiction, the narrator often uses a character as focaliser. Humour transpires at the same time as the character’s unease in the focalised narrative through the addition of brief comments in brackets that destabilise the main discourse. For instance, ‘everyone is related (unfortunately) …’ (BSM 80). In Transcription, the heroine’s bracketed remarks usually seem to humorously question the narrative or another character. For instance, ‘This England (as if there was another one somewhere)’ (Tr 67, emphasis in original) and ‘she wasn’t going to be identifying birds, was she? (Was she?)’ (Tr 70, emphasis in original). In Big Sky, brackets also serve to insert some other character’s remark, rupturing the flow of the narrative and ironically deflecting slightly

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its authority; for instance. after the suggestion that Julia’s character as a pathologist in a TV series will soon be written out of the script: ‘she was pretty certain that she was heading for a grisly exit at the end of her “arc”. (“Aren’t we all?” Jackson said.)’ (BS 13). Humour often arises from comments that draw attention to language. The narrator thus laughs at Bunty: ‘and there are too many children, she adds, as if there were a quota’ (BSM 79). Similarly, Debbie is the butt of Isobel’s joke in Human Croquet: ‘I’m off,’ Debbie says, gathering up her skirts. ‘Your head perhaps’ I query. (HC 80)

Elsewhere, humour is triggered not so much by the stylistic repetition of questions as by the final self-​reflexive one which indicates the narrator’s self-​derision: ‘Have I succeeded in calling back yesterday? Have I stepped in the same river twice? Is the whole dreadful day going to happen again? … How many rhetorical questions can I ask myself without getting bored?’ (HC 275). Humour may be used to deconstruct the discourse of authoritarian elements in society or reveal the double standard which when still at work negates the female identity (Camus 2010 11–​12). Indeed, the parodic rewriting of fairy-​ tale episodes in Human Croquet or of myths in Not the End of the World point to the roles of victims traditionally offered to women while a number of male characters are depicted as predators (like the wife-​beating Mr Baxter in Human Croquet and references to rape in ‘Tunnel of Fish’ and ‘Temporal Anomaly’ in Not the End of the World). Sinead McDermott partly reads Behind the Scenes at the Museum as ‘a comic satire on the family, making use of black humour to punctuate received ideas of family life’ (McDermott 76). Humour however is not merely corrective. As pointed out by Zimmermann, the use of the comic may open up ‘fresh perspectives on difficult and serious topics’ (Zimmermann 150). For instance, narratives that feature characters suffering from Alzheimer’s disease may yet resort to scenes of comedy or be a source of humour through the discrepancy between the character’s perception of events and the reader’s. In Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014) as in Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog (2010) with elderly actress Tilly, the reader laughs with the character affected with dementia, a laughing-​ with which brings about a form of inclusion and

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understanding rather than exclusion and rejection. This process of inclusion through humour may be a developing trend in contemporary fiction: ‘Far from the corrective and exclusionary function traditionally associated with comedy, contemporary works insist on creating communities of laughter, on laughing-​with rather than laughing-​at’ (Guignery §23). Building on James Wood’s distinction between the ‘comedy of correction’ (laughing-​at) gradually giving way to a comedy of forgiveness (laughing-​with), Jean-​Michel Ganteau supports this idea: ‘What I find to be at work in many contemporary British novels is not so much satire instrumentalising humour so as to correct, but comedy that harnesses it the better to connect’ (Ganteau 2016 §3, emphasis in original): a type of humour that reveals common humanity and solicits positive affect (Ganteau 2016 §20). Humour for Freud is a safety valve (as we saw above) and a defence mechanism: Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances … Its fending off of the possibility of suffering places it among the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer. (Freud n.p.)

As such, humour may play a part in narrating trauma, understood as a shock the mind cannot cope with and that consequently reappears in more or less oblique ways, as is the case in Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet, where the narrators gradually overcome the traumatic experience of their sister’s and mother’s deaths, while the trauma caused by his sister’s death never leaves the protagonist in the Jackson Brodie sequence. The hybridisation of non-​ didactic humour and trauma, for instance, could be seen as an illustration of post-​postmodernism or metamodernism that reinjects contents in postmodernism and can be read as the context for the intent ‘to reconnect narrative fiction with moral sense’ (Head 4), which Dominic Head points out in Ian McEwan’s fiction and which is also present in Atkinson’s, particularly from the Jackson Brodie sequence onwards. Because of their often complex narrative structure and the role of humour, the playful dimension of Atkinson’s novels is often underlined. Besides,

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Atkinson’s interviews always mention fun: for her, reading has to be fun and writing too. She repeatedly claims that fiction is only ever fiction and refutes that novelists, or herself at least, have to interfere in the public debate. In her own words, ‘I live to entertain, I don’t live to teach or to preach or to be political’ (Allardice). Her protestations however do not pre-​empt the presence of ideas and social issues in her fiction, as can be seen in her concern with history and feminist matters.

History and memory The past, whether in the guise of history or of memory and what is retained of it, is central to all Atkinson’s novels. Most of Atkinson’s work is indeed set in a more or less distant past or develops in relation to it. Memory is personal and linked to affect: the traces of the past individuals have kept are constitutive elements of personality and identity and help the individuals inscribe themselves in a line. The heroines of the early novels are in search of a missing element in their own past and elaborate narratives of the past to inscribe themselves in a line and establish their identities. Atkinson’s Brodie sequence particularly builds on the resurgence of the past as a structural device and theme of detective fiction, whether it be entirely personal as in Case Histories or, in Started Early, Took My Dog, linked to real events such as the murders of the Yorkshire Ripper that began in 1975. Three of her more recent novels fall under the heading of historical because they evoke, as Behind the Scenes at the Museum partly did, Britain in the Second World War. This concern for the past in Atkinson’s fiction can be read in the context of the revival of historical fiction since the 1980s and 90s. In his survey of the genre, Perry Anderson explains that the genre that ‘predominated massively over all other forms of narrative down to the Edwardian era’ became ‘déclassé’ following the First World War and the rise of modernism. Historical fiction never disappeared and rose again after the post-​war boom but without consideration as a literary form (Anderson).19 The contrast is strong with the current situation when the historical novel now ‘wins literary prizes, is the primary choice of book clubs, dominates bestseller lists and is snapped up for film and TV adaptations’ (Leigh

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Wilson 145). As Leigh Wilson notes, ‘it has been argued that this historical turn has spread … to colonize the mainstream novel’ (Leigh Wilson 145). This return to history, which displays a lack of trust in master narratives (Lyotard), is often achieved through Linda Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’, i.e. postmodern novels that ‘are both intensely self-​reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’ (Hutcheon 1988, 5). Looking at historical novels of the 1990s, Diana Wallace sums up: ‘They emphasise the subjective, fragmentary nature of historical knowledge through rewritings of canonical texts, through multiple or divided narrators, fragmentary or contradictory narratives, and disruptions of linear chronology’ (Wallace 2004, 204). The questioning of the past particularly remarkable in neo-​Victorian novels has since permeated other periods in what Elodie Rousselot sees as a coherent sub-​ genre: the ‘neo-​historical’ novel that is marked by ‘creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits’ and ‘its participation in, and response to, contemporary culture’s continuing fascination with history’ (Rousselot 2–​ 3). However, considering literature in the first decade of the twenty-​first century, Peter Boxall ‘has seen a move away from the “Postmodern” celebration of story over history’ (Boxall 2013, 146). Looking at the fictional engagement with the past throughout Atkinson’s oeuvre can tell us much about the evolution of the approach to history and the past since 2000 or thereabouts, as her work ranges from something highly subjective and constructed in the trilogy to novels more directly focused on the war where the referential is back (see Boxall) and feature a list of sources at the end. Indeed, the relative lightness and playfulness of the early novels regarding the past seems to disappear in the historical novels. Atkinson’s mature work is representative of ‘post-​postmodernism’ (Nealon) insofar as she combines disruptive narrative techniques associated with postmodernism with an interest in portraying experiences of the war.

The feminist dimension ‘I was born a feminist. I will die a feminist’, Atkinson declares before uttering the usual misgivings regarding the reductive dimension of

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the label ‘feminist fiction’ (Tolan 2008, 9). For Emma Young, ‘the notions of feminism and femininity are not explicit in Atkinson’s writing’ (Young 29) but it is easy to argue that Atkinson’s fiction is feminist in the sense that it is aware of patriarchal values that discriminate against women, exposes them and privileges female characters and their perspectives. Atkinson does not write exclusively about women: when looking back to Ruby’s family roots, Behind the Scenes at the Museum generously describes the past lives of men as well as women; her story ‘Sheer Big Waste of Love’, like A God in Ruins, mostly focuses on a male protagonist. However, Atkinson does write about women: women growing up (Ruby in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Isobel in Human Croquet, Effie in Emotionally Weird), women ageing (Pam in ‘Wedding Favours’, Gloria in One Good Turn, Tracy and Tilly in Started Early, Took My Dog), women trying to fit into a pattern that does not fit but who nevertheless manage to do so (Crystal in Big Sky) or not (Bunty in Behind the Scenes at the Museum). Her fiction tends to focus on the world seen through female narrators or characters. Jackson Brodie is the main exception but if Atkinson is to be believed, he is ‘a woman in disguise’ because ‘[h]‌e likes women, and all of his male attributes are attributes that women like’ (Tolan 2008, 9). Moreover, the novels featuring Brodie always have a large feminine cast and tend to point to ways in which women have been, or are still ill-​used in some way, a concern that reaches a peak in Big Sky that includes sex trafficking in the context of globalisation. A major dimension of Atkinson’s fiction already mentioned, but that is also relevant in terms of feminist representation, is the importance granted to the past: Atkinson’s fiction details the lives of women at different stages in time. Reviewing Atkinson’s Transcription (2018), American writer Jonathan Dee realises that ‘this is what all of Atkinson’s work has ultimately been about: rescuing women’s lives and labor, both past and present, from literary invisibility’ (Dee). Dee’s phrase –​‘rescuing women’s lives and labor … from literary invisibility’ –​is interesting because it somehow ties in with Adrienne Rich’s notion of ‘re-​vision’, which is a key function for feminism and helpful to consider Atkinson’s approach: ‘Re-​vision –​the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction –​is … an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which

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we are drenched we cannot know ourselves … We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us’ (Rich 35). The societal and literary past and present, considered as normal and acceptable, are to be reconsidered with a critical eye. As will be shown in the following chapter, Atkinson exerts this ‘re-​ vision’ in her very first novel that appropriates the form of the autobiography and in the second one that reworks classic fairy tales. The well-​known fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm have been the objects of many feminist rewritings since the publication of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber in 1979 because they distil assumptions and guidelines about, notably, female roles. If Atkinson never obviously offers a direct rewriting or transposition of a particular text, the near omnipresence of fairy tales in novels set in a realist background (in her first novels and in the recent Transcription) nevertheless partakes of the contemporary revisioning of fairy tales at work amongst feminist writers. Besides the process of ‘re-​vision’, the issue at stake in her more recent re-​imaginings of the past where she highlights women’s roles during the Second World War is also, as Dee intimated, to rescue women from ‘literary invisibility’, i.e. to tell stories that have been ignored, to depict women who remained unnoticed in the background of history. In this respect, Atkinson’s fiction inscribes itself in what Jeannette King describes as ‘the wider project of second-​wave feminism’ as her evocation of the two world wars supplements the historical record as it ‘reinserts women into history not just as victims but as agents’ (King 173) with Ursula’s life as an ARP warden in Life After Life, Nancy’s spell at Bletchley Park in A God in Ruins and Juliet’s role as a spy in Transcription.20 Atkinson’s feminism is second wave, impervious to the third wave if it means ‘a desire to offer new definitions of femininity, sexuality, and the body’ (Munford 130), and mostly concerned with denouncing the injustices, inequalities and violence faced by women over the years in the private or the public sphere. For instance, in Life After Life, when Ursula works for the Home Office, the narrator caustically reports …the men who interviewed her for the job in the Home Office, men she would never see again, clearly believed that her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-​cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches

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among a sea of buffcoloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. … Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress’. (LL 241, italics mine)

Violence against women is often lurking: whether it be in a peaceful rural setting around Fox Corner when the body of a young girl is discovered or in wartime Berlin where, when trapped there with her daughter, Ursula poisons them both lest they be raped by the approaching Russian soldiers. As said above, Atkinson’s novels are marked by excess and/​or the recourse to exception understood as deviation from the ordinary, the peripetia that changes the initial situation. It is significant that they should unfold in a realist, i.e. an ordinary, setting. Indeed, ‘re-​vision’ is also exerted at the level of the domestic, the domestic space being traditionally considered as the realm of women. For Clare Hanson, Kate Atkinson is one of the writers opening ‘new perspectives on the meaning and significance of the domestic’ (Hanson 31). If we consider the locus of domestic fiction, home, traditionally associated with women, it appears that it has several functions. It is more of an idea and an ideal than a reality. Home is the ideal place that most characters look for. The idea of home is the metaphoric expression of family relationships and affections, ‘a space with marked feminine connotations and a close association with the maternal’ (Splendore 185) and the yearning for home experienced by characters like Ruby (BSM), Jackson Brodie, Martin (OGT) and Reggie (WWGN) is the indirect expression of their loneliness. It is an illusion (if a comforting one) as is made clear with Martin’s notion of the perfect home associated with his imaginary old-​fashioned wife in One Good Turn. Teenager Reggie Chase, who comes from a council flat, admires her friend and employer Dr Hunter’s house in When Will There Be Good News? but this home does not prove to be the haven Reggie imagines and needs as Dr Hunter is kidnapped there. Similarly, for the Land sisters in Case Histories, danger lies within the home because of their incestuous father. In Claire Hanson’s words, ‘Atkinson exploits the detective format to explore the pain and aggression that are frequently hidden behind the closed doors of home. In Atkinson’s

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work, the idea[l]‌of the happy family is a dangerous illusion and home is always uncanny, marked by absence, loss, and trauma’ (Hanson 31–​32). Indeed, if we consider the early novels about girls growing up, adversity often comes from inside the home and the family (Mrs Baxter and her violent husband in Human Croquet). In When Will There Be Good News?, home literally is a prison for Alison Needler and her children who are confined there to protect them from their murderous husband and father. In Life After Life, in the two instances when Ursula gets married, once in England and in another life, in Germany, she is the victim of her husband’s physical violence in the first case and of his psychological cruelty in the second case. Continuing on a feminist note, the domestic space is also a place where women across generations are shown to be defeated by housework. Echoing second-​wave feminism and Fay Weldon’s ‘unhappy housewives trapped in narrow and mundane domestic roles that render them powerless and unimportant’ (Parker 2015, 80), Bunty and her sister in the 1950s in Behind the Scenes at the Museum are slaves to the household chores. In Case Histories, a young Michelle in the late 1970s strives but fails to build the perfect home. All have expectations that cannot be fulfilled. Neodomestic stories like these, which take a new stand on the usual depiction of home, ‘illustrate the ways in which the model fails the protagonists’ (Jacobson 5). The model of what a home should be like and the consequences for the woman in charge generate frustration. Ironically, one of the most satisfying versions that Atkinson offers of a home and domesticity include ‘Auntie’ Doreen in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Auntie Doreen, who gives the children a better holiday with more care, time and attention than their real mother, is in fact their father’s mistress. Through Auntie Doreen and other surrogate mothers like Tracy Waterhouse in Started Early, Took My Dog, Atkinson takes the feminist stand that there are more ways than one of being a mother. Atkinson debunks the myth of maternal instinct through a character like Bunty in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, who seems unable to love her children. For Emma Parker, Behind the Scenes at the Museum shows that the myth of the perfect mother, created by patriarchy, is what generates disappointment and conflict between mother and daughter (Parker 2015, 87). Similarly, the character of Bunty is also an indictment on imposed norms of femininity.

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Adherence to these norms is not always as damaging as it is for Bunty, but they are shown to be conducive to a form of internal conflict or contradiction that women have to put up with. Emma Young examines Meredith, in ‘Transparent Fiction’, through which ‘the conflict between an authentic and performed self is brought to the fore … through the imagery of the female body and what makes a woman attractive and desirable to a man’ (Young 30). This duality between performed and authentic self is represented too through Crystal Holroyd in Big Sky, a former victim of child abuse and a prostitute, who has chosen to play the part of the ideal wife to perfection in order to save herself. As feminist fiction does, Atkinson’s offers alternatives and empowers, at least some of, her female characters. In Started Early, Took My Dog, the narrative insists on the fact that Tracy Waterhouse, former police, now head of security in a shopping centre, is a big woman, which makes her the object of mockery (SETD 27, 31). Even though the narrative follows the tenets of realism, the insistence on her size places her out of the norm and may remind the reader of extraordinary characters like Fevvers in Nights at the Circus and the Dog Woman in Sexing the Cherry who are ‘celebrations of female “monstrosity” ’ (Parker 2015, 82). Indeed, Atkinson emphasises Tracy’s ‘oversize’ as an actual strength that saves her. Overall, the feminist streak is undeniably present in Atkinson’s fiction with its denunciation or re-​vision of gender roles but it typically combines with other elements, such as the concern for historiography, humour or genre.

Chapter overview The perceived aesthetics of hybridity in Atkinson’s fiction is demonstrated in the following chapters that seek to highlight key features of her oeuvre following the order of publication. Chapter 1 focuses on her first three novels Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird that form a cluster insofar as they each portray a girl in the making and obviously rely on postmodern techniques. Yet, they are all different. Behind the Scenes at the Museum has been identified as a ‘family saga’ of

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some sort (see Clark 2003; Hargreaves and Rennison) because of its intergenerational scope spanning a century and four generations altogether but we will read it as a take on the genre of autobiography. Atkinson’s early novels seethe with intertextual references, amongst which fairy tales whose new significance and roles as they are embedded in Isobel’s narratives will be examined in Human Croquet before looking at the paroxystic uses of metafiction in Emotionally Weird. If Atkinson is first and foremost a novelist, she has also authored two plays (Nice in 1996 and Abandonment in 2000); and published circa twenty short stories, some uncollected. Chapter 2 considers some of these less examined texts. First, Abandonment, a play performed in 2000 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, is read as a neo-​Victorian text whose dynamic grafting of Victorian times with the present serves Atkinson’s concern for the past and for feminist issues through the character of the ghost and the dual-​time narrative. It then looks at Not the End of the World, the hybrid nature of Atkinson’s only collection of short stories to date, showing how the brevity of the stories is counterbalanced with elements that convey expansiveness: some of the stories appear like compressed novels, some are linked to each other, some form a frame for the others. When Atkinson returned to the novel, it was in what may first have seemed a more conventional vein than her first texts as she created the character of private investigator Jackson Brodie in Case Histories that was enthusiastically received as a crime novel. Chapter 3 argues that Atkinson does not remain circumscribed by the traditional limits of the genre but operates a defamiliarisation of crime fiction to create idiosyncratic literary novels that bear her distinctive mark in terms of character development, self-​reflexivity, temporality and rely on chance and coincidence as narrative devices. All Atkinson’s works are concerned with the relationship between past and present. Atkinson’s fiction contributes to the return to historical fiction in the early twenty-​first century and Chapter 4 discusses Atkinson’s most recent re-​imagining of the historical past, namely the Second World War, achieved by the narrative aesthetics of these novels. It examines the use of the forking-​path narrative in Life After Life (2013) as it offers successive versions of the same days lived by Ursula before and through the war. The war is represented more directly in A God in Ruins (2015) as the

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narrative partly follows Teddy’s point of view as a Halifax pilot. This text is examined as a companion novel to Life After Life since it is turns out to be another ‘what if’ narrative and picks up some of its characters and events, focusing on the imagined afterlife and memories of Ursula’s brother Teddy, the war hero. However, this chapter shows that instead of complementing the picture of the war generally drawn, the narrative in A God in Ruins interrogates the legacy of the Second World War as it insists on what gets forgotten or remains untold and can only be imagined and develops a general sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. This chapter closes on the study of secrecy as theme and technique in Transcription (2018) –​ which Atkinson refers to as a ‘jigsaw novel’ (Guardian podcast 2018) as she experiments with narrative technique and returns to a female point of view, Juliet Armstrong’s, to appropriate the genre of the spy novel and highlight the role of minor actors and actresses in MI5 projects during and after the Second World War. Finally, Chapter 5 investigates Atkinson’s engagement with conventions regarding endings and closure and the sense of poetic justice they exert or not. The chapter discusses the notion of closure as conveying a sense of completeness (as theorised by Neil Carroll, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Marjorie Garber, Catherine Belsey) and takes on board ‘the postmodern suspicion of closure, of both its arbitrariness and its foreclosing interpretative power’ (Hutcheon 2002, 66). This chapter reads Atkinson’s endings as cases in point of postmodern ambiguity that ‘exploits and yet simultaneously calls into question notions of closure’ (Hutcheon 2002, 67). Indeed, Atkinson’s rambunctious fiction tends to cohere into a whole as coincidences get explained and everything seemingly falls into place towards the end. Except that the process is either over-​emphasised through what I call ‘hyperclosure’, or occasionally sends all the pieces of the puzzle flying through a ‘surprise ending’, or challenges readers’ expectations regarding closure in detective fiction, hiding or revealing a poetics of unrest and instability. What follows are readings that situate Kate Atkinson as a significant storyteller of our time, whose art is marked by hybridity as she appropriates and re-​combines well-​known genres and techniques. Collectively, these readings circulate and account for the wealth and variety of a large body of work that is highly imaginative, multifaceted and offers narrative feasts while being anchored in

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contemporary issues. Atkinson’s work’s most striking feature may be its narrative complexity and expansiveness, suffused with relentless humour, but her novels also definitely have a feminist dimension and are infused with reflexions on the weight, distortions and workings of memory at an individual and public level.

Notes 1 The refusal is said to have been on account of ‘the antipathy between her advisor and her department head’ (Lyall). 2 According to Daneet Steffens, ‘Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and Steve Katz gave her a refreshing sense of freedom’ (Steffens) but Melanie Micir thinks this is too often taken as proof of Atkinson’s aesthetic influences (Micir 520, note 3). 3 In an interview published in June 2019, she said she was at work on two other novels (Hughes). A new novel is announced for the end of 2022, entitled Shrines of Gaiety. 4 Atkinson has pointed to a distinction between herself and herself as a writer: ‘ “I was brought up Katherine, and that’s the person I keep to myself,” she says. Kate Atkinson is a persona she inhabits in certain situations’ (Patrick). 5 Similarly, twenty years earlier, Canadian writer Carol Shields’s first novel (Small Ceremonies, 1976) was greeted with the headline ‘Housewife Writes Novel’ by an Ottawa newspaper. 6 For a detailed report on the mixture of praise and misogyny around the reception of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, see Parker (2002, 74–​82). 7 She is described as ‘the multi-​million-​pound-​selling Kate Atkinson’ by the Bookseller. www.theboo​ksel​ler.com/​news/​new-​kate-​atkin​son-​novel-​ transc​ript​ion-​com​ing-​next-​year-​6874​91a. Accessed 7 July 2020. 8 The process of hybridisation is central to David Lodge’s concept of ‘crossover fiction’ in ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?’ (1992), by which he means a combination of fabulation or non-​fiction or metafiction with realism (1992, 207–​208). It is at the heart of John Barth’s definition in ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ (1980), which sees postmodernist fiction in terms of ‘synthesis or transcension’: ‘My ideal postmodernist writer neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-​century modernist parents or his nineteenth-​century premodernist parents’ (Barth 70). The notion of hybridity is also to be found as a deliberate component in Linda Hutcheon’s definition

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of postmodernism as a ‘kind of wholesale “nudging” commitment to doubleness’ (Hutcheon 2002, 1) which ‘gives equal value to the self-​ reflexive and the historically grounded’ (Hutcheon 2002, 2). 9 The idea was later developed by Andreas Huyssen, who articulated the thesis that ‘in the postmodern era, the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture … finally, definitively broke down’ (McHale 67). 10 Yet, even if Theo D’Haen noticed as early as 1989 that ‘with the advent of postmodernism’, the detective novel, Gothic fiction, the historical novel and science-​fiction ‘(sub)genres that hitherto occupied peripheral positions [were] shifting towards the center of the system’ (D’Haen 408), which was confirmed later by Nick Bentley who observed the ‘dismantling of the divide between popular and serious literature with many writers such as Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith straddling the old divide’ (Bentley 2018, 6) and noticed ‘an increase in respect given to genre fiction’ (Bentley 2018, 7). The independence from the conventions of the genre remains a sign of literariness: ‘in contrast to genre writing, the literary remains in a deep way free and unbound’ (O’Gorman and Eaglestone 6). One may thus doubt that the divide between popular and literary fiction has fundamentally disappeared. Popular literature means genre fiction, and the latter seems to remain tainted as it is, in David Duff’s definition in Modern Genre Theory, ‘often used, sometimes pejoratively, to denote types of popular fiction in which a high degree of standardisation is apparent: for instance, detective stories, historical romances, spy thrillers and science fiction. These are collectively known as ‘genre fiction’, as distinct from more ‘serious’, highbrow fiction’ (Duff xiii). Jeremy Rosen thus argues that cultural hierarchies have not been dismantled. The debate over Kazuo Ishiguro’s incursion into fantasy with The Buried Giant (see Barnett) illustrates Jeremy Rosen’s contention that literary writers are willing to use genre for their own purpose but do not want their work to be classified as genre fiction and ‘take pains to mark their literariness by deploying recognizable literary techniques and by differentiating themselves from, often by denigrating, the lion’s share of popular culture’s voluminous output’ (Rosen 2018). 11 The adjective was picked in snippet reviews about Big Sky (Carey, Gutterman). Alex Clark mentions her ‘fluid identity as a novelist’ (Clark 2018). As Atkinson says half-​jokingly in an interview, ‘my job is to defy genre’ (Sikka). 12 A number of her novels present similarities with a type of film with non-​linear patterns which Allan Cameron names ‘modular narratives’.

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These films have a similar hybridity: ‘On the one hand, [modular narrative films] hark back to much earlier innovations of modernist literature and cinema. On the other, they point forward to future textual forms. … In this sense, cinematic modular narratives occupy a middle ground between traditional narrative and experimentation. Yet, rather than privileging one over the other, I suggest that the value of these films lies in their agnosticism, in their implicit questioning of both linear narrative and the non-​linear forms that would seek to displace it’ (Cameron 183). 13 In Adam Bede, Ch. XVII entitled ‘In which the Story Pauses a Little’, the narrator declares ‘I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’ (Eliot 1859). 14 One notes the recurrence of references to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca throughout her work as mention is made of Mrs Danvers (BSM 353) and Manderley (LL 399) or the narrator’s jealousy (WWGN 163). 15 About her tastes as a reader, Atkinson declares: ‘I do want to laugh, and cry, and see the clowns. I want that Dickensian breadth’ (Tolan 2008, 7) and ‘I like characters and I like plot and I like structure so I like all the quite old fashioned bones of what makes a novel and I think on the whole, that’s what people want to read –​it’s what I want to read’ (Brown). 16 Mantel also points out Atkinson’s wide-​ranging appeal along with her ability to alternate the comic and the tragic. ‘Anyone who reads, let’s say, Joanna Trollope will be able to read and enjoy Kate Atkinson. Her novel delivers to the populace its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his, though Atkinson has a game-​plan more sophisticated than Dickens’s, and her handling of a child’s death scene forestalls any Wildean scorn’ (Mantel 1996). 17 For Roger Clark, the ‘density and profusion of detail’ in Atkinson’s writing reminds him not only of Dickens but also of Georges Eliot and Thomas Hardy ‘in their creation of seemingly actual worlds’ (Clark 2003, 15). 18 This combination of narrative and the fragmentary may well be confirmed in Atkinson’s future 36 Views of a Woman and based on Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji where ‘sometimes Mount Fuji is everything and sometimes it’s so small because it’s about people in the foreground so I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to have this thing where the character, the woman, it’s sometimes all about her and sometimes she’s just passing by’ (Hughes). 19 In her response to Anderson’s essay, Diana Wallace points out that the historical never disappeared but that, until recently, women’s novels

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have been excluded from discussion of the genre (Lukacs only discusses novels by male authors): ‘the historical novel did not become a “recessive form” after World War I as Anderson claims. Instead it became, in Britain at least, a predominantly female form. Writers as disparate as Naomi Mitchison, Rose Macaulay, Georgette Heyer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Bryher, Hilda Vaughan, Kate O’Brien, D.K. Broster, H.F.M. Prescott, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Jean Rhys reinvented the genre in radical ways’ (Wallace 2011). 20 In another version of her life, Ursula’s small retirement party from the Home Office in June 1967 also raises the issue of the glass ceiling: ‘ “You’ve helped to pave the way for women in senior positions in the Civil Service,” Jacqueline said quietly to her … Not that senior unfortunately, she thought. Not in charge. That was still for the Maurices of this world’ (LL 421).

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1 Coming-​of-​age novels: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird The first three novels published by Kate Atkinson –​Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Human Croquet (1997), Emotionally Weird (2000) –​cannot be considered a trilogy because, ‘although they certainly do bear definite continuance of theme and style, the books resist any formal designation as a trilogy due to a lack of any overarching structure’ (Tolan 2008, 11). They also feature different characters of different ages, in different times and places. Yet, they form a cluster in the writer’s work because all three, published in relatively quick succession before she took a break in novel writing, focus on a young heroine, albeit a different one, in the process of disentangling herself from a dysfunctional or unorthodox family and facing a major revelation. ‘[E]‌ngaged in a quest for identity’ (Parker 2002, 17), the protagonists try to come to grips with an unknown or forgotten past in order to reach maturity and adulthood. Atkinson herself referred to them as a trilogy: ‘I realised they are based on Alice in Wonderland in one way or another –​but the young girl has now reached 21 and is grown up’ (Bunce 2000). She acknowledges: ‘Those three books are all coming from the same place, and were a lot to do with my childhood reading, my adolescent reading, my university reading: to do with literature’ (Tolan 2008, 10). Endowed with complex plots, these early novels all deal with the postmodern uncertain knowledge of history in a highly playful and comic manner. Metafictional, self-​conscious and intertextual, they particularly bear the mark of postmodernism because they offer textual games and a feast of narrative strategies. For some reviewers, ‘it is quite difficult to say what these earlier novels are “about”, beyond being exercises in storytelling’, going as far as to state that ‘with Emotionally Weird (2000), Atkinson seemed to

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dispense with plot altogether’ (O’Donoghue 20). Besides, instead of a pretend transparent and seamless narrative, temporal, visual and writing disruption combine in the three novels: a heterodiegetic narrative in the simple past alternates with an autodiegetic narrative told in the present tense (the present time changes from the 1950s to the 1960s and 1970s depending on the novel and goes until the moment of utterance); chapters or parts bear very explicit headings (years are indicated in Behind the Scenes at the Museum; temporality is divided in ‘Past’, ‘Present’ and ‘Future’ in Human Croquet) and Emotionally Weird features varying specific typesetting.

Narratives of self-​discovery This chapter reads Atkinson’s three early novels as narratives of self-​ discovery. Rita Felski uses the phrase for narratives in which ‘access to self-​knowledge’ is linked to the rejection of the heterosexual romance-​plot that governed women’s lives (Felski 122). Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity unfold in these feminist narratives of development that rework traditional forms like the Bildungsroman (Felski 122). The following pages examine Atkinson’s own feminist reworking of the genre. Because they give an account of the development of the young protagonist from childhood or youth into adulthood, having overcome a series of obstacles or got rid of former emotional shackles, ‘through a troubled quest for identity’ (Baldick), these novels qualify as Bildungsromane (or ‘novels of formation’), a term first used by Karl Morgenstern in 1819 and later taken up and popularised by Wilhelm Dilthey (Stević 3). The Bildungsroman is generally agreed to originate from eighteenth and nineteenth-​century Germany, notably with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–​96) translated by Thomas Carlyle in 1824 and considered to be the ‘prototype’ (Jost 99) or ‘archetype’ (McWilliams 6) of the genre, even if according to Lorna Ellis and her 1995 analysis of Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betty Thoughtless (1750), the female Bildungsroman existed prior to Goethe’s work (Joannou 200). The genre having also developed in English literature, for instance with Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–​50) and Great Expectations (1860–​61), the term is now ‘recognized

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throughout the world as a synonym for exploring human progress and development’ (McWilliams 12). By the end of the Bildungsroman, experience has shaped the hero and prepared him for life (Jost 99) and a place in society. In such a novel, the focus is on the formative years in the life of the protagonist: the hero is a child or a very young man who is shaped, formed into an adult by the events he encounters (Jost 102–​103), which is why it is also referred to as ‘novel of development’, ‘apprentice novel’ or ‘coming-​of-​age novel’. The Bildungsroman is generally read as a narrative of self-​realisation even though, as noticed by Aleksandar Stević, a large number of the English novels considered to belong to the genre end in failure of some sort (Stević 1). While Goethe’s novel is committed to ‘the ideal of reconciliation between the hero and the world’, the Bildungsroman as practised by the English and the French from the nineteenth century onward ‘explore[s]‌a fully modern socialization process’ (Stević 13). The genre initially features a hero rather than a heroine. In nineteenth and early twentieth-​century novels, when the protagonist is a heroine, the outcome of her development is limited to marriage or death (Felski 124–​125; Fraiman 5–​6). The female and/​or feminist version of the genre has attracted scholarship (Abel, Hirsch and Langland 1983, Felski 1989, Fraiman 1993, Joannou 2019) on the nineteenth century and after since ‘the genre gained new currency amongst women writers in the second half of the twentieth century’ (McWilliams 1) as part of ‘an appropriate complement to the feminist politics of emancipation’ (McWilliams 33). As the process of self-​discovery tends to be located at a later stage in the life of the character, the feminist Bildungsroman tends to cover a different period (Felski 137, 138), whereas youth is an essential component of the genre. Atkinson’s Bildungsromane take on the traditional form: her reworking appropriates the model since it focuses on young developing heroines rather than women entering a new phase of awareness in their lives. At the end of Atkinson’s narratives of development, Ruby, Isobel and Effie have become adult women shaped by their early years and able to continue on with their lives. The classical Bildungsroman sees the hero find his place in society but, as said above, the endpoint for the heroine is often marriage or death. Conversely, in the feminist Bildungsroman according to Felski, ‘the status of marriage as the

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goal and endpoint of female development is called into question by the emergence of a new plot to expose the insufficiencies of the old’ (Felski 128–​129): these novels develop life beyond the traditional ending. Atkinson’s feminist Bildungsromane differ from both the traditional and the feminist pattern according to Felski since they depict the developing years of the adolescent heroines without following the traditional pattern. Indeed, if both Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird completely sidestep the marriage plot, Atkinson’s first Bildungsroman sees its heroine married for a while until she leaves with her daughters. All three narratives leave their heroines in mid-​life about to continue on the journey of their lives. In the traditional Bildungsroman represented by Wilhelm Meister, the hero is male and female characters are incidental: they act as foils, catalysts or obstacles to the hero’s development (McWilliams 23). In Atkinson’s novels, it is the male characters who seem instrumental: Gian-​Carlo in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Malcolm in Human Croquet and Bob in Emotionally Weird are not developed except in relation to the relatively small part that they play as the love interest in the heroine’s development. Moreover, for Jerome H. Buckley, the hero of the Bildungsroman often emerges as an artist of sorts (McWilliams 15) and the genre turns into the Kunstlerroman or artist novel. McWilliams observes that there is no counterpart for women characters who are mostly doomed, citing Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) before a more positive portrait in To the Lighthouse (1927). Atkinson’s narratives reverse this early trend. In each of her first three novels, the heroine’s quest for her identity is conditioned by storytelling. Ruby, Isobel and Effie, protagonists and narrators, are shown to be successful in their respective enterprises as all three turn out to be writers (Ruby becomes a poet while Isobel and Effie turn to novel writing). In terms of form, for Rita Felski writing in 1989, the feminist Bildungsroman is ‘characterized by a historical and linear structure; female self-​ discovery and emancipation is depicted as a process of moving outward in the public realm of social engagement and activity’ (Felski 126): it is ‘biographical’, ‘dialectical’, ‘historical’ and ‘teleological’ (Felski 135) but twenty years later, Ellen McWilliams notices characteristics more suited to Atkinson’s novels when she notes that the female version of the

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genre seems to ‘work both within and against postmodern trends’ because, on the one hand, it maintains ‘the idea of a cohesive self moving towards clarity’ but, on the other hand, this is rendered through ‘a new form at odds with the measured, linear development propounded in the early Bildungsroman and related theory’ (McWilliams 20). Indeed, according to Maroula Joannou, looking at twentieth-​century narratives by women writers, contrary to the hero’s stories of adventures, ‘A woman’s quest for her identity may be explorative rather than goal-​orientated, epistemological rather than teleological, relational rather than linear, circuitous or circular rather than direct, or shifting rather than fixed’ (Joannou 203). In Atkinson’s Bildungsromane, the heroine’s quest is indeed relational, enmeshed within the family: the protagonist exists and develops in relation to past and present members of the family whose stories erupt in her narrative, which is thus circuitous. A traditional Bildungsroman usually works within the realistic illusion which it creates and sustains but twentieth-​century women writers ‘have eschewed its realism using a variety of non-​ realist genres such as the gothic and the grotesque, the utopian, and the dystopian, the fantastic, the fable and the fairy-​tale’ (Joannou 200). In Atkinson’s version of the genre in Human Croquet, realism seems to blend with fantasy when the protagonist is subject to time warps. In her three novels, the realistic or referential illusion is set up with references to many brand names that evoke ordinary daily life such as ‘we have mince pies and Ambrosia Creamed Rice Pudding’ (BSM 187) and ‘the Bob Martin display’ in the window of the pet shop (BSM 205) and with precise geographical detailing of the characters’ progress through York (BSM 194–​195, 200, 202). Yet, implementing the postmodern ‘commitment to doubleness’ (Hutcheon 2002, 1), this illusion is shattered through the instability of the ‘I’ and the recourse to intertextuality. Indeed, all three novels are problematic in terms of the narrator or narrative voice. All use at least partly first-​person narration, which as David Lodge points out, ‘is just as artful, or artificial, a method as writing about a character in the third person; but it creates an illusion of reality, it commands the willing suspension of the reader’s disbelief, by modelling itself on the discourses of personal witness: the confession, the diary, autobiography, the memoir, the deposition’ (Lodge 2003, 87–​88). The sense of authenticity and

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proximity that first-​person narrative tends to entail, if Lodge is to be believed, is challenged in every one of Atkinson’s first three novels in which the narrator keeps attracting attention to her unreliability, often with startling beginnings, such as ‘My mother is a virgin. (Trust me)’ (EW 21), which immediately challenge the expected order of things. In each novel, the protagonist is in search of the past to complete her sense of identity. To convey this, the ‘I’ is unstable and discontinuous: it changes in every chapter in Behind the Scenes at the Museum; it tries out various fairy-​tale role models in Human Croquet and stories in Emotionally Weird. Overall, they all demonstrate the importance of storytelling in the construction of the self and how truth and fiction intertwine in what Paul Ricœur calls our ever-​ changing ‘narrative identity’, that is, our necessary ability to constantly rearrange events and perceptions into a narrative that makes sense. In Ricœur’s words, ‘As the literary analysis of autobiographies confirms, the story of a life continues to be reconfigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This reconfiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told’ (Ricœur 1998, 246). All three novels are also rife with intertextuality: Dennis Walder analyses the opening of Behind the Scenes at the Museum to point to its numerous echoes of earlier novels and support thus his idea that contemporary fiction is indebted to the past. Behind the Scenes at the Museum certainly serves Walder’s point as Atkinson’s novel makes an inordinately abundant use of intertextuality which conveys self-​reflexivity. In this novel only, Marianne Camus has identified ‘no less than seventeen references to literature from Peter Pan to Great Expectations, without forgetting Chekhov or Bram Stoker’ and ‘at least fourteen references to legends and fairy tales’ (Camus 2003, 142). An intertext noticed by many in the incipit of Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (published in York in 1759). This is significant because Tristram Shandy contributed to establish ‘the self-​consciously autobiographical novel’ (Walder 45) on which Behind the Scenes at the Museum seems to be a new variation. Besides, Tristram Shandy is a novel which, as D’Ambrosio observes, ‘plays extensively with the opposition between a narrative of missing information and an extreme version of exhaustive storytelling’ (D’Ambrosio 28), two characteristics present in Behind the

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Scenes at the Museum (and Atkinson’s two subsequent novels).1 We can talk about ‘exhaustive storytelling’ (D’Ambrosio 28) in the sense that a lot of characters are created, each with at least a glimpse of their own story offered to the reader. For instance, ‘the Sunday outing’ in Behind the Scenes at the Museum introduces a gallery of minor characters that will not reappear in the narrative. Another example of this apparently ‘exhaustive storytelling’ is to be found at the end of the chapter entitled ‘Holiday’ when the narrative moves to the past tense and goes over what happened to all the characters including the dog (BSM 266–​267). Partly as a result, Atkinson’s early novels read as highly playful and comic. As one critic aptly puts it, ‘to call Atkinson’s writing lushly detailed is an understatement; it is frenetic, and relentlessly joking’ (Jules Smith). Yet, this combines with darker undertones. All three novels are ‘narrative[s]‌of missing information’ (D’Ambrosio 38), which the heroines attempt to retrieve in order to form their identities. These Bildungsromane that chart the heroines’ quest for identity have at their hearts the protagonists’ traumatic experiences –​what Freud refers to as ‘experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs’ (Caruth 5). Indeed, their respective developments are hampered or stalled by a childhood experience which is silenced or unknown and has led to trauma thus defined after Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer: ‘a psychical trauma is something that enters the psyche that is so unprecedented or overwhelming that it cannot be processed or assimilated by usual mental processes. We have, as it were, nowhere to put it and so it falls out of our conscious memory, yet is still present in the mind like an intruder or a ghost’ (Luckhurst quoted in Ganteau and Onega 10). The traumatic accident of Ruby’s twin sister’s death by drowning in Behind the Scenes at the Museum leads to the memory of the event being suppressed along with the existence of her sister. Here as with the circumstances of the disappearance of Isabel and Charles’s mother in Human Croquet, the memory is hidden because it is too painful to be acknowledged. These three novels are all articulated around individual trauma, the absence of memory and its quest. Even though they are not limited by trauma –​the narratives continue when the heroines have recovered –​Atkinson’s early novels can be read as trauma narratives, i.e. ‘fictional narratives that help readers to access traumatic experience’ (Vickroy 1). Instead of the trauma being caused

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by a historic event like the Holocaust, the Vietnam War or colonisation and racism (see Vickroy 2), trauma in Atkinson’s fiction refers to a specific event in the childhood of an individual and it can be cured. It is interesting to consider how individual trauma is represented in order to involve the reader: how is Ruby’s subjective experience as an amnesiac conveyed? How are the holes in Isobel and Charles’ memory intimated? In fact, a similar form of immersion is offered as in narratives that are anchored in a historical and cultural framework which Laurie Vickroy describes thus: ‘They immerse readers in characters’ attempt to remember, filtering survivors’ experiences through the lens of individual consciousness, with variable levels of awareness such that memory is explored through affective and unconscious associations rather than through conscious memories and structured plots’ (Vickroy 3). Indeed, if we return to the distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ as modes or presenting events, Atkinson’s novels ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ since the self-​narration covers the experience of trauma (sometimes unknown) rather than the analysis of trauma. Indeed, the traumatic experiences at the heart of the narratives are hidden and the trauma itself may be unacknowledged as is the case in Behind the Scenes at the Museum or it may hide another one as in Human Croquet where Isobel and Charles’s trauma turns out to be not their mother’s disappearance as indicated at first, but her murder. Atkinson’s early novels are marked by fragmentation, conveyed through the ‘use of multiple voices and positionings within characters or narrators as well as between them’ (Vickroy 27), and said to be typical of narratives of trauma (Eaglestone 2019, 319). Anne Whitehead notes that fiction often tries to mimic the forms and symptoms of trauma ‘so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection’ (Whitehead 3).2 Robert Eaglestone has noted the tendency to limit representation of trauma to ‘broken, fragmented works’ when it can in fact be dealt with in ‘realist and popular’ literary forms (Eaglestone 2019, 319). Postmodern trauma novels represent a trend of postmodernism that is ‘less playful’ (Schönfelder 16). One of the specificities of Atkinson’s novels –​which also participates of her aesthetics of hybridity –​is precisely that they make the trauma narrative coexist with humour and playfulness. One may note the carnivalesque humour in Behind the Scenes at the Museum in

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the scene of the Coronation on TV and Ruby’s father dying while having sex with a waitress at a family wedding belongs to the ‘grotesque’ (Splendore 206). Humour also percolates in Human Croquet through the misuse of fairy tales, while the subtitle to Emotionally Weird is ‘a comic novel’. Atkinson’s feminist Bildungsromane are all first-​ person narratives, a combination that evokes autobiography, which is another type of narrative of self-​discovery worth exploring when considering how the narrative of Ruby Lennox and her family in Behind the Scenes at the Museum participates in Atkinson’s feminist re-​vision. Human Croquet seems to depart completely from the realism of the Bildungsroman. The narrative is at times marked by the grotesque, for instance with the description of Isobel’s body –​ ‘I’m as large as England … my nose is a white cliff at Dover’ (HC 23) that is reminiscent of the excess and undecidability that characterise the description of the Dog Woman in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (24–​26). Not only does the narrative evoke fantasy or science fiction through the heroine’s sudden travels in time but Isobel’s narrative of self-​discovery hinges on fairy tales. Even more than the first two, Emotionally Weird foregrounds storytelling as self-​development.

Revising autobiography (and memory) in Behind the Scenes at the Museum Expanding on Beatriz Domínguez García’s idea that in several fictional autobiographies by women writers, including Atkinson, ‘memory is being used as a counterpart to history’ (Domínguez García 2011, 59), the following pages examine Behind the Scenes at the Museum as a novel that appropriates the genre of (fictional) autobiography and the approach to the past to feminist and narrative ends. Indeed, Behind the Scenes at the Museum presents several paradoxes worth exploring. First, the Bildungsroman covering the developing years of the life of Ruby Lennox from infancy (or even before) to maturity is structured like a sort of autobiography because of its first-​person narrative told in a chronological and linear manner, from ‘1951, Conception’ to ‘1992, Redemption’. Yet, it differs from it on several counts.

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Whereas autobiography is again initially a genre dominated by men –​since women’s autobiographies were generally disregarded (see Di Battista and Stanley) –​the subject here is female which, according to scholars like Wendy Roy and Liz Stanley, makes a difference: contrary to ‘the masculinist perception of autobiography … as the unfolding or development of a coherent, mature and completely actualised self’ (Stanley 63), Behind the Scenes at the Museum seems to display both the fragmentation and inconclusiveness which some see as typical of women’s autobiographies (see Roy 116). Liz Stanley concludes her study on women’s autobiographies pointing out that they intermingle the individual and the community, fiction and fact, fantasy and reality: ‘The boundaries between conventional dichotomies are traversed here and shown to be far less impermeable than generally supposed. These feminist autobiographies challenge the boundaries of conventional autobiographical form, indeed play with some of its conventions such as the ‘autobiographical pact’ of confessional truth-​telling, a narrative that moves from birth/​ beginning to maturity/​ resolution/​end, and the insistence on a unitary self’ (Stanley 247). In fiction, Atkinson’s first novel, like Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries that was published the same year, offers a good example of this challenge to the conventions of the genre. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the narrative is openly fragmented through a selection of episodes with jumps in time in between. For instance, ‘Chapter 8, 1963, The Rings of Saturn’ covers most of the year, at one stage pointedly evoking the family events following the calendar of religious feast days (BSM 230), while ‘Chapter 9, 1964, Holiday!’ is restricted to a single event in the year, the family holiday in Scotland. The headings of the chapters that organise the life narrative are significant as they combine an objective external calendar suggesting impersonality with the reference to personal or family events, which illustrates the duality at the heart of self-​narration. The chapter headings also suggest snapshots, a succession of episodes rather than a whole. Similarly, the use of the historic present in the autobiographical chapters denies continuity and suggests fragmentation, as the ‘I’, seemingly anchored in a different time, apparently changes in each chapter. These narrative strategies thus all point to the opposite of a unified self even as the quest through the Bildungsroman is the discovery and assertion of

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identity, starting with the liminal ‘I exist’ (BSM 9) until the final ‘I am Ruby Lennox’ (BSM 382). While autobiography tends to focus on the narrator, Behind the Scenes at the Museum often seems to drift away from its main topic as Ruby’s narrative develops many other characters at length. Indeed, self-​narration is interspersed with episodes that are not within Ruby’s living memory or contemporary with her but evoke the family past set in the 1890s, the First and Second World Wars told in an omniscient voice (that is really Ruby’s). An autobiography has by definition a personal dimension to it. Accordingly, it draws mostly on one’s memory rather than on history, the two covering different approaches to the past: ‘Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic … History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism’ (Nora 8–​9). Memory is a private act, while history is a public and collective narrative. Yet, Ruby’s narrative alternates her own past with that of her family members and thus ‘recovers history spasmodically’ (Hargreaves 36) as it mentions a selection of historical episodes or events in non-​chronological order, and only in relation to her family. The inclusion of family stories means ‘widening the perspective and scope of the novel’ (Splendore 205). In this respect, it differs from the self-​centred ‘masculine’ autobiographies based on the sense of an individual self: Ruby’s inclusive autobiography illustrates the notion to be found in female autobiographies that the female self and sense of identity is relational (see Roy 116). Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a fictional autobiography, not just because Ruby is of course a fictional character invented by Atkinson, as is made clear in the reading contract established by Kate Atkinson’s name on the book cover, but also because the character gives an account of her life and of her family past that is fictional within the world of the diegesis too: ‘Ruby … is compelled to fill factual gaps with conjecture, supposition, and, ultimately, fantasy’ (Tolan 2009, 276) as indicated regarding her great-​grandmother Alice: I want to rescue this lost woman … Dive into the picture… Picture the scene –​ A hundred years ago. … (BSM 29, emphasis in original)

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Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels are a major intertext in Atkinson’s early novels and the phrase ‘dive into the picture’ may read as an allusion to Through the Looking-​Glass and its heroine stepping into an imaginary world: the phrase thus marks Ruby’s stepping into a world of her invention. Moreover, one may note a ‘mise en abyme’ between Ruby’s inventive metanarrative and the narrative in which the past is also the object of ‘untruth’. Indeed, for instance, Alice’s children, Lawrence and Ada, and her husband and his second wife all lie about Alice’s disappearance, claiming that she died giving birth to Nell (Domínguez García 2001, 150). The past is of paramount importance in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, as indicated in the very first chapter that places York and the characters in a long line of history, intertwining historical figures with fictional ones (BSM 10). These constitute the higgledy-​ piggledy backdrop to the lives of the characters. Behind the Scenes at the Museum illustrates Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction that is ‘obsessed with the question of how we can come to know the past today’ (Hutcheon 2002, 44). The narrator thus draws attention to her reconstruction of the past. For instance, she admits the colour of the carpet during the Coronation ceremony is a ‘supposition’ as the TV is in black and white (BSM 77) and this acknowledgement consequently lays doubt on everything else she says. Ruby’s narrative also displays Lyotard’s mistrust of metanarratives and focuses on the lives of insignificant people, not historical figures. History and historical events appear through the lives and losses of ordinary or secondary characters, like Bunty’s uncles and aunts. The novel alternates chapters and ‘footnotes’. Surprisingly, the latter are as long as the text which they are supposed to complement. The term ‘footnote’ itself carries an ambiguity that is played upon in Atkinson’s novel. Indeed, the word has come to refer, in a figurative way, to an event deemed to be of minor importance since a footnote, in its literal sense, adds extra information that is subordinate to the rest of the text. Yet, it is used to explain or comment on the main text and is thus of relative importance. Atkinson’s distortion of the implied subordination in the word ‘footnote’ in order to refer to the Lennox family’s experience of the two world wars, or merely to episodes of their past, questions the hierarchy imposed on people’s stories. The novel also demythologises national events like the Coronation of Elizabeth II

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where the main protagonist ‘looks like a balloon’ (BSM 70) when it appears that what really matters is the means by which the event is transmitted, the TV set as a sign of success, and the behaviour of the various family members on this occasion.3 Similarly, the fabricated dimension of the representation of the war is clearly signalled when Nell goes to the cinema with Jack, just back from the front in the First World War, to watch the documentary The Battle of the Somme in which ‘All the Tommies were smiling and laughing as if the war was a great joke. … They all turned and waved and smiled as if the Somme was no more than a day’s excursion’ (BSM 68–​69). As the title Behind the Scenes at the Museum suggests, the narrative intends to go beyond the polished discourse of history and look at the untold stories. Moreover, Atkinson’s novel also pays attention to a class that is usually little considered. As Marianne Camus puts it, ‘the lower middle classes whose members usually constitute an uneasy fringe in the imaginary world created by novelists. … this transitional group of shopkeepers living above their shops’ was, until Behind the Scenes at the Museum, used as a backdrop to the adventures of more exciting characters (Camus 2003, 133). Fiona Tolan aptly argues that Behind the Scenes at the Museum ‘examines the gendered nature of historiography’ (Tolan 2009, 277, 276) but the novel casts its net wider as it also includes representations of the First World War as experienced by Jack and Franck and of the Second World War by Edmund and Tom. Scholars have however stressed the focus on women that is also present in the later historical fiction Life After Life and Transcription: Atkinson ‘expos[es] the absence of domestic experience from the historical record’ (Tolan 2009, 276) and fills the blank by telling ‘the history of women kept outside history, of women who stay at home …’ (Camus 2003, 133). Within the diegesis, the adult Ruby’s fictional project is a cycle of poems in which, contrary to the historical record, Ruby promises ‘There will be room for everyone’ (BSM 382). Ruby thus refuses the selection imposed by official historiography. Footnotes devoted to the women of her family, echoes between past and present, objects (like buttons and a Coronation teaspoon) but also phrases like ‘the wrong life’ successively applied to Alice, Nell, Bunty and Ruby signal Atkinson’s feminist construction of a genealogy between female characters. This genealogy is ‘an imagined matrilineal story defined by the inherited disappointment

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of women’s married lives’ (Hargreaves 36) which conveys ‘a critique of women’s place in patriarchy, as women are repeatedly trapped within an unsatisfying domestic sphere’ (McDermott 73), the most developed case being that of her mother Bunty. Bunty is a key character in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Paula Splendore reads the latter novel as an instance of the ‘new family plot’ in which the mother–​daughter relationship is the centre of the plot (BSM 185), which echoes the idea of the ‘autobiographer’s connection with her mother’ (Roy 116). Indeed, considering Behind the Scenes at the Museum as a Bildungsroman and an autobiography that is supposed to end when the heroine has reached maturity and adulthood after going over the hurdles of life, it is significant that Atkinson’s novel should end after Bunty’s death. It confirms the centrality of the mother in the development of the heroine even though in Atkinson’s novel, the mother–​daughter plot is ‘in a comic-​grotesque register, in which the mother figure … is used as a debunking maternal icon’, as in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) (Splendore 189). The mother figure, I would add, also serves as a feminist comment on the woman condition of the 1950s. Upset at being pregnant again (BSM 26), which in all likelihood actually represents the reality of many women in the 1950s, Bunty is a reluctant mother and a ‘housework slave’ (BSM 117). The depiction of her and her sister’s week of chores is realistic, underlining the woman condition of the 1950s. However, realism does not eschew comedy. Bunty is ‘a parody of the conventional maternal icon one finds in classic realist texts’ (Splendore 206) or, to be more precise, of the construct ‘the female mystique’ described by Betty Friedan. While the mother figure is the embodiment of the home at the heart of the domestic, this very figure is the object of mocking, as irreverent as it is funnily expressed, through hyperbolic phrases that describe Bunty as ‘doing her impression of the Martyred Wife’ (BSM 170) and as ‘Our Lady of the Kitchen’ (179), stating ‘she’ll be damned if anyone is going to rob her of her sainthood’ (BSM 175). With Bunty’s constant search for a role to play to fill the void of her own non-​identity, here resolved with the acting of the sacrificing wife and mother, Atkinson points to the frustration felt by women ill-​ at-​ease with the limited social roles imposed on them. Being a wife and a mother is indeed the only option to the ordinary woman in the Britain of the 1950s and 60s depicted in Atkinson’s novels.4

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At the same time, humour is entangled with these realistic situations. When her gay nephew asks her if he should pour the tea with the set phrase, ‘Shall I be mother?’, misrepresenting her mother’s reaction to her nephew, the narrator suggests Bunty ‘looks shocked as no-​one has ever offered to swap this role with her (you can see she’s tempted)’ (BSM 230–​231). ‘[T]‌he liberating effect of black humour’ (Splendore 206) is present in many depictions. For instance, at the end when Bunty suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, Ruby comments: ‘Bunty’s replacement personality is a much nicer model than the old one’ (BSM 378). At the same time as Bunty is one of the characters used to lay the emphasis on often-​ignored women’s lives and to denounce the vacuity of the lives proposed to them, she remains a negative figure of motherhood described as ‘autistic mothering’ (BSM 374), acting out of duty rather than love. The ‘redemption’ of the last chapter applies to the daughters coming to terms with their mother rather than the other way round. As pointed out by Hilary Mantel, ‘The nature of memory is a central issue in the book’ (Mantel). Indeed, while some chapters recover the family history or memory, Ruby’s own story, which is narrated in other chronological but discontinuous chapters, is marked by the missing memory of the accident in which her twin sister drowned. Memory is personal and linked to affect: the traces of the past that we retain are constitutive elements of personality and identity and they help individuals inscribe themselves in a line. Atkinson’s early protagonists are in search of a missing element in their own past. To make up for it, they elaborate narratives of the past that inscribe them in a line and establish their identities. Of course, memory is selective: ‘paradoxically, a defining feature of remembering is that most things are forgotten or exist half-​ submerged to be occasionally and unpredictably propelled to the mind’s surface –​each of us a Proust transfixed by a madeleine’ (Stanley 128). Marcel Proust’s madeleine is one of the most famous episodes linked to the retrieval of memory, as shown by Liz Stanley’s use of it. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the narrator alludes to it and to the phenomenon it refers to but the civilised and refined madeleine and tisane are now parodied and replaced by the pet shop fire ingrained in Ruby’s memory, later revived by ‘the smell of frying sausage’ (BSM 215). As the madeleine (or frying sausage)

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episode shows, memory is both abstract and material. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the physical likeness to be found across the generations such as the blond curls (Albert, Edmond, Gillian) or the artificial smile (Ada, Nell, Bunty, Ruby) illustrates Kate Mitchell’s notion of ‘embodied memory’ when ‘memory is carried with us bodily’, notably with ‘the unconscious repetition of various bodily actions and gesture across generations’ (Mitchell 162). The phenomenon is actually highlighted in Behind the Scenes at the Museum: ‘One of those curious genetic whispers across time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our forehead in exactly the same way as Alice has just done’ (BSM 31). Memory for Ruby is clearly a way of establishing her identity, of establishing her place in relation to others. Memory is also a matter of invention as is made obvious when Ruby’s life seems to echo Alice’s (and Bunty’s), as the heroine too finds herself entrapped in an unhappy marriage and remarks ‘I was leading the wrong life’ (BSM 360), words previously attributed to her great-​grandmother (BSM 35). The narrator self-​consciously refers to autobiography as a ‘story’ to which she gives parodic titles of films or novels: ‘Ruby 2–​The Sequel, What Ruby Did Next!’ (BSM 361). Besides, Ruby’s autobiographical chapters evoke objects or elements from the past that pointedly lead to the ‘footnotes’ and are at first expected by the reader to be akin to private ‘lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (Nora 7). Contrary to spontaneous memory (Nora 12), an object ‘becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura’ (Nora 19). In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, objects like buttons from Alice’s dress, the George V Coronation teaspoon or a feature like a smile all appear in the footnotes as promised but they are often secondary and therefore not infused with any symbolic value. Moreover, these elements may be traces of dead people who are more or less central to Ruby’s story (if the buttons belonged to her great-​grandmother, the teaspoon was a neighbour’s) but they do not carry any memory: for instance, the button that is later revealed to have belonged to Alice is unwittingly swallowed by Gillian (BSM 23) and the lucky rabbit-​foot that Bunty wears around her neck when she is giving birth seems unrelated to the ordeal of the men during the First World War.

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The reader may infer links but the important fact is that the characters to whom these objects could be significant do not care or remain ignorant of the object’s interest. This, plus the fact that the items first mentioned in Ruby’s chapters are not central to the footnotes –​to which they never give their titles –​serves to desacralise the past by focusing on objects and stories that have fallen into oblivion. If the purpose of the ‘lieu de mémoire’ is to prevent forgetting (Nora 19), the underlying process of creation that is part of memory is highlighted inasmuch as Ruby remembers them as she invents the family past. What this says is that every object has a story worth telling as much as any other, which is a way of denying the hierarchy put in place by the writing of history. In historiographic metafiction, truth and the past are often challenged through the juxtaposition of conflicting views. In Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries, which is another fictional autobiography in which the main character, Daisy Goodwill, constructs memories of her life and others with recourse to imagination, this is achieved by occasionally giving way to other voices and characters as well as unsettling to-​and-​fros from first to third-​person narration to relate the life of the protagonist. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, additionally to the dual narrative alternating first-​person chapters and third-​person ‘footnotes’, Ruby’s version in the first person is challenged by the instability of the character’s voice. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a text profuse in characters, stories and details so that it may seem saturated with information and akin to what James Wood (2000) identifies as ‘hysterical realism’ (as explained in the introduction). Yet, it hinges on a silenced event, the absence of a specific memory, which makes Ruby an ‘incompetent’ narrator (Richardson 2) and belies the traditional claim to veracity commonly attached to autobiography since Rousseau’s Confessions in which the author purports to truthfully report his or her life, to give ‘a portrait in everyway true to nature’ (Rousseau 17). No frame narrative, no reflective voice introduce the standpoint or purpose of the narrator in the present looking back to the past. Instead, the reader is invited to a direct plunge into the narrative, which corresponds to what Philippe Lejeune calls an ‘eclipsis of the retrospective narrator’ (Lejeune 15, my translation), ‘as if the enunciation was contemporary with the story, and it originated from the character’ (Lejeune 15, my translation,

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emphasis in original).5 Told in the historical present tense, the autobiographical narrative is anchored in Ruby’s viewpoint with no retrospective dimension and pretends to coincide, to equate the narrated ‘I’ with the narrating one, a device which conveys instability as this supposed conflation of the two ‘I’ changes with every chapter devoted to a growing up Ruby. The narrative voice is perturbing on several counts. First, the first-​person narration lays claim to an impossible narrative situation as it purports to be told by Ruby as a foetus, gaining second-​hand experience through her mother but also enjoying a form of omniscience as indicated by her knowledge of both local history and cultural references like ‘We are in Quattrocento heaven’ (BSM 18) to refer to white clouds in a blue sky. The fantasising at the heart of this first chapter is signalled by the reference noted by many to Tristram Shandy because of the reference to the parents’ intercourse in the incipit with the mention of a clock but also to ‘the magical realist playfulness of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’ (Germana 112). The fantasising is clearly stated when the narrator concludes her list of real and imaginary events that took place in York with ‘who is to say which is real and which a fiction?’ (BSM 10). During the childhood years, the narrative conveys a child’s priorities and interests in games. For instance, in Chapter 3 that depicts events around the narrator then aged two, she evokes her passion for a rocking-​horse through exclamatives and superlatives: ‘there he is! The light of my world! The Mobo horse is perhaps the most handsome creature ever manufactured by man’ (BSM 86). There is however no effort to imitate a child’s way of talking as the narrator has previously explained that she then had ten words in her vocabulary (BSM 86). Besides, the narrative that purports to follow the point of view of Ruby as she grows up sometimes shows double vision and the split between the narrated ‘I’ and the narrating one. Some comments indicate an adult or older cultural awareness –​for instance with the reference to Italian painting mentioned above or to the Pre-​ Raphaelites when supposedly aged nine (BSM 208). Other remarks are made possible either by hindsight, dramatic irony afforded by the passing of time (such as the early announcement of Gillian’s death (BSM 80)), or by an omniscient perspective that is contradictory with the autodiegetic viewpoint and can only be explained as being the result of imagination and invention.

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Because of this instability, Ruby is an unreliable narrator of sorts. An unreliable narrator is recognisable by the discrepancy between what he or she says and what the implied author says. The concept was originally defined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961 in the following terms: a narrator is called ‘­reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied narrator’s norms), unreliable when he does not’ (Booth 158–​159). Brian Richardson notes the rise and development of the unreliable narrator throughout the history of fiction: ‘one goes from unreliable narrators to incompetent ones to delusional and then completely insane storytellers’ (Richardson 2). He remarks that ‘Unreliability has proliferated under postmodernism’ but he understands it only as antimimetic (Richardson 103), which is not the case in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Ruby is unreliable because of her recourse to imagination and invention in what otherwise reads as an autobiography and her adopting the stance of an omniscient narrator that is able to give access to other characters’ thoughts in the events recounted in the ‘footnotes’. Contradiction leads to tension. As noted by Tolan, ‘The apparent omniscience with which the footnotes are narrated belies their fictional nature’ (Tolan 2009, 281). But Ruby is also meant to be unreliable because the experience of trauma has transformed her memory, as is retrospectively revealed to the reader. In Anne Whitehead’s words, ‘trauma comprises an event or experience that overwhelms the individual and resists language or interpretation’ (Whitehead 3) and this is directly translated in the presence in Ruby’s self-​narration of ‘textual gaps’, a narrative strategy to indicate ‘incomplete relation to memory’ (Vickroy 29). Until its source is revealed, trauma’s ‘haunting or possessive influence’ (Whitehead 5) is suggested by Ruby’s sleepwalking and, as noted by Germana, duality and patterns of repetition, ‘Spectral references to the missing twin haunt the narrative from its embryonic beginning’ (Germana 113). The reconstructed Ruby is not trying to trick the reader by deliberately not saying everything she knows: her ignorance at the time of the events is recreated so that ‘Atkinson manoeuvres the reader into the position of the unknowing subject of repressed memory, subject to all the estrangements and dissonances a belated revelation of a hidden secret can produce’ (Luckhurst 1999, 88). In a

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way, Ruby anticipates these victim types of unreliable narrators like Mark Haddon’s narrator with Asperger’s syndrome in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time (2003) or Emma Healey’s protagonist with developing dementia in Elizabeth is Missing (2014) and like Emma Donoghue’s five-​year-​old child narrator in Room (2010) whose perspective is constricted by a life in captivity in the sole company of his mother. Ruby’s vision is impaired by her loss of memory or repressed memory of her twin sister’s death. James Phelan refers to this type of unreliability as ‘underreporting’, due to some form of insufficiency (Phelan 51–​53). In Richardson’s terminology, Ruby would be an ‘incompetent’ narrator, as she is impaired by her loss of memory and therefore unable to give a full and accurate account. John Mullan offers ‘inadequate’ to refer to this type of unreliable narrator. Instead of these adjectives whose privative prefix reflects negatively on the characters, one could suggest the phrase ‘deficient narrator’ that lays the emphasis on the narrators’ disabilities. As an autobiography tells a story of the past from the perspective of the present, it is usually narrated in the past. However, the present tense is used for the (more directly) autobiographical chapters of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, in a direct enactment of Pierre Nora’s idea that ‘Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present’ (Nora 8) or, as Roger Luckhurst puts it, ‘Memory, then, is always contemporary, caught up in the politics of the present, and always con-​temporal, bringing disjunct times together’ (Luckhurst 1999, 81). Yet, in general, there is recognition that ‘The writer of auto/​biography … no more has direct access to “the self who was”, than does the reader’ (Stanley 61). But with the present tense, Ruby pretends to immerse herself and the reader into a moment in her past life. The use of this tense is also significant to indicate that the past is not past at all but still present: the present tense is a sign of trauma marked by the impossibility of converting the traumatic events into memory, of making them past. The use of the present tense is also useful for the narrator as it postpones an important disclosure. Towards the end, the reader realises that Ruby the storyteller has manipulated her account to recreate her state of forgetfulness due to trauma.6 In opposition to the chapters focusing on Ruby, the episodes from the family past are narrated in the past tense, the tense which, according

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to Roland Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, signals the construction of the tale (Barthes 29–​40). Indeed, at the end of the novel, the authoritative omniscient voice used in these chapters is revealed (or confirmed) to be Ruby’s: the list of characters mentioned at the very end but whose stories have already appeared in footnotes suggests that the past has been written up to complement the present. When Ruby has recovered her memory in Chapter 12, sub-​ headed ‘1970, Broken English’, the present sometimes alternates with the past. More importantly, the narrator is now able to distantiate from her narrated self with remarks that suggest a more inclusive approach to her life as she is able to move between periods of time: ‘I don’t know that I am doomed by Janet Sheriff, our history teacher who fell in love … and forgot to teach us large chunks of the European syllabus’ (BSM 355) and introducing her future husband with ‘you would never think from looking at him that he would turn out the way he does’ (BSM 355). The chapter goes beyond the limit set by its title and includes the reunion of the surviving Lennox family in Australia in 1982 at the time of the Falklands War. The narrator concludes the chapter with one long sentence that begins by upsetting temporality ‘This was in the future’ (BSM 361) and encompasses her proposal, marriage and divorce, ending with ‘I am Ruby Lennox once more’ (BSM 361). The narrator’s ability to move effortlessly between different periods in the past and the present of her narrative indicates that she has gone over the trauma that kept her in a perpetual present. Recovering the suppressed memory of Pearl’s death partakes of Ruby’s growing-​up process and enables her to come to terms with her identity. ‘I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox’ (BSM 382): given pride of place in the last lines of the novel, this leitmotiv now reads like the simple assertion of Ruby’s identity and uniqueness.

A feminist revision of fairy tales in Human Croquet Human Croquet centres around sixteen-​year-​old Isobel Fairfax, her family and friends in England in the 1960s. Subject to time warps that temporarily send her back to scenes in the distant past or make her live different versions of the same day, Isobel is the somewhat unreliable narrator of both chapters set in the present and chapters set in

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the past told by a supposedly omniscient narrator. Haunting Isobel and her brother Charles is their mother Eliza whose disappearance they try to account for while struggling with the repressed memory of finding her dead body in the forest. Human Croquet reads as a Bildungsroman depicting Isobel’s trials and tribulations of growing up and achieving maturity. This narrative arc is also the underlying plotline of a number of fairy tales, a point which is particularly relevant here since Human Croquet relies heavily, amongst many other intertexts (Sanders 2001, 68, 75), on such tales which blend in with aspects of the Bildungsroman. Many contemporary women writers have returned to the well-​ known fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers in the wake of Angela Carter and her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), now considered as the canonical example of fairy-​ tale rewriting, in order to question the roles attributed to women and the underlying ideology of traditional fairy tales.7 In the late twentieth century, fairy tales underwent Adrienne Rich’s ‘re-​vision’, or rewriting, as advocated by Patricia Duncker: ‘We cannot fit neatly into patterns or models as Cinderellas, ugly sisters, wicked step-​ mothers, fairy God-​ mothers, and still acknowledge our several existences, experienced or imagined. We need the space to carve out our own erotic identities as free women. And then to rewrite the fairy tales –​with a bolder hand’ (Duncker 12). Writers did follow suit and two decades later, Laura Tosi was able to observe that, ‘Many contemporary rewritings of fairy tales tend to challenge the conservative norms of social behaviour and the implications of gender roles in fairy tales. Feminist critics and writers have collaborated in the critical exposure of fairy tales as narratives voicing, in the main, patriarchal values’ (Tosi 369–​370). Sharon Wilson sums up the various techniques by which postmodern novelists appropriate, revise and adapt fairy tales, notably through the use of parody and irony: ‘Often turning fairy-​tale plots upside down, reversing outcomes, and using unreliable narrators, anti-​heroes/​heroines, and magical realism, the texts generally exist in a romance mode and may still depict transformation and metamorphosis’ (Sharon Wilson 99). For Elizabeth W. Harries, Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet only make ‘glancing references’ to fairy tales (Harries 2015, 158). However, Fiona Tolan argues that fairy tales structure Ruby’s pseudo-​authentic historical narratives in

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the footnotes in Behind the Scenes at the Museum (see Tolan 2009, 281), as Rachel who raises Alice’s children certainly is a typical unloving ‘wicked stepmother’. Kevin Paul Smith, in his study The Postmodern Fairy Tale, devotes a whole chapter to arguing that ‘Human Croquet is a magic realist novel precisely because of its use of fairy tale intertexts’ (Kevin Paul Smith 56): he thus examines the use of fairy tales before comparing Human Croquet to Wendy Faris’s list of primary features of ‘magical realism’ and concludes that Atkinson’s novels tick all the boxes (Kevin Paul Smith 77–​78).8 To return to Harries’s remark, it is true that Atkinson does not take any one single text as a basis for rewriting or transposition. Indeed, Human Croquet is replete with fairy tales and it will be argued that the near omnipresence of these texts in this novel amounts to more than ‘glancing references’ and structures the narrative and the heroine’s identity at the same time as it partakes of the contemporary ‘re-​vision’ of fairy tales at work amongst feminist writers. The following pages examine how Atkinson enacts her own version of the feminist re-​vision advocated by Adrienne Rich and exposes ‘the fairy tale’s complicity with “exhausted” narrative and gender ideologies’ (Bacchilega 50) but also how this exposure is as much the aim of the novel as it is a structuring element of Isobel’s narrative of development: as the self-​conscious dimension of the narrative suggests, becoming aware of the lie is part of the growing-​ up process for the heroine. After examining how fairy-​tale motifs come into play as structuring devices in the novel, Atkinson’s idiosyncratic re-​vision of women’s roles in fairy tales through parody and humour will be focused on before considering how the novelist tackles what is often seen as the hallmark of the fairy tale, i.e. the happy ending. Human Croquet is set somewhere in England in 1960 and, for the most part, like Behind the Scenes at the Museum, makes a show of being firmly anchored in the real, notably with recourse to precise items of everyday life. For instance, a character’s Adam’s apple is compared to a Cox’s Orange Pippin (HC 26), characters look for Sellotape (HC 34) and Hoovers are used to clean houses (HC 71). Yet, the realist tradition invoked by the brand names that pepper the text contrasts with the opening frame narrative, which explains why the novel is tagged ‘magical realist’. Indeed, in Human Croquet, Atkinson retains the oral quality of tales which

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is put to the fore with a homodiegetic narrator who frames her tale with parts entitled ‘beginning’ and ‘future’ and foregrounds the constructedness of her tale: ‘I am Isobel Fairfax, I am the alpha and omega of narrators (I am omniscient) and I know the beginning and the end. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine’ (HC 20). The word is the world and the narrator’s subjectivity and possible unreliability is foregrounded, which is typical of twentieth-​century tales. The introductory chapter, in which the narrator needing to establish her identity inscribes herself in a family line where magic, legends and fairy tales intertwine, displays the postmodern weaving of intertexts that will be found throughout the novel, and underlines how tales are not flat and fixed but evolve and answer one another. Her sixteenth-​century ancestor –​Sir Francis Fairfax –​ is thus a Bluebeard figure and a conflation of different intertexts in which the reference to Perrault is clearly coloured by Charlotte Brontë’s version of the tale in Jane Eyre: ‘Some also said that he had a beautiful child wife ... locked away in the attics of Fairfax Manor. Others said the woman in the attics was ... his mad wife. There was even a rumour that his attics were full of dead wives, all of them hanging from butcher’s hooks’ (HC 14). This aggregation of intertexts also signals the artificiality and constructedness of Isobel’s narrative. Throughout the novel, whether in the chapters told in first or third person, the narrator reaches for fairy-​tale motifs and patterns to depict her life. Most characters are explicitly cast in parts to be found in fairy tales, focusing on a specific telling trait. Her brother Charles is thus said to be ‘as ugly as a storybook dwarf’ (HC 26); Gordon is the inefficient father, who, like Thomas the Rhymer, was away for seven years (a magic number if any), who remarries, bringing in a stepmother into the family. Her next-​door friend Audrey Baxter is introduced first as a Rapunzel –​with her beautiful long hair –​with her father in the role of the jealous witch, and later as a Catskin who does not escape in time and is made pregnant by her incestuous father; Mrs Baxter is Isobel’s fairy godmother, albeit a powerless one. Handsome Malcolm Lovat is ‘a prince’ (HC 38) whose mother is declared to be an ogress (HC 38) just like the Prince’s in Perrault’s version of Sleeping Beauty. Moreover, the reader recognises isolated or sustained episodes

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rewritten from Cinderella, Snow White, as well as Hansel and Gretel, while Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is clearly signalled as major hypotext through self-​reflexive remarks. Indeed, Isobel begins her tale depicting herself lying in bed on ‘my birthday, my sixteenth –​ the mythic one, the legendary one. The traditional age for spindles to start pricking and suitors to come calling and a host of other symbolic sexual imagery to suddenly manifest itself’ (HC 23).9 Here as everywhere in her narrative, Isobel thus refers to fairy tales in a most knowing way. Yet typically of postmodernism’s doubleness, the distance imposed by self-​consciousness does not cancel what is being said: her own story is a new take on the tale in which Isobel is in a coma (as the reader learns three-​quarters of the way through the book). Julie Sanders appropriately notes that ‘Atkinson is especially interested in the fairy tale’s invocation of the family both as an ideal and as an entity capable of horrific dysfunctionality’ (Sanders 2006, 87). Fairy tales are double-​ edged indeed. Encouraged by Disney representations of the tales, references to the tale may misleadingly be associated with lightness (all the more so as, as we shall see, the reference to fairy tales is also meant as a source of humour). But they all have a dark side that is now brought to the fore. As Emma Parker points out, ‘Atkinson draws on the menace of the original fairy tales to expose the underside of ordinary life, which features murder, incest, and domestic violence’ (Parker 2002, 14), all this being present in the next-​door neighbours’ home, in Eliza’s childhood and in Sir Fairfax’s household. Like many fairy-​tale heroines, Isobel is motherless. The trauma generated by her mother’s disappearance is expressed through a self-​ narrative that is strikingly mediated through stories, many of which are classical fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers and Hans Andersen. Indeed, fairy tales have a consolatory value because they are narratives of improvement. For Bruno Bettelheim, the happy ending with its reassuring dimension is a condition of the genre (Bettelheim 144). This type of comforting ending –​now in the shape of the return of her mother –​is indeed what Isobel is yearning for, even if she eventually realises she has to give it up: ‘The second coming of Eliza was no longer just around the corner, with its restoration of real right justice and suffering rewarded (the happy ending)’ (HC 208). Isobel draws on fairy-​tale patterns for comfort

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and notably to fill in the blank left by her mother’s absence: the narrative she invents for her mother is inspired by fairy tales and legends, illustrating the idea that ‘Fairy tales play to the child’s hankering after nobler, richer, altogether better origins, the fantasy of being a prince or a princess in disguise, the Freudian “family romance” ’ (Warner 210).10 In Human Croquet, most of the fairy tales that Isobel refers to and associates with have a happy ending and follow what Atkinson refers to as ‘that archetypal structure of a fairy story’ where ‘justice is done: the good are rewarded, the evil are punished, everyone gets their just deserts’.11 The Little Mermaid excepted, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the heroine of ‘The Wild Swans’ are all rewarded for their endured hardship, just like Isobel hopes to be herself. As Peter Brooks aptly says, ‘Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semi-​ conscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue’ (Brooks 3). In Human Croquet, Isobel uses fairy tales to structure her own story: ‘this novel highlights the necessity of storytelling in order to arrive at a coherent construction of the self’ (Meyer 452). However, in order to do so, in most cases, Isobel derails and revises the fairy-​tale plot when it comes to her own life as the sign of her growing up and of her (feminist) emancipation from set patterns of behaviour. The transposition (Genette 1997,  294) or ‘trans-​contextualization’ (Hutcheon 2000, 11–​12) of fairy-​tale episodes to the England of the sixties is a form of hybridisation that brings to the fore elements that are usually passed over or taken for granted. While the numerous references and allusions to fairy tales are accessible and definitely have a rallying dimension because they belong to popular culture, these well-​known motifs undergo ‘re-​vision’ as they are defamiliarised (Shklovsky), ‘de-​naturalized’ (Bacchilega), ‘de-​doxified’ (Barthes): they are made strange in order to point to their construction of gender roles in conflation with patriarchy. In its questioning of the assumptions usually made about gender, Atkinson’s novel fully subscribes to the agenda of postmodern fairy tales described by Cristina Bacchilega: ‘If the fairy tale symbolically seeks to represent some unquestionable natural state of

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being, postmodern fairy tales seek to expose this state’s generic and gendered “lie” or artifice’ (Bacchilega 35). What is particularly interesting in Atkinson’s approach is that this takes place via parody and humour. The technique of parody or ‘repetition with critical distance’ (Hutcheon 2000, 6) or ‘repetition with difference’ (Hutcheon 2000, 101) allows for the ‘critical revision’ (Hutcheon 2000, 15) of the well known. As Hutcheon convincingly argued, ridicule is not necessarily the purpose of contemporary parody. In Atkinson’s usage, parody is nevertheless often accompanied with derision and humour, which may add their weight to the subversive project of re-​vision. Indeed, humour invites the reader to observe the critical distance at work between the narrator and her story as well as with her use of fairy tales. ‘Ironic inversion is a characteristic of all parody’ (Hutcheon 2000, 6) and we find it at work in Human Croquet in which Atkinson makes significant amendments to fairy-​tale figures and plots, adopting the simple but efficient technique of gender and/​or role reversal favoured by postmodern writers. Female characters are empowered: the mother and the stepmother are given a more central and active part in the plot, with different values attached. Indeed, far from being dismissed in the early opening lines to concentrate on the ensuing trials and adventures, the absence of the heroine’s mother is at the core of her narrative and seems to constitute the object of the heroine’s quest. Furthermore, as in other similar cases of motherless children, Isobel is duly granted a stepmother whom she professes to dislike intensely, but there is a major difference in Atkinson’s novel: the stepmother, Debbie, is a helpless and harmless young woman trying to do her best with a disastrous household. Atkinson thus refuses to take up the stance of women oppressing women often displayed in tales.12 In fact, she reverses the situation since Debbie is the one who saves Isobel (after the latter has been hit by a tree) when she gives her ‘the kiss of life’ (HC 347). The usual Snow White scenario is inverted and the female character of the stepmother rehabilitated. Instead of poisoning her daughter-​in-​law, the stepmother saves her and thus gains a status akin to the ‘real’ mother’s, confirming the similarity between the two female figures hinted at earlier in the novel when both were associated with the Grimms’ Ashputtel (Cinderella) at different stages of her story: the toiling years for hardworking Debbie who

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is imagined separating lentils from ashes, while elusive Eliza is cast as the ‘true bride’ to be found thanks to her shoe. Atkinson’s narrative thus sets up a sisterhood between mother and stepmother instead of opposing one to the other. Similarly, Roger Clark points to a positive re-​vision of female relationships in the final encounter Isobel imagines with her mother: ‘The scene metamorphoses the usual Snow White story of female antagonism into a moment of intimacy and unity, with the red apples connoting the transference of knowledge and mature sexuality rather than the poison of envy and temptation’ (Clark 2003, 18–​19). Isobel differs greatly from fairy-​tale heroines because of her proactivity and awareness. One of the key features of rewriting is to give a voice to the voiceless. For instance, Angela Carter gave a voice to the nameless wife on Bluebeard in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), Margaret Atwood to the ugly sisters, the witch and the stepmother in ‘Bad Gals’ (Good Bones, 1992) and Robert Coover also followed the witch’s point of view in Stepmother (2004). Atkinson follows this pattern here when, instead of discussing the heroine in the omniscient mode and then leaving her to sleep in a corner until it is time for the prince to come, the narrative focuses on her point of view. It is highly significant that Atkinson’s version of Sleeping Beauty should be in charge, telling the tale. Indeed if Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is supposed to be the heroine of the eponymous tale, she does not have a voice of her own and is the epitome of p ­ assivity. Not only does Atkinson give a voice to the sleepy heroine but she parodies the whole tale: Isobel’s sleep is coma-​induced after a tree fell on her. Sixteen-​year-​old Isobel is repeatedly said to be lying in her attic bedroom. She is waiting for her prince, desperate to be kissed but this scene –​when the prince wakes her up with a kiss –​is parodied with a multiplication of waking-​up scenes that are never caused by a prince’s kiss. On one occasion, in place of the prince (HC 225) is a spotty boy trying to force himself on her (HC 227). In Sleeping Beauty as in Snow White, the life-​saving kiss usually comes upon the passive heroine unaware. Here, Isobel, ‘a seething cauldron of adolescent hormones’ (HC 56) is, if not actively looking for it, obsessed with the idea. She makes no bones about the fact that her interest in her prince is mainly sexual: when offered to make a wish, ‘I wish, naturally, for sex with Malcolm Lovat’ (HC 49); ‘I ... ­concentrate on imagining Malcolm Lovat without his clothes’ (HC 142);

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‘I was just daydreaming about him flinging me onto a four-​poster bed and telling me how beautiful I am compared with Hilary’ (HC 215). This is a far cry from Sleeping Beauty and the like who do not initiate (sexual) activity. Eventually, there are two kisses, one of which is the kiss of life given by Isobel’s much-​mocked stepmother Debbie –​distance is thus significantly taken from the usual ‘women, beware women’ stance in fairy tales (Duncker 7).13 In the end Sleeping Beauty/​Isobel wakes up by herself and definitely not with the help of a male agent, thus indicating the self-​sufficiency of the character and her newly acquired maturity. Another key element in Human Croquet is how the fairy-​tale episodes repeatedly alluded to by Isobel to make sense of the world are treated with humour. In this respect, Atkinson’s text is close to this ‘number of unusually funny feminist fairy tales whose main purpose is to show the farcical side of sexist expectations in classical fairy tales’ (Zipes 1986, 15). For example, when she fantasises that the dog newly appeared on her doorstep might be her brother Charles, she immediately alludes to the tale The Wild Swans only to mock Andersen’s sacrificial sister and assert her difference: ‘I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-​over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. He is absurdly grateful’ (HC 72–​73). Humour derives from ‘perceived incongruity’ (Smuts) between the situation, what she imagines doing and what she does. The humorous contrast is enhanced by the change in style –​the other primary source of comedy also dependent on timing (Lodge 2011, 110) –​when a long and complex sentence is abruptly followed by two simple ones. Atkinson thus points to the unsatisfactory nature of the models proposed by fairy stories. Again, it is one of Andersen’s tales of unrequited love and sacrifice that is the butt of her mockery: on one of the occasions that Malcolm fails to kiss her, Isobel comments, ‘How long will I keep my passion silent? Until my tongue is cut and my silver-​scale sardine tail is turned into awkward, unwieldly legs? Perhaps not quite that far’ (HC 218). Here again Isobel realises that she cannot follow the proposed pattern. Through humour, Atkinson denounces the masochistic sacrifice expected of the young heroine in fairy stories. In having Isobel refusing to fit in these motifs Atkinson points to

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the limitations and gender roles imposed on women. The heroine is shown to construct herself against the gendered role these narratives impose: they may form a large part of her models and references (showing the formative part fairy tales play or might play in female development) but they do not suit her. Treating the roles set by the tales with humour, which in Freud’s words is ‘the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability’, is Isobel’s way to assert her own identity within the set narratives laid out by the tales. As Freud explains, ‘humour is not resigned, it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances’ (Freud n.p.). The gloomy rewriting of Cinderella going to the ball illustrates how Atkinson debunks fairy-​tale romantic expectations via parody (HC 252–​254): Isobel is unexpectedly given the chance to attend a Christmas Eve party but her dress is ugly, nobody notices her nor is interested in her and she has to search the house to find her prince –​ and when she eventually finds him he is disappointingly hugging a bottle of gin. The famous episode of the shoe lost while running away reappears in a very different context: the heroine loses it while leaving the house followed not by an enamoured prince but by a group of lecherous college boys who want to rape her (HC 261). Contrasting the fairy-​tale pattern with her actual situation is a source of humour: ‘Why is this happening to me? I’m supposed to be waltzing rapturously in Malcolm Lovat’s handsome arms not running for my virtue’ (HC 261). The outdated phrase ‘running for my virtue’ coming after emphasising adverb and adjective underline the fact that romantic fairy-​tale patterns are not to be trusted for guidance. The plot goes seriously wrong indeed and never reaches a happy ending as the prince dies in a car crash. The outcome of this revised Cinderella suggests that with no prince to lean on, the heroine must make her way on her own. Isobel’s relationship with fairy tales and her regular confrontation with their heroines as unsuitable role models illustrate the girl’s journey to adulthood. The ultimate acceptance of the happy ending as a deceit is presented as the sign of her new maturity. Fairy-​ tale happy endings (as described by Bruno Bettelheim) have long been the target of feminists’ reworkings because, in Jessica Tiffin’s words, ‘Patriarchy becomes entrenched not only

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in content but also in the recurring utopian closure of structure, which lends itself particularly well to rigid gender roles’ (Tiffin 21). The happy ending is indeed usually marked by thematic and structural closure but Atkinson’s Human Croquet displays a certain ambiguity. The commonplace expectation that things will get better is challenged by the narrator who asserts, ‘But we all know what ugly ducklings grow up into. Ugly ducks’ (HC 215). Isobel’s ‘knowing attitude towards its intertextual source … causes us to question any possibility of the traditional happy ending for these characters’ (Sanders 2006, 88). The denial of a retributive happy ending reaches a peak in Isobel’s version of her mother’s life in a chapter ironically called ‘The bonny bonny road’ (recalling the one that takes Thomas the Rhymer to ‘fair Elfland’): bought, then stolen from her rich parents as a baby, a victim of incest by her adoptive father and of her neighbour’s lust, Eliza runs away and becomes a high-​class whore, marries, has two children before being murdered by her lover. Eliza goes from wealth to poverty, from a doting environment to being the victim of sordid murder: there is no retribution for the ordeals of this very active protagonist in what seems to be an anti-​fairy story or a reversal of the fairy story’s progression. Isobel associates Eliza with Snow White through the famous three colours: ‘If only I didn’t have to keep on inventing Eliza (rook-​hair, milk-​skin, blood-​lips)’ (HC 63). She then parodies these characteristics when depicting the ‘thin white neck’ (HC 128) and the ‘dark red ribbons of blood in her black curls’ (HC 129) so that Eliza’s story is like a macabre rewriting of the tale in which the heroine is eventually murdered by her lover instead of being rescued by the prince. When the retributive fairy-​tale happy ending is performed in Human Croquet, it is clearly declared to belong to the realm of fiction. Having woken from the coma during which she imagined most of the events narrated before and described a scene in which she kissed Shakespeare, Isobel concludes, ‘Only the imagination can embrace the impossible –​the golden mountain, the fire-​breathing dragon, the happy ending’ (HC 356). The adoption of the stylistic ternary structure to be found in fairy tales suggests the narrator’s endorsement of the genre. For instance, whereas the villain (Mr Baxter) commits suicide, he is punished only in the narrator’s imagination when

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twice she imagines him murdered by his empowered wife. Isobel can then end her version of events with the satisfied ‘Real right justice. Done’ (HC 351). Similarly, as a writer of historical romances, Isobel has (and uses) the liberty to bestow happy endings to her deserving characters. Whereas Eliza is murdered, Isobel’s artistic interpretation of her as Lady Fairfax is empowered: Lady Fairfax eventually tells her own tale herself and rides off with her lover, away from her violent husband: the Bluebeard tale is rewritten so that the character runs away from patriarchal authority with her lover. The happy ending is understood to be circumscribed to the realm of imagination and fiction. Yet, the numerous references to Shakespeare’s comedies suggest that the perspective of a happy ending remains the object of hope, a yearning for the narrator who calls her daughter Imogen after Cymbeline (Sanders 2001, 74). The contemporary fairy tale, as Stephen Benson notes, keeps displaying ‘the formal trajectory of plot, the progression through a series of casually related events towards an ending that functions, in whatever manner, to resolve, explain and thereby make fixedly meaningful the events it serves to cap’ (Benson 130, italics mine). The ending thus remains the point of closure, be it happy or not. As Jessica Tiffin puts it, ‘the point is that closure is offered, an artificial oversimplification imposed on events so that they have a neatness and self-​ containment rather different from the messy, ongoing matters of life’ (Tiffin 14). No such ‘neatness’ is to be found in Kate Atkinson’s re-​vision where the closed ending of the tale is questioned while displaying a yearning for it and abiding by it to a certain extent as the closing frames are multiplied. Conflicting signals are sent, repeatedly announcing closure at various levels but eventually denying it. When Isobel wakes up from her coma, all the elements of her narrative so far are emphatically declared to come together to make sense: ‘Slowly, slowly, everything begins to fall back into shape, like a kaleidoscope at rest, a jigsaw finished. ... The cosmic journey I took was the world of the comatose’ (HC 309). This indeed provides a rational explanation for the unusual facts told before but more is yet to come: with about fifty to eighty pages to go, there is no ‘tell-​tale compression of the pages’ to confirm or suggest that the tale is nearing its end and that ‘we are all hastening together to perfect felicity’ (Austen 203). Besides, the closure announced by the

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comparison with a finished jigsaw is flawed: Eliza retains her mystery and the trauma caused by her defection never seems to abate, visible in the competing versions that will not assemble to constitute a final tale (see Kevin Paul Smith 76) because it would mean death. In a refusal to accept the death of her mother, Isobel as writer of historical fiction keeps on rewriting the ending, refuting closure and stability. In the last few pages, the adult narrator still rejects the idea that a dead body found in the forest is her mother’s. When a ring bearing her parents’ initials is found on a skeleton in the woods, she writes: ‘I believe my mother had such a ring but I knew she couldn’t be the forgotten body in the wood for I never thought of her as dead, and anyway she had made herself manifest to me not long ago’ (HC 375). She goes on to describe a meeting with a woman around apples fallen off the conveyor belt in a supermarket, which is again a re-​vision of Snow White. Atkinson enacts re-​ vision while she ensures her readers are aware that fairy-​tale narratives are neither natural nor innocent but the product of a narrator. The ending of the tale particularly tells on the teller. Isobel thus points out that Mrs Baxter and Eliza give different conclusions to Little Red Riding Hood and other tales, thus revealing their different characters and views on life: ‘when Eliza had told them they had frequently ended badly and contained a great deal of humiliation and torture, whereas in Mrs Baxter’s versions, the stories all had happy endings’ (HC 192). Mrs Baxter is thus an old-​style teller, of the type described by Marina Warner: ‘when critics reproach fairy tale for the glib promise of its traditional ending –​“And they all lived happily ever after” –​ they overlook the knowledge of misery within marriage that the preceding story reveals in its every line. The conclusion of fairy tales works a charm against despair, the last spell the narrating fairy godmother casts for change in her subjects and her hearers’ destinies’ (Warner 217). Through Isobel’s trials and attempts to fit role models offered by fairy tales, Atkinson mounts a challenge to the picture of femininity imposed on women by some fairy tales. She simultaneously reappropriates the female fairy-​tale writing tradition that literary history has relegated to the background (such as Mme d’Aulnoy and Mme Leprince de Beaumont). Atkinson does not fully relinquish the hope carried by the happy ending, as could be expected from the self-​conscious use of fairy-​tale

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intertexts, but merely limits it to the world of fiction. Yet through the character of Isobel who uses fairy-​story patterns for guidance in the absence of her mother, Atkinson humorously confronts the readers to the limiting and unsatisfactory role models set up for girls and women in fairy tales. Contrary to characters by Robert Coover or A.S. Byatt14 who are stuck in a role or pattern and are aware of it, Atkinson’s heroine in Human Croquet is able to free herself from these roles through ‘re-​vision’ and self-​consciousness that challenge the romantic ending and open up the traditional closure of fairy tales, a freedom which in itself can be read as a happy ending.

Paroxystic self-​reflexivity in Emotionally Weird Set in 1972, Emotionally Weird introduces Effie, a twenty-​one-​ year-​old who exchanges tales with her mother, Nora, on a remote Scottish island inhabited only by them. Effie tells her mother stories of her recent life at Dundee University in exchange for the tale of her own origins since she is an orphan. There are thematic similarities with the previous novels: mostly a first-​person narrative, by a young girl in search of her past and thus of her identity. In terms of form however, Atkinson takes up a completely different approach as she reinjects, with deliberate excess, some of the postmodern characteristics spotted in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet. In her third novel, Atkinson seems to offer a self-​reflexive commentary on her first two novels, their critical reception and literary theory attached to them. In fact, as can be seen through my insertion of references to Atkinson’s novel within brackets in Nick Bentley’s list, given below, Emotionally Weird reads like a textbook example of narrative techniques associated with postmodernism: metafiction; the disruption of linear flow of narratives [through interruptions by other narratives or characters] and the relationship between cause and effect [which seems completely absent from Effie’s narrative]; challenging the authority of the author [as Nora does to Effie]; the use of events and characters drawn from fantasy [as when Effie resuscitates a character by burning a scrap of manuscript]; self-​reflexively drawing attention to the language being used to construct the fiction [as when they discuss the appropriateness of certain

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Kate Atkinson adverbs]; the use of parody and pastiche [in the various instances of creative writing attributed to Effie’s fellow students and lecturers], and more generally a scepticism towards fixed ideologies and philosophies [as when fun is made of a lecturer’s structuralist theories]. (Bentley 2008, 34)

Through Effie’s remarks, Atkinson plays with the poststructuralist idea that reality is textual by pointing to very material and physical events: ‘Nora says that it doesn’t matter when you die, that this life is nothing but an illusion. Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t stop the cold rain from soaking us to the bone or the gales blowing in our hair’ (EW 23) and later again: ‘With no power and the cupboard bare, we had to imagine breakfast. … We remained hungry, however, for you cannot really eat your own words’ (EW 33). Even as Atkinson’s novel constantly plays with the border between illusion and reality, it insists on the down-​to-​earth distinction between the two. In the frame narrative, Effie and Nora are gathered on their bare island to tell their ‘tales’ (EW 25). Because of the similar isolated setting, Hatice points to The Tempest as ‘narrative frame’, with Nora cast as a female Prospero (Hatice 90). As for Ruby and Isobel, storytelling is a necessity for Effie, in order to structure her life, in accordance with Paul Ricœur’s narrative identity (see Meyer 448). However, the trajectory of this journey into self-​discovery through words is reversed. Indeed, while Ruby and Isobel try to make out their past to extricate themselves from a dysfunctional family, this is the type of family that is revealed to Effie: Nora, who is not actually her mother, is the result of incest between her own brother and sister. Part of Nora’s narrative qualifies as family saga like Atkinson’s previous two novels but it is a very dark one with death, incest and violence at its heart. In an echo to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, the narrative builds up Effie’s and the reader’s expectations regarding her true family, introducing her as the last in a long line of an old family that turns out be the opposite of what could be hoped for. What is more, in a mockery of the genre of the family saga, Effie and the reader are told the story of the Stuart-​ Murrays from the beginning of the twentieth century as if they were of actual importance to her when, in fact, the girl is not even related to them at all since her biological mother, Mabel Orchard, who married a Stuart-​Murray, begot her with someone else. As for

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Effie’s narrative of her life in Dundee, it may certainly remind the reader of the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s Alice (see Clark 2003, 19) in the way she wanders uncomprehendingly in a strange world. Moreover, Emotionally Weird opens with an epigraph, whose function often is to offer an indirect comment on the text (Genette 1997, 145), which is taken from Through the Looking-​Glass and is an absurd dialogue between Humpty Dumpty and a puzzled Alice. Emotionally Weird is by far ‘the most obviously metafictional as well as metanarrative text’ of Atkinson’s first three works (Meyer 445). The distinction between metafiction and metanarration is indeed relevant to refer to Effie and Nora’s comments on Effie’s tale. While metafiction deliberately draws attention to its status, metanarration is self-​ conscious too but ‘refers to the narrator’s reflections on the act or process of narration’ (Neumann and Nünning), for instance with ‘we must tell our tales. How will you begin, she asks’ (EW 25). The outcome is a highly self-​consciously postmodern novel: through her characters and their textual awareness, Atkinson not only uses postmodern devices but points them out. For instance, Nora’s remarks enable playful self-​reflexive comments on the narrative: ~Plot development? Nora murmurs quietly, almost to herself. ‘Is not necessary in this post-​modern day and age,’ I tell her firmly. (EW 186)

Compared to her other novels where almost everything, at some level, ultimately makes sense or fits in, Emotionally Weird is a ramshackle narrative, with a ‘shandyesque quality’, comprised of ‘digressions and circumlocutions’ (Clark 2003, 19). As Viktor Shklovsky says of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with which Emotionally Weird bears a number of similarities, Atkinson in this novel is particularly keen to ‘lay bare the device’ (Shklovsky 1991, 147). Effie quotes herself, referring to the physical book the reader is holding, indicating the exact page: ‘On page 49 I looked out of the third floor window …’ (EW 152, emphasis in original). Comments on her use of words or style by herself or by Nora interrupt the flow of the narrative. For instance, when imagining which animals her fellow students would be, she ends up with ‘But what I might be I did not know. (I prefer monosyllables. They stick to the page better.) (EW 173), the additional comment in brackets

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ironically pointing both to the language and the materiality of storytelling. Similarly, when Effie does not wish to narrate a class she finds boring, she announces: ‘Time for some omission and reduction’ (EW 173). In the footsteps of Sterne, Atkinson inserts a completely black half page to represent what she sees when closing her eyes (EW 85). Effie’s self-​reflexive remarks remind the reader of the supposed orality of the tale: ‘his duck-​head handled umbrella (try saying that quickly)’ (EW 271, emphasis in original). No suspension of disbelief is possible as the reader is constantly reminded of the medium by which the story is told. Other types of disruption are brought about by excerpts from an essay or from novels being written by Effie and her fellow students or teachers, with different type-​settings to make it visually obvious and accentuate the sense that the novel is a particularly fragmented narrative. As a number of characters have taken a course in creative writing, the novel includes excerpts from their literary efforts, which is the occasion for marked intertextuality through pastiche and parody of various genres. The first excerpt from Effie’s The Hand of Fate ends with a reference to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). Effie’s remarks in her essay on Henry James and Middlemarch apply to her narrative, the one we are reading: ‘a mere string of disparate incidents which lack any dramatic purpose’ (EW 185), which Hatice reads as a challenge to the realist novel: ‘Through these random and unconnected incidents, we question the relation of the novel to life and experience’ (Hatice 97). Effie’s narrative is also disrupted by Nora’s comments that force the reader’s self-​ consciousness and voice his/​ her own grievances as when Nora complains of the number of minor characters (EW 196) or exclaims that the narrative cannot have reached its end: ‘Nothing’s happened yet’ (EW 235, emphasis in original). Nora’s remarks occasionally seem to inflect Effie’s narrative in terms of style –​for instance, her comment ‘too much dialogue’ (EW 248) brings about a description –​as well as events as when she suggests bringing back a character (EW 280), confirming the idea that Effie’s account, despite its attention to clothes and geographical location, is not true to life. Emotionally Weird transgresses yet another border of fiction when Audrey Baxter, a character from Human Croquet, reappears as the author of an essay on our belief in miracles.

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While the narrative seems to take pains to present us with a multi-​ vocality through the introduction of various stories in different typesets, the distinction between Effie’s narrative and the invented tales attributed to other characters is blurred when the reader recognises the doctor in the hospital visited by Effie as straight out of Philippa’s novel (EW 225): ‘Dr McCrindle … smiled at me wolfishly’ (EW 277), suggesting either that Effie is confusing fiction and reality, projecting what she has read on her real world or that all the narratives emanate from Effie. Indeed, repetition of comments in narratives said to be authored by different characters –​‘A girl in love is a frightening sight’ (EW 327, 375) –​suggest that they are not. Not only is the status of Effie’s narrative of her life in Dundee undermined but so is the frame narrative as there is evidence that Effie is the author of the whole narrative, for instance when it turns out she knows some facts before Nora actually tells them –​such is the case with ‘my mother is not my mother’ (EW 161). Fun comes out of this blurring of supposedly different narrative levels as well as preventing the reader from having emotional involvement with the characters. Indeed, all these elements are at odds with the pretend transparency and seamlessness of realism as they all constantly recall the reader to the situation. Emotionally Weird is subtitled ‘a comic novel’. Comic fiction is ‘an elusive thing to define’ (Coe). What a ‘comic novel’ is indeed is not delimited nor the object of a parody within the pages of Atkinson’s novel, in the way that romance and fantasy are, for instance. The subtitle implies some degree of lightness both in the contents of the novel and in its purpose since the phrase ‘a comic novel’ suggests reconciliation, a happy ending and no death. Indeed, Nora protests against the death by suicide of Olivia, one of Effie’s fellow students: ‘you said this was a comic novel –​you can’t kill people’ (EW 365, emphasis in original). Yet, expectations raised by the subtitle are checked early on in the novel by what Nora announces her own tale will contain. Lightness is nevertheless introduced in her list through its reference to staples of detective fiction and sensation novels (EW 26). At minima, one may infer from the subtitle that the purpose of the text is to amuse the reader and possibly to announce that liberties will be taken with the representation of the real since the latter, in a comic novel, is subordinate to the aim

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of making the reader laugh. The introduction of a large cast of fellow students at university (EW 72–​77) just like the depiction of an unlikely number of people in the McCue’s household on her baby-​sitting night (EW 119–​140) clearly offend the common rules of narration and verisimilitude for the purpose of comedy. Various distinctions have been made between types of comedy. James Wood (2004) separates, on the one hand, comedies of correction in which we laugh at characters, from, on the other hand, comedies of forgiveness in which we laugh with the protagonists. In Emotionally Weird, comedy is rampant and laughter is directed at everything: it derives from Effie’s comments, from situations marked by excess and characters’ reactions to them as much as from characters who are more schematic than usual in Atkinson’s fiction. In fact, all kinds of comedy are to be found in Emotionally Weird. Some chapters evoke the campus novel because of their satire of university, regarding political commitment and campus politics: –​‘The university’s strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk’ (EW 48). Atkinson pokes fun at her characters, students and academics, through their speech, attitudes or clothes but laughter is also meant to derive from situations (unexpected plot development, coincidences, quid pro quo, etc.). Finally, comedy arises through language when attention is paid to literal meaning of phrases or through repetition and puns. Atkinson’s coming-​of-​age novels all revise the Bildungsroman in various ways, inflecting on the traditional genre by blending autobiography and trauma narrative in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and appropriating fairy tales in Human Croquet but, to some extent, the prevailing notion of hybridity may reach a limit in Emotionally Weird, in the sense that this novel is anything but a homogeneous tale: in addition to the recurring metanarrative comments, it is partly composed of juxtaposed rather than actually combined narrative episodes and genres. There is no actual grafting or crossing of different genres in Emotionally Weird, which remains a spiky reading object whose edges are deliberately obvious, as if refusing to blend into some sort of a whole. Atkinson’s first three novels can be read as variations of the genre of the Bildungsroman marked by feminism. In these narratives of self-​discovery that alternate strong referentiality with fantasy and

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intertextuality, the past looms large as the protagonists all are in search of it, as a way of defining themselves. What is put forward regarding the past in these novels marked by postmodernism is the uncertainty surrounding the past, its unseizableness –​a dimension that will fade in the background in the later novels –​as well as the trauma that may derive from it. In these novels, a sense of fragmentation is conveyed through the use of different voices, periods and genres that make space for a large cast of characters or voices without eschewing the unfolding of a story. Significantly, these three coming-​of-​age tales point to the relational as well as to the narrative dimension of identity as the heroines’ autobiographical accounts heavily rely on storytelling and (family) relationships. In this respect, they illustrate one of the directions taken by the fragmentary polyphonic novel in contemporary fiction, one that ‘follow[s]‌the suggestion that every life narrative should encompass all the disparate voices and experiences constituting the composite biography of a single individual’ (D’Ambrosio 31).

Notes 1 Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird may remind the reader of Tristram Shandy in their unusual use of typography, such as pages bearing just a few words –​‘a baby!’ (HC 152) and ‘no baby!’ (HC 321) –​and changes in the typesetting, visual devices that make the reader pause. 2 As Ganteau and Onega sum it up, ‘in the field of poetics, there seems to be some consensus around the definition of what various critics, from Luckhurst to Whitehead have called “traumatic realism”, a category relying on such traits as: heavy resort to intertextuality; emphasis on repetition (in various guises, including anachronism, hence haunting and uncanny effects); fragmentation …; or also the representation of psychological de-​doubling –​… (Similarly, affective doubling and the creation of anxious modes as a means of anticipating and attempting to preempt or displace traumatic events or memories is an important formal influence on Amis and McEwan, amongst others.)’ (Ganteau and Onega 17), to which they add ‘another, all-​encompassing feature which corresponds to the process of intensification (through hyperbolical soliciting of affects)’ (Ganteau and Onega 17). 3 For a detailed study of this episode, see Terry Hargreaves, Marianne Camus and Sinead McDermott.

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4 In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, characters of unmarried women who become pregnant are manipulated into abandoning their children. Such is the case of Doreen and Patricia who both live to regret it. Lilian is the exception as she rebels and escapes to Canada with her unborn fatherless child. 5 ‘tout se passe comme si l’énonciation devenait contemporaine de l’histoire, et qu’elle était donc le fait du personnage’ (Lejeune 18). 6 A similar manipulation is at work in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) as Briony hides her role in the story. However, unlike Briony, Ruby is innocent of the crime imputed to her. 7 See for instance Jeannette Winterson’s rewriting of the Grimms’ ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ in Sexing the Cherry (1989), A.S. Byatt’s take on ‘The Glass Coffin’ in Possession (1990) and Emma Donoghue’s reworking of a series of classic fairy tales which she interlinks in Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997). 8 Atkinson is weary of the phrase ‘magic realism’ or ‘magical realism’ that has been applied to some of her fiction (see interview with Tolan). Yet, Kevin Paul Smith has a point and ‘magical realism’ does indeed seem suited to refer to her Human Croquet if we consider the following definitions: ‘realism magic or magical realism was introduced in the 1950s in relation to Latin American fiction, but has since been adopted as the main term used to refer to all narrative fiction that includes magical happenings in a realist matter-​of-​fact narrative’ (Bowers 2) and ‘ “Magical realism” relies most of all upon the matter-​of-​fact realist tone of its narrative when presenting magical happenings’ (Bowers 3). 9 Julie Sanders points out that the date given, 1 April (i.e. April Fools’s Day) is a hint that Isobel may be an unreliable narrator (Sanders 2001, 67). 10 The mysterious Lady Fairfax who appears in some parts of the novel is indeed Isobel’s template for her representation of Eliza, her unknown mother: the same motifs from folktales and legends are drawn upon to represent these elusive feminine characters. One notes for example the fantastic arrival of Lady Fairfax, an ‘enigmatic creature whose beginning and end were veiled in mystery’ (HC 15), on ‘one wild, storm-​driven night’ (HC 15), which is echoed in ‘Eliza was a mystery. Nobody knew where she came from’ (HC 91). Both women are given a similar destiny: appearing and/​or disappearing in forests and woods, which are traditional places for fairies to live in. A mystery surrounds the birth of their children, evoking relationships between mortals and fairies relying on the mortal abiding by a condition set by the fairy. The narrator also indicates that the ‘new lady Fairfax favoured green’ (HC 16), which is the colour of the fairies and accordingly the one worn

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by Eliza on the day of her supposed disappearance in the woods, just like Lady Fairfax ‘disappearing from underneath the Lady Oak, fading away’ (HC 16). 11 Interview with Jenny Colgan, Open Book, 2003. In fact, not all fairy tales contain the promise of a happy ending: the Grimms and, later, Disney are reasons why the fairy tale became associated with retribution and a happy ending (see Zipes 2006, Chapters 4 and 9). 12 Marina Warner points out that in many stories all over the world women are often the agents of the young heroine’s sufferings (Warner 202). 13 The second kiss is part of Isobel’s flight into fancy: when watching a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream –​‘This is an ideal thing. Not a real thing’ (EW 356) –​she turns around and finds William Shakespeare reclining on her bed. 14 For Coover, see Benson (133). For Byatt, see two of the tales in Possession: A Romance: ‘Such is the power of necessity in tales’ in ‘The Threshold’ (66) and ‘the spell was as the spell was’ in ‘The Glass Coffin’ (155).

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2 Forays into other genres: theatre and short stories

This chapter focuses on two literary genres that also feature, if in much smaller proportion, in Atkinson’s oeuvre. After her three coming-​of-​age novels and before embarking on the Jackson Brodie sequence, Atkinson turned to other genres: she wrote a play, Abandonment, which was performed in 2000,1 and published a collection of stories, Not the End of the World, in 2002. If these texts bear Atkinson’s trademark of literary allusions and humour, they also attest to the versatility of Atkinson’s skills and interests as a writer while confirming her predilection for female characters and gender issues, the complexity of representations of the past and a hybrid form of realism, for instance, with the inclusion of a ghost in her play and Greek gods in her stories. These works illustrate the author’s aesthetics of hybridity; where her play convenes and entwines two temporalities and social worlds, her short stories are remarkable for their expansiveness.

Abandonment: a neo-​Victorian play Atkinson’s first three novels are set in a recent past: respectively the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. However, they look back to a more distant family past: Victorian times are never very far away, for instance with great-​grandmother Alice in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. This period is given a particularly significant part in her full-​length play Abandonment, which features a Victorian storyline along with a contemporary one. At the beginning of the play, the main protagonist, Elizabeth, an academic historian who has complicated family relationships with her adoptive mother and sister, Kitty, moves into a flat in an old Edinburgh house that turns out to hide the remains

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of Agnes, a Victorian governess whose story unfolds at the same time as Elizabeth’s. One may identify here a slimmed-​down version of Atkinson’s concern with complex or multiple time structures featuring in her novels before and after Abandonment. The play was reviewed quite favourably when initially performed at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival in 2000: ‘for all its bulging unwieldiness, it makes you rather hope Atkinson will persevere with the stage’ (Billington); ‘There’s no disputing that Abandonment is an impressively ambitious work, characterised by the distinctive synthesis of waspish black comedy, historical sweep and mind-​bending intellectual concepts that has won Atkinson such praise and popularity as a novelist’ (Sue Wilson). The play has however received little critical attention from academia, with the exception of Benjamin Poore who considers it a ‘supernatural realist play’ because of the presence of a ghost in a broadly realist setting, with characters who are representative of society and are anchored in the social context (see Poore 149–​152; 157–​159). The contemporary characters in Abandonment thus discuss artificial insemination and same-​sex parents, attitudes to homosexuality, domestic abuse, issues of adoption and chaos theory, while the Victorian scenes feature a lawyer’s household, including the masters’ interests –​photography and spiritualism –​and servants’ remarks about their condition. Thus, for Poore, ‘Minus the appearances of the ghost of Agnes, the play is a straightforward family drama, in which each female character is revealed to have been abandoned in some way’ (Poore 157). Abandonment indeed summons themes that are predominant in Atkinson’s work such as troubled relationships in dysfunctional families (present in almost every novel and story) and the importance of houses (like Arden in Human Croquet or Jackson’s search for a home in the Brodie sequence). The presence of the character of the ghost is however of capital importance as, along with the dual-​time narrative, it brings about the issue of the past and how we know it, as well as the concern for feminist issues. Indeed, the figure of the ghost is a multi-​level and multi-​directional challenge as it upsets temporality and smooth narratives of the past and invites a re-​consideration of the past: ‘[t]‌he haunting demands justice or, at the very least, a response from the haunted subject’ (Shaw 107). Formally, the play juxtaposes or interweaves scenes set in the contemporary period and in the nineteenth century –​as in

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Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993). Because of the active relationship set up between the two periods for the viewer/​reader, it is worth examining Abandonment in relation to the neo-​Victorian genre, all the more so as the self-​consciousness typical of the early neo-​ Victorian is indeed also typical of Atkinson’s narrative approach to the past. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the presence of the past in the present is introduced through the image of a swarm of ghosts permanently inhabiting the houses in the old streets of York and somehow perceptible by the living: ‘light-​ as-​ air occupants who wreathe themselves around the fixtures and fittings and linger mournfully on our backs’ (BSM 10). In Abandonment, the Victorian past permeates the present through one particular ghost, the ghost of a Victorian governess who haunts the house recently bought by Elizabeth. As noticed by Mark Llewellyn: In recent neo-​Victorian fiction the figure of the Victorian ghost, or the sense of the ghostliness of the Victorian past, has increasingly come to the fore. As a motif, the idea of the nineteenth-​century spectre serves as a useful corollary to the contemporary author’s awareness of the ‘haunting’ presence of the Victorian period even into the twenty-​first century. (Llewellyn qtd in Arias and Pulham 24)

In Abandonment, the character of the ghost not only represents the haunting of contemporary times by the past but it also enables a dual neo-​Victorian approach to the past. Furthermore, in the wake of Tara MacDonald and Joyce Goggin’s project in their issue of Neo-​Victorian Studies, this chapter explores how Abandonment, as a neo-​Victorian text, engages with feminism ‘and in what ways this engagement is productive, problematic, or both simultaneously’ (MacDonald and Goggin 5). After John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) with its critical contemporary re-​imagining of the Victorian era, neo-​Victorian literature proper emerged in the early 1990s, notably with the publication of A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), which depicts twentieth-​ century scholars on a quest to interrogate the secrets of Victorian poets and features what were later identified as two main trends of the neo-​Victorian genre. Indeed, on the one hand, neo-​Victorian literature may be perceived with Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn as ‘more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth

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century’, a contemporary take on the past or a self-​conscious reconstruction of memory: ‘texts (literary, filmic, audio/​visual) must in some respect be self-​consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4, emphasis in original). Self-​ consciousness and ‘the self-​analytic drive’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 5) are thus key features of neo-​Victorianism. On the other hand, the questioning and revisioning of the Victorian past may take the shape of re-​creations. Indeed, within the genre, Louisa Hadley distinguishes the ‘pseudo-​Victorian’ (Hadley 159–​161) that includes (like Possession) or are, like Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, wholly constituted by texts supposedly written by Victorian characters. If Waters’s novels are revisionist pastiches of Victorian novels, the re-​creation of Victorian times and characters may go as far as losing all self-​consciousness to become immersive literature. Nadine Boehm-​Schnitker and Suzanne Gruss thus call for an inclusive approach of neo-​Victorianism and plead for ‘soft’ definitions that make space for works that are ‘immersive, affective or nostalgic in their engagement with the nineteenth century’ (Boehm-​Schnitker and Gruss 3). This section examines how Abandonment combines self-​consciousness and immersion through the representation of a haunting past. The notion of haunting has often been used to refer to the relationship between past and present at the heart of neo-​Victorian fiction: What is at stake here is the way in which the Victorian past and the contemporary age establish a dialogue, a two-​way process, a dual relationship by means of which the Victorians come to life in neo-​Victorianism, and contemporary revisions of the Victorian past offer productive and nuanced ways of unlocking occluded secrets, silences and mysteries which return and reappear in a series of spectral/​textual traces. (Arias and Pulham xx)

Abandonment represents this ‘two-​way process’ in the sense that the ghost of Agnes haunts Elizabeth’s new home and new life but also in the sense that the character of revenant and the past it embodies are woken up by the arrival of the modern characters in the Victorian house. Elizabeth likes the place for its authenticity. In a way, she represents the uncomprehending contemporary

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taste for artefacts from the past. The expository scene insists on the fact that the house is a product of the past, largely untouched, but nostalgia is eschewed thanks to Kitty’s down-​to-​earth remark that also unwittingly foreshadows the discovery towards the end of the play: ‘It smells like someone died in here’ (A 5). What is more, linear temporality is upset as the ghost of the Victorian governess haunts the present, an instance of ‘the idea of the spectral as a virtual embodiment of that coexistence between living and dead’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 167). The co-​existence of past and present is initially visually impressed as the play opens with the near-​juxtaposition of the two periods on the stage: Agnes is playing the piano amidst Elizabeth’s packing-​cases and later shares the stage with the contemporary characters, at the beginning of Act I, scene 6, ‘Agnes wanders around listlessly’ (A 43, emphasis in original) as Alec visits Elizabeth for the first time and their relationship is set in motion. Agnes the ghost also conflates past and present through language when in the first two scenes in which she speaks (Act I, scenes 4 and 6), she addresses herself and/​or the audience, re-​using words and phrases the audience has heard spoken by the modern characters and others they have not yet heard but will hear later in the Victorian scenes. Abandonment is a play in two acts, with two weeks separating the two acts. Most of the play takes place in contemporary Edinburgh but Elizabeth’s new abode is haunted by Agnes to the point that the contemporary gives way to a few scenes set exclusively in the past. Thus in Act I, scene 6, the contemporary action of the play is suspended as lighting draws attention to Agnes, who exclaims: ‘Wait –​I remember! I am Agnes Soutar … The year is eighteen hundred and sixty-​five … I bring you, ladies and gentlemen, the past, sour and reeking, what was and what might have been’ (Ab 48). This address then gives way to immersion in the Victorian drama as it is directly performed in a few scenes: the representation of a living Agnes with her love and downfall elicits understanding and empathy from the viewer, who is placed in a privileged knowing position.2 On the other hand, the play forces critical distance and a self-​conscious approach to the past through the main character who is an academic historian and similarities between the two stories as the viewer/​reader is compelled to consider both periods when faced

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with split scenes or remarks by characters so that the representation of the past in Abandonment is ambivalent. The main character is an academic historian but she is not looking for the Victorian story (nor does she find out much about it after the skeleton is found). She launches herself instead into a quest for her personal past as she starts looking for her birthmother. Even though the plot does not rely on her researching actively the past as is the case in A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Graham Swift’s Ever After and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, the character’s profession enables comments that have a self-​reflexive value for the viewer/​reader. For instance, before the play immerses the viewer in Agnes’s story, Elizabeth declares ‘history is people, not dates and battles’ (Ab 15). Elizabeth’s newly acquired flat contains a whole suitcase of pictures, i.e. material traces of the past, ‘a pseudo-​presence and a token of absence’ (Sontag 16), displayed on the piano at the beginning of the play. Pictures are often considered as testimonies of the past, as authentic documents. In Susan Sontag’s words, ‘a photograph –​any photograph –​seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects’ and thus benefits from ‘presumption of veracity’ (Sontag 6), hence the part it plays in a number of neo-​Victorian novels. As noted by Kate Mitchell, ‘many contemporary historical novelists return to the Victorian origins of photography to explore history, memory and the Victorian era. They dramatise the value that attaches to photography as a memorial medium, its promise, … to erase distance, to cheat time, and allow access to the past, the resuscitation of the dead’ (Mitchell 143–​144). But Abandonment takes another stand as, in the play, pictures show people whose stories have been forgotten: pictures do not tell anything, nor attest to anything. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Bunty gives an interpretation of the picture of Alice, her grandmother, and her children once she has read the date that accompanies it (BSM 29). Until then, the heroine, Ruby, in the absence of words and narrative had identified a different woman as her ancestor on the basis of a photograph. Here, as in Abandonment, Atkinson seems to be setting up a hierarchy that places narrative and words above photographs, usually seen as authentic traces of the past, but which are nothing without words. As Sontag points out, ‘[t]‌he camera makes reality

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atomic, manageable, and opaque’ but ‘[o]nly that which narrates can make us understand’ (Sontag 23). Indeed, in Abandonment, the pictures of the past lie around the present but they tell no story. If the viewer realises in the course of the play that the pictures in the suitcase(s) are the ones taken by Merric, Agnes’ Victorian employer, and that Agnes very likely appears in some of them, the characters do not make the connection and the pictures remain unread testimonies of the past. When Kitty suggests ‘You could pretend they were your real family’ (Ab 7), Atkinson alludes to the easy mystification of the past. More generally, the play raises the question of how we know the past, a common theme in neo-​Victorian fiction that often foregrounds the textuality of the past: how we interpret or misinterpret the past through its textual remains. In Abandonment, the idea is conveyed not through texts (as in Arcadia) but through the pictures. Merric’s enthusiasm for photography reminds the viewer that the Victorian era was marked by progress and changes but this suggestion is counterbalanced by the shortcomings of the character. The other Victorian interest represented in Abandonment is spiritualism as Merric’s wife, Laetitia, tries to supplement a loss and to summon the spirit of her dead child (A II, 268).3 As Llewellyn suggests that ghosts of the Victorian period in the present may be ‘a re-​articulation of the Victorians’ own fascination with séances, spectres and other spookish things’ (Llewellyn qtd in Arias and Pulham 24), in Abandonment, the Victorian character’s search for the dead may read as a mise en abyme of the contemporary neo-​ Victorian quest for the past. ‘(Re)vision’ is listed by Heilmann and Llewelyn as a characteristic of neo-​Victorian fiction (Heilmann and Llewelyn 2010, 4). The feminist ‘re-​vision’ advocated by Adrienne Rich (Rich 35) has indeed found an outlet in neo-​Victorian literature that returns to the past to give a voice to the downtrodden, forgotten or ‘suppressed histories of gender and sexuality, race and empire’ (Kaplan 3), to which one might add class considering how servants are re-​ visioned, for instance, in Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (2006) and Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013). Abandonment evokes the past itself and in relation to the present, both in terms of women’s condition, linked to class, and of epistemology.

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In the expository scene of Abandonment, the conversation quickly turns to the previous inhabitant, Miss Aurora Chalmers, ‘famous in her day, quite forgotten now’ (Ab 6). With this character partly fallen into oblivion, the play does question the contemporary fascination with the Victorian past by showing how limited and selective it is. However, within the diegesis, the story of Aurora Chalmers is known (Ab 6) and the play is not about rediscovering this character. It is about the undocumented story of Agnes, a new governess seduced by her employer, Merric Chalmers, a lawyer with an interest in photography. When she becomes pregnant, he prepares to abandon her but Laetitia, his wife, kills her to avoid scandal (Ab Act II, scene 11). The Victorian plot is mirrored in contemporary times as Elizabeth’s romantic involvement with a photographer, Alec, ends in his leaving her, as if the past were, to some extent, repeating itself. Like Possession and Arcadia, Abandonment offers a ‘dualtime narrative’ (Heilmann and Llewelyn 2010, 8) when Victorian scenes are embedded in contemporary ones for the spectator. In Act I, scene 6, the scene between Alec about to take pictures of Elizabeth is split open by the flash of the camera that marks the transition between the two periods: the Victorian characters, Merric and Agnes, engaged in a similar photographic session, momentarily interrupt the contemporary scene. In both cases, the photographer is the seducer4 (as in Behind the Scenes at the Museum) and the camera pointedly serves to entrap, capture and constrain a character and its image.5 More generally, its function is highly significant here as it serves to immobilise the present for the future and thus fabricate the past. Another major scene that establishes a form of repetition is Act II, scene 5 (Ab 75–​79) in which a dialogue between Agnes and Merric is entwined with a dialogue between Elizabeth and Alec, suggesting seamless continuity in the two relationships and similarity between the female concerns as opposed to the male ones. For instance, while the male characters (played by the same actor) say: ‘you should live in the moment’ (Ab 76) and ‘we must live in the moment’ (Ab 77), Agnes’s ‘I would like children’ is immediately followed by Elizabeth’s musing ‘I wonder what our children would look like?’ (Ab 77). Similarly, the contemporary scene in which Alec leaves Elizabeth (Ab Act II, scene 7) is followed by a Victorian one in which we learn that Agnes is pregnant (Ab Act II, scene 8),

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before the final scene where all are gathered around Elizabeth’s baby: this sequence impresses on the viewer/​reader that the same story (except for the end) is unfolding through two different characters. These pointed similarities indicate Atkinson’s approach to the relationship between past and present. For Emma Parker, ‘Parallels between Agnes and Elizabeth point to the repetition of the past, an idea reinforced visually on the stage by using actors who play characters in the Victorian period to double as their modern counterparts’ (Parker 2002, 16–​17).6 The two female characters are not related, which makes the similarities between women’s lot over generations all the more striking, pointing to the Victorian past and women’s history as cultural heritage and inheritance. However, the repetition motif deviates as Elizabeth survives the failed relationship and starts a new life: when, like Agnes, Elizabeth finds herself pregnant, she decides to raise the child by herself, a variation that highlights differences regarding the condition of women. In Abandonment, the past acts as a foil to the present, highlighting the progress in the situation of women (notably in relation to men). For Poore, ‘the critique is mostly of Victorian attitudes’ (Poore 158). It is true that the Victorian era is not shown in a particularly positive light and is deprived of nostalgic presentation in Merric’s predatory attitudes over the servants of the house and his wife’s bitterness. However, this can be nuanced. Indeed, the complexity of the period is foregrounded as Alec’s mercenary marriage is counterbalanced by his mother’s passionate views and attachment to her adventurous dead husband. Even Laetitia, the ‘virago’ (Ab 50) and murderous wife, is also depicted as someone in pain after the loss of one of her children and the philandering attitude of her husband who married her for her fortune. In neo-​ Victorian fashion, the play uses an unusual angle to return to the Victorian era and highlights hitherto invisible or less-​ documented figures of the past by focusing on the story of the governess rather than on the upper-​class family. This story is one of abuse and retrieving it by performing it is one of the ways in which neo-​Victorian literature attempts to do justice to the forgotten figures of the past. The double plot in Abandonment moreover allows for self-​ reflexivity on this point. Indeed, after finding the skeleton, one of the contemporary characters aptly guesses: ‘I think she must have been a servant in the Chalmers’ family. It’s easier

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for the lower orders to disappear’ (Ab 109), drawing attention to the invisibility of socially inferior figures. But Agnes remains unknown to them, invisible, contrary to the Chalmers girls who are accounted for and to whom the conversation thus turns. In the diegesis, Maud and Edith Chalmers, identified by the viewer/​ reader as Merric and Laetitia’s daughters, are respectively turn-​ of-​the-​century artists and explorers. While this may celebrate the positive evolution of women’s condition as Maud and Edith are a far cry from their frustrated mother, this also throws the life of the unknown and unnamed Agnes back into oblivion. Representing Agnes’s life and aspirations on stage makes the twentieth-​century characters’ ignorance and dismissal of her all the more poignant to the spectator. As the viewer is likely to identify to some extent with the contemporary characters, it invites him or her to reflect on his or her own ignorance about things past. In the way Agnes escapes the notice of the contemporary characters, we recognise in Abandonment another function of the ghost identified by Heilmann and Llewellyn: ‘neo-​Victorian spectrality can be seen as a reflection of our inability to recapture the Victorians, and the impossibility of see(k)ing the ‘truth’ of the period through either fiction or fact … Texts themselves become shadows, spectres and written ghosts that never materialize … but instead remain simulations of the “real” ’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 144–​145). With the double plot, parallels are made obvious between the lives of Elizabeth and Agnes to the reader but the past finally irrupts in Elizabeth’s present with the discovery of Agnes’s skeleton at the end of the play. Yet, the past is not fully revealed. In Act II, scene 12, Agnes’s bones are discovered by the twentieth-​century characters but her story is not because it is only documented by pictures that do not speak. As in Byatt’s Possession in which part of what happened eludes the twentieth-​century characters and is only known to the reader thanks to a few direct immersions in the past, in Abandonment, only the spectator is made aware of it because of privileged immersion in the nineteenth century thus foregrounding the power of imagination, fiction, and storytelling. However, in a final suggestion that the past somehow pervades the present even if the latter is unaware of it, Elizabeth chooses to call her baby daughter Agnes for no rational reason since she remains ignorant of the identity of the skeleton. Eventually, a sense

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of circularity is conveyed by Agnes being the last character on the scene just as she was the first one to appear at the beginning of the play: as a ghost, she is on the margins of the plot and yet her liminal position, emphasised by her location ‘in the doorway’ (Ab 107, emphasis in original), underlines her significance. As remarked by Kate Mitchell about other texts, ‘Ghostliness becomes a metaphor for a past both lost and, paradoxically, perpetuated, endlessly returned or repeated in the present’ (Mitchell 144). Through the combination of self-​ reflexivity and immersion, notably brought about by the character of the ghost, Atkinson’s neo-​Victorian play invites the viewer/​reader to reconsider the way he or she knows the past. In watching the juxtaposition occasionally turning to superposition between past and present, the viewer/​ reader is led to bear in mind or realise how limited and selective our knowledge of the Victorians actually is, particularly regarding women and the lower classes. Both groups, embodied in Agnes, belong to the invisibles temporarily made visible in the play.

Expansive short stories in Not the End of the World Kate Atkinson’s career as a writer began with short stories for which she first met literary recognition in the form of prizes.7 Writing stories for magazines is how Atkinson taught herself writing, as she has often explained (Tolan 2008, 1). She refers to Henry James’s remarks about a story being like a ‘hard diamond’, ‘where everything is reduced and solid and compact’ (Tolan 2008, 3). In fact, Atkinson has written stories consistently throughout her career, as attest for instance, ‘Affairs of the Heart’ written for Crimespotting, an Edinburgh Crime Collection (2009) and ‘Festive Spirit’ initially published in the New Statesman in December 2018, then reprinted in the collection entitled Festive Spirits (2019). Yet Atkinson has only published one collection so far –​Not the End of the World (2002) –​which comprises twelve stories overall.8 Published after her three coming-​ of-​ age novels and before Case Histories, the volume, for Helen Mundler, ‘marks a transition in her work: the affiliation to metafiction is worked out with much greater subtlety, making the commentary on narrative fiction the more complex and interesting’ (Mundler §1).

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It is a fact that the short story is ‘a genre that even today is a long way from reaching the degree of literary prestige, social recognition and even commercial value that the novel has enjoyed’ (Sacido-​ Romero and Lojo-​Rodríguez 2). Atkinson is aware of the difference in reception and readership of novels and stories at the expense of the latter. She explains this with the reader’s desire for ‘commitment and engagement’: ‘they want to get into something and to wallow in it. Once you’re committed to the novel, you know you’re going to get a good run out of it, but a story is going to be over as quickly as it was written’ (Tolan 2008, 2). Atkinson’s collection however was a commercial and critical success, which could be explained by the fact that Atkinson offers her readers what can be termed ‘expansive short stories’ –​an oxymoron to attempt to encompass the idiosyncrasy of Atkinson’s stories as the brevity of the story is counteracted by elements that expand it. If brevity is considered the mark of the short story (Malcolm 33), this very characteristic, as Atkinson acknowledges herself, may be unappealing to readers because it necessarily puts a limit on narrative and on character development, for instance. One remembers Edgar Allan Poe’s wish for ‘a certain unique or single effect to be brought out’ (Poe 522, emphasis in original). Stories thus generally focus on a particular episode or event (a party, a train journey etc.), key moments that may act as a reflector on the character’s life (Louvel 18). As David Malcolm sums up, ‘contraction and compression have been a focus in classic discussion of the form’ (Malcolm 33). For Gerald Gerlach, ‘The short story blends the brevity and intensity of the lyric poem with the narrative traits (plot, character and theme) of the novel but it blends them with a sacrifice: the brevity is not so brief, the intensity not so intense, and the novelistic luxury of multiple plot lines spanning broad vistas of time and space … must be foregone’ (Gerlach 7). If the short story does hover between poetic and narrative poles (Tibi 11), parts of Gerlach’s assertion are debatable as brevity is relative and expansion possible. Indeed, some of Janet Frame’s stories in The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951) are not longer than a page and Lydia Davis’s more recent collection Can’t and Won’t (2014) includes as short as five-​line paragraphs. Conversely, stories can be expanded into linked stories, as is the case with the Juliet stories in Alice Munro’s Runaway (2004). In his chapter entitled ‘Brevity

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expanded’, Ian Reid distinguishes, apart from the novella, between the cycle and the ‘framed miscellany’ like 1001 Nights. For his part, David Malcolm thinks the short story can be augmented in three ways. First, the epiphany that works like a synecdoche when, for instance, a brief moment throws light on an entire life (Malcolm 35). In his second category, Malcolm places both the ‘compressed novel’, which can take the form of a ‘condensed family saga’, and linked stories –​‘Coherence of topic, recurrence of characters and locales, and proliferation of related story materials, inter alia, lead a cohesive and coherence group of stories that push against the limits of the single brief narrative’ (Malcolm 36) –​which he sees as ‘different but similar type(s) of expansion’ (Malcolm 36). The third one is the very placement of stories in collections: ‘its context adds an extra semantic dimension to that individual text’ (Malcolm 36). Some of these categories and classifications may overlap but they introduce a number of features –​the cycle through linked stories, the framing stories, the compressed novel –​which are present in Atkinson’s collection and convey expansiveness in their different ways to hide the underlying social fragmentation. ‘Contraction and compression’ are not notions that prevail when considering some of Atkinson’s stories. Indeed, they rather seem to be ‘compressed novels’ in the sense that they lay emphasis on narrative as some of her stories cover long periods of time and embrace whole lives. A story such as ‘The Bodies Vest’ could thus be considered as a ‘compressed novel’ because of its amplitude covering the main character’s childhood, adult life and death. Generally speaking, ‘the short story portrays human identity as a subject in process, so that characterisation tends towards only partial realisation’ (March-​ Russell 134) but, even in her stories, Atkinson manages to give her readers apparently full-​fledged characters. In rather classic fashion in short stories, characters may be used as focalisers, like Eddie and his mother June in ‘Tunnel of Fish’. Alternatively, the omniscient opening description of Meredith Zane in ‘Transparent Fiction’ (NEW 47) situates the character socially and lists precise physical traits. Moreover, even though ellipsis –​a formal aspect of the short story –​is also used in Atkinson’s narratives, it is counteracted and relegated to the background in ‘Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping’ through lists that give a feeling of abundance and expansiveness as in a novel (NEW 4). A number of narratives stretch over a large

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time span or move back and forth between past and present, which expands the scope of the story. As the narrative follows Rebecca’s thoughts in free indirect style in ‘Dissonance’, the narrative moves from her mother’s current partner to the former one (NEW 82). These shifts in time also point to the fact that past and present are intertwined. This is particularly apparent in ‘Sheer Big Waste of Love’ that weaves paragraphs about Addison’s recent present with episodes from his past. The first paragraph establishes the existence of a traumatic encounter for Addison when he met his father in the first paragraph (NEW 99) but this event is only told ten pages later (NEW 112–​117) before the scene is echoed when Addison returns to the same place for his father’s funeral (NEW 121–​124). This interlinking of past and present finds an echo at the macro level of the collection with the overwhelming presence of references to Greek gods somehow appearing in the lives of contemporary characters across the stories. A sense of expansiveness is also suggested by the stories that seem to go beyond their limits because of intertextuality as well as intratextuality at work in the volume. Indeed, Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity are also illustrated in this collection that features stories that are somehow interrelated. Not the End of the World can thus be read as a ‘composite novel’ following Dunn and Morris’s d ­ efinition –​‘The composite novel is a literary work composed of shorter texts that though individually complete and autonomous are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one or more organizing principles’ (Dunn and Morris 2)9 –​or a ‘short story cycle’ as defined by Susan Mann: [T]‌here is only one essential characteristic of the short story cycle: the stories are both self-​sufficient and interrelated. On the one hand, the stories work independently of one another: the reader is capable of understanding each of them without going beyond the limits of the individual story. On the other hand, however, the stories work together, creating something that could not be achieved in a single story. … The ability of the story cycle to extend discussions –​to work on a larger scale –​resembles what is accomplished in the novel. (Mann 15)

The link between the stories in Not the End of the World has been remarked upon before: ‘each story develops another aspect of the previous ones to produce an amorphous whole’ (O’Cinneide 21).

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However, rather than an ‘amorphous whole’, the collection can be read as very constructed, even if the stories may form a constellation rather than a linear development. If the composite novel or short story cycle is a more or less loose assemblage of stories, for instance from James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), where the setting is the only link, to Alice Munro following the relationship between mother and daughters over the years in The Beggar Maid (1978), or the character of Olive Kitteridge in Elizabeth Strout’s eponymous volumes Olive Kitteridge (2008) and Olive, Again (2019) who appears in the background of several stories, the links between the stories in Atkinson’s collection seem more tenuous, playful and irregular. Yet, the paratext of Not the End of the World impresses coherence on the reader first when the stories appear numbered in the table of contents, pointing to an order for reading them. Moreover, each story is prefaced by an ­illustration –​mostly engravings and woodcuts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries –​and an epigraph whose function is to offer a comment, an intimation of what happens in the following story.10 As demonstrated by Gerald Lynch, one of the major unifying elements in a short story cycle are either place/​setting or character, the latter sometimes implying the former since ‘the place of origin or extended residence plays an essential role in the formation, revelation and understanding of character’ (Lynch 521). Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008) and its sequel Olive, Again (2019) offer an example of this combination. In Not the End of the World, apart from ‘Transparent Fiction’ set in London and a few pages of ‘Unseen Translation’ set in Munich, all stories are set in Scotland with a reference to a significant holiday in Crete at some point in the past for most of the characters. This reference participates in establishing both the dichotomy and the connection between ordinary lives and Greek gods or scenes from the mythology. Gerald Lynch quotes Not the End of the World as an example of how coherence in a short story cycle can be achieved through ‘recurrent characters and narrators’ (Lynch §124; Lynch 513). Atkinson’s collection does not centre around one particular protagonist but it features characters, some of which reappear in stories focusing on others. The story of Nanci Zane, the American dentist’s daughter who dies in Europe, first briefly mentioned in the background of the story focusing on Meredith Zane in ‘Transparent

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Fiction’, is developed in ‘The Bodies Vest’ where she is Vincent’s girlfriend and wife. One character, Pam, appears as the French teacher in ‘Tunnel of Fish’, as the mother in ‘Dissonance’ and again in ‘Wedding Favours’. Hawk is mentioned as the protagonist’s boyfriend or former boyfriend in several stories, ‘Tunnel of Fish’, in ‘Dissonance’ (NEW 82–​83) pointing to the transience of romantic relationships. The briefly mentioned nanny ‘oddly named Missy’ (NEW 63) in ‘Transparent Fiction’ is the main protagonist of ‘Unseen Translation’. In Helen Mundler’s words, ‘the overlaps in character and plot mean that each small world seems to offer the illusion of a guarantee of the existence of the last, and the next’ (Mundler 3, §6). If these overlaps place the characters in the same fictional world and guarantee its existence, they also point to a fragmented world and create the sense of the characters’ solitude. Despite the recurring characters, the stories are otherwise self-​ contained with very marked endings even if some of them remain open. The narrative thus rounds off with all the characters’ thoughts at the end of ‘A Tunnel of Fish’ and ‘The Cat Lover’, and closes on the outcome of the relationship between Heidi and Gordon the cat-​ tiger. A number of the stories metaphorically end with the main character leaving: Meredith ‘ran into the future for ever’ (NEW 67), Missy and Arthur ‘ran. They ran so fast that Arthur was sure they were going to take off even before they got on the plane’ (NEW 149), Rebecca ‘walked quickly’ (NEW 95), and Addison ‘walked swiftly out of the door’ (NEW 124). Even though the action of leaving may read as a closural sign, characters are in movement, defying stasis and closure. Some stories end with the character watching a screen –​Fielding watching cartoons (NEW 180), Pam watching Buffy (NEW 263) and Heidi looking at the ultrasound showing her baby cats (NEW 198) –​creating a mise en abyme as the characters are like the reader/​listener engrossed in somebody else’s life on a diegetic level other than his/​her own. Finally, ‘Temporal Anomaly’, which rewrites part of the myth of Persephone who is doomed to endlessly spend part of the year in the underworld, ends on the suggestion of a cycle, implying unending repetition. Recurrence of characters combines with other elements to give unity to Atkinson’s collection and expand the narrative worlds of the stories in a playful and indirect way. Ian Reid pointed out the importance of a framing device to round off a volume

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of miscellaneous stories, which he compares to but distinguishes from cycles with internally linked stories (Reid 50). Atkinson’s Not the End of the World however combines both as the collection of interlinked stories is book-​ended by two stories with the same characters, Charlene and Trudi, the second story being the continuation of the first. Gerald Lynch supports the idea that first and last stories are generally particularly significant as they ‘establish and confirm a cycle’s meaning’ (Lynch 524). For Helen Mundler discussing Not the End of the World, ‘Charlene and Trudi go Shopping’ and ‘Pleasureland’ ‘frame the collection and make its textual concerns coherent’ (Mundler 1). Indeed, a number of characters, like Heidi and the man-​size cat in ‘The Cat Lover’ that are both mentioned in ‘Charlene and Trudi do Shopping’ (NEW 9, 10), or events in the stories, are initially mentioned in the opening story retrospectively; the reader realises that Charlene and Trudi are the diegetic narrators. The framing quality of these two stories is reinforced by the presence of liminal quotes from the same book: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which retells episodes from Greek mythology and whose incipit is the epigraph to the first story while its epilogue is the epigraph to the last story. Whereas the first one evokes the poet’s purpose to, with the help of the gods, ‘spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time’ (trans. Anthony S. Kline), the last one is the poet’s assertion that his words will outlast his life. The epigraphs create a mise en abyme and acquire a new metafictional function as they find an echo in Charlene and Trudi’s roles as storytellers. Coherence and unity in the volume are also achieved through the use of the last segment of the book for the title of the collection. Whereas collections are often entitled after one of the stories or after an overall theme,11 Atkinson’s, as in a novel, lays emphasis on the final sentence –​‘don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world’ (NEW 278) –​which gives the volume its title. Narrative irony prevails as the narrative precisely evokes a now decaying city riddled with disease in which the protagonists are dying, left only with the option of telling stories to create/​recall a world to which they no longer have access. The final story continues the first one in the collection but it also works as a ‘capping, or return, story’ (Lynch 525, emphasis in original) since it convenes elements from the stories before to suggest that they were told by the characters themselves:

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‘Tell me a story,’ she said to Charlene. ‘I could tell you the story of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades.’12 ‘I think we’ve had that one.’ ‘ “Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died”?’ ‘We’ve definitely had that one.’ (NEW 276)

The characters’ words constitute their world. In the opening story, Charlene muses ‘I would like to visit a Moorish palace. The Alhambra. That’s an exotic word. That’s the most exotic word I can think off, offhand. Alhambra’ (NEW 5) to which Trudi offers Xanadu, an allusion to Coleridge’s poem: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/​A stately pleasure-​dome decree’. The overwhelming role of imagination is asserted as the dialogue turns to the word rather than its referent in the real world (making the signifier more important than the signified) and continues to a fictive place that leads to another imaginary place (Xanadu/​ pleasure-​ dome) that gives the final story its title (‘Pleasureland’). In ‘Pleasureland’, it turns out that the characters have been surviving thanks to the stories they have told each other. In a way, the final story offers a surprise ending to the whole collection. Yet, the direct reference to Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights based on storytelling as a means to postpone death (NEW 277) is subverted as death occurs when they run out of stories: ‘It’s grown very dark, don’t you think? Keep talking. Tell me another story.’ ‘I can’t remember any more,’ Charlene said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world.’ (NEW 278)

Finally, as pointed out by Gerald Lynch, ‘it would be a mistake not to credit the roles played by theme and style and device in strengthening the coherence of short story cycles unified primarily by place and/​or character’ (NEW 521). Thus, echoing the title distortedly, death is a notion that runs through Atkinson’s collection. June’s parents have communicated to their daughter their fear of death in ‘Tunnel of Fish’. In ‘Transparent Fiction’, Meredith Zane steals a cape of immortality (NEW 67). ‘Dissonance’ opens with ‘Simon wished his mother would die’ (NEW 71) and ends with his own serious accident while his sister shocks herself by bringing a stranger back to life (NEW 95) (before we learn in a different

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story that she is studying medicine). In ‘Sheer Big Waste of Love’, the protagonist’s name reads as a pun: Addison is Hades’s son, the son of the god of the dead and the story partly revolves around Addison’s father’s death (NEW 120) on the very day Addison’s son is born. In ‘The Bodies Vest’, the protagonist is surrounded by the untimely deaths of both his parents and his wife. ‘Temporal anomaly’ begins with ‘Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died’ (NEW 221). ‘Wedding favours’ is about the passing of time as the main character, Pam, worries about consequences of possible deaths. The recurrence of the same theme expands the stories beyond their endings. As stories go beyond their endings through the recurrence of characters and of the theme of death that link them together, some remarks evoke the notion that death is not the end: in ‘Temporal Anomaly’, ‘There were always more summers, even when you were no longer there to see them. That was a thought to hold on to’ (NEW 240). The thought is attributed to Marianne, the protagonist, but is also valid beyond the story, for Charlene (and for the reader). In the final story, ‘ “Nothing dies,” Charlene whispered into Trudi’s ear. “All matter is transformed into another matter.” ’ (NEW 277). Similarly, the stories are all somehow concerned with immortals, namely Greek gods and their myths, stories that have survived human death, stories that keep being told and retold, as shown intratextually with rewritings of myths or stories adapted from them or inspired by them. These allusions also serve to expand the narratives. The paratext occasionally invites the reader to make the link with the Greek myth through quotes and illustrations preceding the stories. Thus, before the character of Missy is introduced in ‘Unseen Translation’, a quote from an ‘Homeric hymn to Artemis’ and an engraving of Diana prepare the reader to see Missy as Arthur finally does at the end of the story with a ‘quiver of silver arrows’ on her back, ‘gleaming with moonshine’ (NEW 150). The presence of the gods is indicated through thunder cracking in ‘Transparent Fiction’ when Meredith Zane, in an echo to her research on telomeres and immortality (NEW 57), appropriates the cape of eternity (NEW 67). In ‘Temporal Anomaly’ whose preceding illustration ‘The Rape of Proserpina’ has a proleptical value, Atkinson rewrites the story of Persephone/​Proserpina abducted by Hades. The god’s chariot rides past Marianne as she has a lethal car

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crash on the motorway and then lives a life-​in-​death in her home until she eats the seeds of a pomegranate. Eating does not condemn her to the underworld as she is then restored to her life (NEW 239). Her mother is clearly identified as a version of Demeter/​Ceres when the cornucopia, the goddess’ attribute, is used to describe her garden (240) until the episode repeats: after six months of summer, ‘the sky darkened and Marianne heard the sound of horses’ hooves … “oh no, not again” ’ (NEW 240). In ‘Sheer Big Waste of Love’, the main character is Addison, the illegitimate son of a rich man, known as ‘the Car King’ (NEW 103). Atkinson plays on the child’s idolisation of an unknown father as a god: ‘Addison imagined him high in the clouds, like a god in his chariot’ (NEW 103). To Addison, the garden party he catches a glimpse of is a form of paradise but when Shirley upsets him by confronting him with his child, ‘Addison saw a streak of lightning fracture the sky and almost immediately thunder banged …’ (NEW 113). The analogy with the Greek god is furthered by the later description which also derides the myth: ‘He was a big man, bigger than the others, with the kind of imposing stature that intimidated other men. On the other hand, he didn’t seem that heroic to Addison –​the skin on his cheeks was pouchy and slack and his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. In contrast, his face sported a huge beard’ (NEW 112). Hades appears under his own name in ‘Temporal Anomaly’ and like the encounter with the god of the sea in ‘Tunnel of Fish’ marked in June’s memory by ‘the disgusting smell of fish and whale fat’ (NEW 41), this one is described with an emphasis on the olfactory sense: ‘he overtook her on the inside lane, so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms’ (NEW 223). The gods and the actions they perform are demythified through the down-​to-​earth materiality of their description. At the same time, this use of mythology serves to ‘defamiliarize our own world and the everyday problems which face women’ (Brown 220). Atkinson’s feminism can indeed be traced in the description of unpleasant encounters with male gods at the expense of the female characters. Similarly, the golden apples thrown her way do not make Meredith Zane trip or delay her as they do Atalante in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and she escapes unscathed. As noticed by Fiona Tolan, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a key intertext in stories such as “Temporal Anomaly” … and “Unseen

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Translation” ’ (NEW 14)13 Atkinson also appropriates the transformation trope in ‘The Cat Lover’ in which a tiger becoming more and more human in his habits impregnates the female character. More importantly for us here, Tolan notes: ‘The range of Atkinson’s intertextual allusions expands her writing beyond its formal boundaries, indicating the debt to previous works owed by all authors’ (Tolan 2008, 14, italics mine). In fact, not only do the intertextual references to Greek myths and mythology expand the scope of the stories but the specific intertextual link with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text which retells events from Greek mythology, also creates a mise en abyme that expands the stories as Not the End of the World retells some myths too. The short story cycle could be termed hybrid in the sense that it borrows from the genre of the short story as well as from the genre of the novel. Maybe because of this hybridity, there is a constant tension between the whole and the part. For Gerald Lynch, ‘The story cycle is also unique for the paradoxical way it often represents the failure of place and character to unify a vision that remains tantalizingly whole yet fundamentally suspicious of coherence and completeness’ (Lynch 523). Indeed, in Not the End of the World, Kate Atkinson writes expansive short stories through extensive time coverage, abundance of details, use of intertextuality and of characters that push back the limits of the text as they reappear in other stories. While the linking of the stories may seem to validate their mutual existence or reality and create the sense of a community, the framing stories reveal the artificiality of these. The framing stories emphasise death and disunity as they depict a society marked by fragmentation and disintegration.

Notes 1 Before this, Atkinson had written a short play, Nice (1996), that tells the same story as ‘Inner Balance’. 2 The Victorian characters appear part of Act I, scene 6; Act II, scene 2, scene 4, part of Act II, scene 5, Act II, scene 8, Act II, scene 11. 3 This is similar to all the dead little Amys their mother attempts to get in touch with at séances in A.S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’ in Angels and Insects.

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4 Benjamin Poore remarks on the name of the Victorian character: ‘Merric, whose name, consciously or otherwise, echoes that of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, hinting at the idea of Merric being morally monstrous or deformed, and perhaps of his photographing Agnes like a medical curiosity or specimen’ (Poore 158). 5 In Susan Sontag’s words, ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself in a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge –​and, therefore, like power’ (Sontag 4). 6 A similar device is used in Karel Reiz’s film adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (with a screenplay by Harold Pinter) in which Jeremy Irons plays Charles Smithson and the actor impersonating Charles, while Meryl Streep plays Sarah and the actress who acts her part. 7 ‘In China’ (1988) won the Woman’s Own Short Story Competition and ‘Karmic Mothers –​Fact or Fiction’ the Ian St James Award in 1993 (see Parker 2002, 12–​13 and the British Council Literature website). The early stories remain uncollected (Parker 2002, 17, 94). 8 Three stories had been previously published elsewhere (‘Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping’, ‘Tunnel of Fish’ and ‘The Bodies Vest’). 9 Maggie Dunn and Anne R. Morris indicate five ways in which stories can be linked to one another: by sharing a setting, a narrator/​protagonist, a common theme, a narrative style, by featuring at least one character from a shared group of protagonists (Dunn and Morris 1–​18). 10 On epigraphs, see Genette, Paratexts (1997, 144–​156). 11 See A.S. Byatt’s Sugar and Other Stories and The Djinn and the Nightingale and Other Stories and Alice Munro’s Runaway that use the title of a story for the whole collection as opposed to Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, Byatt’s The Matisse Stories and Elementals with titles that encapsulate the whole collection. 12 I.e. the Zane sisters in Atkinson’s stories. 13 Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the very idea of physical transformation form a recurring intertext and theme in Atkinson’s fiction. It is already present in Human Croquet when Isobel turns into a tree like Daphne (see also Trivellini 355) and the possible transformation of Nora into a sea creature is evoked in Emotionally Weird (EW 23).

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3 Defamiliarising detective fiction with Jackson Brodie: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky In 2004, Atkinson published Case Histories, which seemed a complete departure from her first three novels and her collection of short stories that shared varying degrees of intertextuality, self-​reflexivity and recourse to fantastical elements. Case Histories introduces the character of Jackson Brodie, a private detective in Cambridge, hired by three different characters to solve cases grown cold. The book enjoyed an enthusiastic reception on both sides of the Atlantic. Philip Oakes wrote in the Literary Review ‘Welcome to the most original, engaging private eye to perk up in British crime fiction for many a year … Case Histories is light years away from your average crime novel’ (Oakes 60) and, for Jacqueline Carey in The New York Times, ‘Case Histories is so exuberant, so empathetic, that it makes most murder-​mystery page-​turners feel as lifeless as the corpses they’re strewn with’ (Jacqueline Carey 65). Like many others, these reviewers acknowledged the novel as crime fiction because of the detective protagonist but strongly emphasised its atypicality. The aim of this chapter is to explore this singularity and see how it partakes of Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity when she introduces dissonance in the genre of detective fiction as she combines it with postmodern aspects without relinquishing her taste for character. Ironically, at the end of Emotionally Weird, her last novel before Case Histories, Atkinson makes a scathing description of a certain type of detective fiction: her heroine has become ‘a writer of detective fiction –​the genteel kind for nervous people who like their crime free of anything to do with urban decay, computers or sex, and for foreigners who like their English

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detective to be quaint and colourful’ (EW 399), which sounds like a pastiche of Raymond Chandler’s description of the readership for classic detective fiction: ‘the flustered old ladies –​of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages –​who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty’ (Chandler 16). As can be expected from this, Brodie is neither ‘quaint’ nor ‘colourful’. Acknowledging Atkinson’s literary background as ‘a writer with an interest in metanarratives and fiction games’, Glenda Norquay locates the novelist’s work in the context of Scottish detective fiction by women writers: ‘Kate Atkinson’s crime writing perhaps challenges the genre most of all’ (Norquay 2012, 135). Indeed, it can be argued that Atkinson operates a ‘defamiliarisation’ of the genre in Case Histories and the ensuing novels featuring Jackson Brodie. ‘Defamiliarisation’ is the word used to translate a critical term coined by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay ‘Art as Technique’ (1917). As explained by writer and scholar David Lodge, Shklovsky argued that “the essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways” (Lodge 2011, 53): Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war ... And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stony stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. (Shklovsky 2017, 9)

Lodge comments that ‘This theory vindicates the distortions and dislocations of modernist writing, but it applies equally well to the great exponents of the realistic novel’ (Lodge 2011, 53). In fact, the concept also applies to postmodern writing and metafiction as it modifies the reader’s habitual perception, notably by drawing attention to the artifice of the text. What we shall not retain from the notion of defamiliarisation is the difficulty of access that applies neither to the realist novel nor to the postmodern novel where it was replaced by a form of playfulness.1 Crime writing has changed considerably over the years. From the English whodunit, sometimes referred to as classical or ‘golden age’ detective fiction, illustrated by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham amongst many others, to the American

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hard-​ boiled novel set in ‘an unforgiving, recognizably modern, urban world and the ordinary’ inhabited by ‘ “blue-​collar” people … who have been dealt a tough hand by life’ (Nicol 242), crime fiction exists in many guises, one of which being the ‘metaphysical detective story’ –​as exemplified in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy –​ that displays many postmodernist characteristics (see Merivale and Sweeney 1999 and Merivale 2010). What matters to us here first is the fact that crime fiction is considered as genre literature because it unswervingly abides by certain conventions. According to Tzvetan Todorov, ‘the masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book which best fits its genre. Detective fiction has its norms; to “develop” them is also to disappoint them: to “improve upon” detective fiction is to write “literature,” not detective fiction’ (Todorov 43). Yet, before examining how Atkinson engages with detective fiction, it is worth observing that this is one of the genres that, as part of postmodernism, have moved from the periphery to the centre in terms of canonicity or literariness at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-​first centuries (see D’haen). On the one hand, while the detection narrative can be considered as ‘paradigmatic of literary narrative itself’ (Marcus 245) and ‘the narrative of narratives, its classical structure a laying-​bare of the structure of all narrative’ (Brooks 25), elements of the genre have been foregrounded in literary novels such as, most famously, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, a Romance (1990), following suit from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), or Graham Swift’s The Light of Day (2003), to which can be added novels by Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis and Kazuo Ishiguro that also exploit the genre but tend to corrupt it (see Ganteau 2011). These novels may or may not have a professional detective as main character but they have recourse to techniques and motifs of the detective novel. These combine with Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, questioning our knowledge of the past and the means by which it is reconstituted. On the other hand, literary writers have tried their hand at the genre of detective fiction (or appropriated elements of the genre). ‘Mainstream’ or literary writers such as Julian Barnes in the 1980s, John Banville since the 1990s and, more recently still, J.K Rowling write mystery stories under pseudonyms.2 These multi-​ levelled variations on the detective story can be put in relation with changes in the expectations of readers of the genre:

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Now that we have lost interest in the puzzle story, now that we demand rounded characters, plots with some psychological complexity and that include some bit of the workings of chance, conflicted motivations, uncertain self-​knowledge –​in fact, many of the features found in a literary novel –​our tastes are somewhat at odds [with the classic detective story]. (Brownson 136)

Like Susan Hill with her Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler who first appeared in The Various Haunts of Man (2004) in the same year as Jackson Brodie, Atkinson has created and developed under her own name an idiosyncratic detective in four novels published between 2004 and 2010 and a fifth one in 2019. While Banville and Barnes have used a pseudonym for their detective fiction as if to signal a distinction in their production, Hill and Atkinson have kept the same name, suggesting merely a turn or fluctuation in their writing. In fact, Atkinson has repeatedly said that she never meant Case Histories to be considered as genre fiction. Indeed, I would argue that, rather than constituting an exception in Atkinson’s production, these novels bear Atkinson’s distinctive mark in terms of complex narration, character development and self-​ reflexivity.3 Atkinson’s Brodie novels may also be part of a postmodern deviation in the genre, when the figure of the detective is wounded or diminished in some way (as in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time, Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing and American Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn) and which includes ‘the prominent function played by chance in the unfolding of the plot, the deliberate confusion of the roles of the investigator, the criminal and the victim, and the inconclusiveness or the absence of solution’, along with a marked use of intertextuality in novels that ‘often revolve around the investigation of linguistic crimes, and epistemological and ontological questions’ (Ciocia 116). My contention in this chapter is that Atkinson produces idiosyncratic crime fiction that combines postmodern traits such as the ones mentioned by Stefania Ciocia (the impact of chance on the plot, the end of a clear-​cut line between investigator, victim and criminal, inconclusiveness, obvious intertextuality) with her distinctive marks: excess and expansiveness (visible for instance in Case Histories that begins not with one crime but with three, all unrelated), complex plots with a sustained interest in character that are narrated through disrupted temporality that unsettles the reader’s

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expectations.4 In order to show how, within the British landscape, Atkinson has created sui generis fiction, this chapter examines how, in the Brodie novels, the novelist appropriates the stock character of the private detective but goes beyond the traditional limits of the detective genre and includes a discussion of the past. All amount to giving a realist representation that is then deflated by the part played by metafiction and intertextuality and the use of chance and coincidence as narrative strategies.

Revisiting the detective hero Crime fiction is considered as genre literature because it is governed by certain conventions, a number of which were famously edicted in rules by novelist S.S. Van Dine in 1928. Van Dine’s classic detective fiction later evolved into hard-​boiled fiction and we shall see that Atkinson borrows from both. One of the rules of the genre through its evolution is the presence of an investigative figure as protagonist. In a number of ways, Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie exemplifies the detective promoted by Raymond Chandler in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. It is worth quoting Chandler at length: He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not do his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. (Chandler 18)

Chandler’s statement that he does not care much for his detective’s private life refers to his behaviour with women and merely states that he is not a brute. What is implied in this statement but is highly significant is that the detective is nothing but a detective.

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Classic detective fiction too prohibits the narrative to wander away from the crime and its investigation: nothing matters much apart from reconstructing the story of the crime. When Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse develops a relationship with a female character, this is always related to the investigation or the plot as these women turn out to be victims of criminals.5 Georges Simenon’s Maigret is granted a supportive wife but she remains very much in the background. The reader knows precious little of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, who remains a one-​dimensional character. Contrary to the initial lack of interest of novelists in developing their detectives’ private lives Brownson has pointed to a recent fleshing out or ‘interiority’ (Brownson 138) of the character that is indeed present in Case Histories. Following convention, Jackson Brodie is introduced professionally: he is ex-​army and a former police inspector, now an underemployed private investigator.6 However, the detective is not reduced to his function but is given a private life and a past: Jackson is unhappily divorced; he dotes on his daughter Marlee and feels paranoid about what might happen to her, which is explained in a chapter-​long analepsis that reveals Brodie’s trauma following the rape and murder of his sister when he was a teenager. In classic detective fiction, the reader trusts the detective to be able to solve the crime, an element that is established through ‘the use of the opening scene to demonstrate the detective’s superior reasoning powers, thus creating a potent primacy effect’ (Segal 164). But when Jackson first appears, aged forty-​five, in Case Histories (CH 69), he is merely introduced in a stereotypical pursuit for a P.I.: tailing a presumably unfaithful wife at the request of her husband, which means sitting in a second-​hand car, chain-​smoking, bored, reflecting at length on his life and his recent broken marriage. This stock situation is further humorously parodied by the fact that Brodie is otherwise only employed by ninety-​plus Binky Rain to explain the disappearance of her cats. This minor character introduced early on in the novel actually fades behind Jackson’s new unrelated cold case investigations in Cambridge: what happened to three-​year-​old Olivia Land? Who killed Theo’s daughter when she was photocopying documents at his office? Where is Michèle’s now grown-​up daughter? Ironically for a supposedly detective novel, at the end, Brodie inherits a large fortune from Binky Rain, which means he no longer needs to work.7

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In One Good Turn (2006), Jackson is thus no longer a detective. Now residing in the south of France, he finds himself in Edinburgh in his capacity of boyfriend to Julia Land, met in Case Histories, an actress who is performing in one of the shows of the festival. Jackson is then the chance witness to a road rage incident along with Martin Canning, an author of detective fiction, and Gloria Hatter, the disillusioned wife of a corrupt property developer. When he makes a tardy entrance, fifty pages into the novel, Brodie sees himself as the shadow of his former self, unmanned by his wealth, and comes to life when he gets on a case brought to him by Martin while the official investigation is led by Detective Inspector Louise Munroe. In When Will There Be Good News? (2008), Jackson is still living off Binky Rain’s inheritance and is married to the apparently perfect Tessa. When asked, Brodie describes his job as ‘security’. His function as an investigator has shrunk to trying to prove his paternity, denied to him by Julia after the birth of their son and their separation. This quest quickly becomes quite secondary and is left unresolved (until the next novel). The main detecting character, shown in the action of doing police work, is Detective Inspector Louise Munroe, who keeps resurfacing in Jackson’s life as a missed opportunity for a relationship. Sixteen-​year-​old Reggie Chase takes on the part of the amateur detective, and talks Jackson, whom she rescued from a train crash, into trying to figure out what happened to her employer and friend Dr Joanna Hunter. In this book, Brodie is shown to lack in perspicacity or not to have Chandler’s ‘sense of character’ as he turns out to have been conned by a woman who married him to lay her hands on his fortune. Started Early, Took My Dog (2010) is set two years later. Brodie has just turned fifty and is ambling his way across Yorkshire and its abbeys in ruins while working on one case only: Hope McMaster has hired him to find out about her biological parents. In his investigation, Jackson is however consistently overtaken by another private detective, a sort of doppelgänger with the same inverted initials (Brian Jackson) who is always one step ahead of him. In this novel with a dual narrative, Atkinson also evokes the years of the Yorkshire Ripper, sexism and corruption in the police in Leeds in the mid-​1970s through the crime of a prostitute then investigated by young constable Tracy Waterhouse, now a retired

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policewoman. In this novel, Atkinson continues to explore feminist issues through a gallery of female characters in various walks of life and at different ages. When he reappears in Big Sky (2019), Brodie is back to tailing unfaithful spouses and his daughter Marlee is about to get married. Atkinson unsettles the character of the detective further as Jackson proves, again, rather ineffective. Crystal Holroyd later employs him to find out who is following her but, as she puts it, after he’s seen her being beaten up and her children kidnapped, ‘I’m not paying you, you know. You’ve done fuck all’ (BS 257) and ‘ “Claims he’s a detective,” she said to Harry, “but he’s shit at detecting” ’ (BS 258). As a reviewer put it, ‘Of course … Big Sky isn’t technically a mystery’ (Lennon) and Jackson certainly doesn’t solve any mystery nor really achieves any task he has been employed for: unbeknownst to him, Mrs Trotter hires another character, Tatiana, to kill her unfaithful husband (BS 345) and Chloë’s parents deal with the paedophile who attempted to groom their daughter online themselves (BS 235). As can maybe be inferred from the above, Jackson Brodie is de facto the hero of the novels, if only because he is the only recurring protagonist, but the narrative does not portray him as such, both in terms of his characteristics and of his role in the narratives. Indeed, Atkinson’s detective is rather ordinary in the sense that he does not have any particular gift or ability –​as opposed to Holmes or Poirot –​but is more intuitive –​like Maigret or Morse. He has hunches more than actual method and deduction technique. He thus distrusts a character because she is ‘looking up to the right’ when telling her story in Case Histories, which he unoriginally thinks is a sign of lying (CH 284). In Big Sky, the one girl he directly finds and saves is the young kidnapped girl whom he traces of his own initiative, on an impulse after he has spotted her, a young girl carrying a backpack with a unicorn, hopping in a car (BS 50–​51). This story remains in the margins of the main plot, which contributes to the portrait of Brodie as unsung hero. A couple of reviewers aptly called Jackson a ‘reluctant detective’ (O’Grady; Urquhart). His investigation in Case Histories moves slowly, diluted in Jackson’s daily life and private concerns with his daughter and former wife, and attacks apparently unrelated to his work. He is in fact fairly passive: things seem to be happening

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to him rather than Jackson seeming to be in control. People bring him their cases: his investigation means asking a few questions and being led from one character to the next until somebody gives him the answer. For instance, regarding the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Land, Jackson only finds out what happened to the child thanks to what a retired police detective has told him. For the most part, Brodie solves the cases but in every novel there is something that escapes him. Indeed, there is often another crime behind the one Jackson and the reader are focusing on: in One Good Turn, Gloria Hatter has hired a killer to get rid of her husband; in When Will There Be Good News?, Dr Joanna Hunter, Reggie Chase’s beloved employer, pushes the murderer of her family to kill himself after he has served his thirty-​year sentence. There is always more than one story. Brodie’s perspicacity is not so much at stake here as the notion of overall complexity. In both examples, the reader is finally given a broader picture which puts into perspective the stories that Jackson has revealed by pointing at what he has not found out. Brodie is actually a private eye, the staple of thrillers and hard-​ boiled fiction, whose life is threatened on several occasions. Bran Nicol’s description of Sam Spade, the private detective in The Maltese Falcon, seems to be a perfect fit for Jackson: ‘frequently in danger of being imprisoned, suspected of deliberately obstructing police investigations’ (Nicol 246). In Case Histories, someone interferes with the brakes of his car and has his house explode while Brodie is beaten up on at least two occasions,8 so that he embodies Todorov’s notion: [T]‌ he ‘story of the vulnerable detective’ is mainly illustrated by the novels of Hammett and Chandler. Its chief feature is that the detective loses his immunity, gets beaten up, badly hurt, constantly risks his life, in short, he is integrated into the universe of the other characters, instead of being an independent observer as the reader is. (Todorov 51)

The figure of the private detective is marked by its status as outsider (Brownson 135), working independently from the police and sometimes against them. Brodie notably steps outside the law twice. This however is anything but the sign of the ‘moral ambivalence’ (Nicol 245) of a Samuel Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s hero.

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As a true hero, Brodie always wants to do the right thing and never doubts what the right thing to do is but not in a conventionally moral sense. In When Will There Be Good News?, he destroys a crime scene when he sets fire to the house where Dr Joanna Hunter was held captive with her child and where she killed her two guards, employed by the local mob to blackmail her husband (WWGN 444). Brodie knows her story (her mother and siblings were murdered out of the blue while walking in the countryside when she was six years old) and tacitly agrees to help. In Big Sky, Brodie gives a false report on a shootout. One could see these as instances of the confusion of the roles between investigator/​criminal/​victim noticed by Ciocia in postmodern detective fiction, except that Brodie is motivated by a clear sense of justice. According to Brodie’s version of the shootout, ‘Bad people were punished, people with good intentions weren’t crucified. And girls who took justice into their own hands weren’t penalized when they had already suffered more than anyone should’ (BS 311). In both cases, Jackson’s crimes are inspired by his sense of justice but hint at ‘the possibility that the most “moral” resolutions for the victimised are at odds with law and order’ (Norquay 2012, 135): his illegal exactions are cover-​ups that allow him to protect characters who are shown to have had more than their share of misery and hardship, at the expense of hardened criminals. When it happens, the restoration of order in Atkinson’s novels is not necessarily in line with the law. The detective is instrumental in restoring some form of order but it is a personal moral order at odds with official regulations. Jackson has neither the centrality nor the absolute rectitude expected of the conventional hero but he is the moral centre of the novels. He is a hero through and through, in the ethical sense of the term, as his role is to help people in need. However, if his moral creed is not questioned, his role as hero in the novel is laid bare through self-​ reflexive comments. For instance, Brodie compares himself to a knight errant, ‘a knight of the road’ in Started Early, Took My Dog (SETG 310) and Renée Pigeon shows how in this particular novel, ‘Jackson’s adventures … satirize the crime fiction trope of the detective as knight’ (Pigeon 64). His rescuing instincts are established, derided and confirmed in Big Sky through the reference to a moral figure along with old-​fashioned fictional

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stereotypical characters: ‘He was the shepherd, he was the sheriff. The Lone Ranger. Or Tonto, perhaps’ (BS 261).9

Claims to realism As we have seen, Jackson Brodie is a substantially fleshed-​out character. A sign of the novels’ gesture towards realism, Jackson is quite a distance from the one-​ dimensional stereotypical investigative figure, be it in classic detective fiction or hard-​boiled fiction. The individualisation of characters in crime fiction can also be observed of Susan Hill’s and John Banville’s heroes that were developed at the same time as Atkinson’s and may be an overall trend introduced by ‘literary’ writers. Talking about Started Early, Took My Dog, Atkinson states her views clearly: Mainstream crime is very end-​driven: there’s a plot that goes directly from A to B, and all the detective is doing is going about picking up clues. That’s important, but it’s not what these books are about. The interesting thing to me is character –​I could have written a whole book about Tilly, for e­ xample –​and character is unfashionable in crime. What a lot of crime fans want is plot, plot, plot, and character just gets in the way. So when you get something more rounded and interesting, it’s inevitably not going to be mainstream. (Atkinson The Scotsman 2010)

Atkinson pursues referential illusion –​i.e. the illusion that characters and their environment are real –​with reference to actual places like Cambridge, Edinburgh and Yorkshire.10 Fictive characters are, for the most part, not treated as fictional constructs but as real entities, which is a tenet of realism. For instance, at different stages of One Good Turn, Jackson and sixty-​something Gloria Hatter, disappointed with her marriage, reflect on the roads or paths not taken in their lives (OGT 316–​317, 45–​46), while Martin Canning, the successful but frustrated author of classic detective fiction, dreams up an imaginary life. In Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, the investigation moves slowly as room is made not only for the detective’s but for many other characters’ stories. Not one of the novels actually starts with Jackson, which relegates the investigative figure and his task to being one character amongst others, with no privileged position.

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In Case Histories, Brodie comes centre-​ stage because he is the common element in the three investigations but he is set amongst a variety of other characters. After Case Histories, even though Atkinson retains her Brodie character from one book to the next, she shifts the emphasis away from him so that he becomes a secondary character in the story of other protagonists. Gloria Norquay aptly sees him as a ‘catalyst’ (Norquay, 2012, 135; Norquay 2017, 121): he is the character through which the various threads of the narratives converge and get altered, rather than a central figure. A look at the cast of any Brodie novel gives an idea of the wealth and range of characters to be found in Atkinson’s fiction. For instance, One Good Turn features Graham Hatter, a corrupt businessman; Gloria Hatter, a tired wife and mother; Tatiana, a Russian dominatrix; D.I. Louise Munroe who is also a single mother with a teenage son on the edge of being a delinquent; Martin who writes classic detective fiction under the pen-​name of Alex Blake; Ray alias Paul Bradley, the victim of violence who turns out to be a ‘hitman’. In this novel as in the rest of Atkinson’s production, there is a large cast of fleshed-​out characters who are given prominence. Most are individualised as the narratives tell about their past and present, main traits and thoughts. One of the ways in which characters, in their diversity, are given pride of place in Atkinson’s novels is indeed through their roles as focalisers, since events in the narrative are perceived mostly from the characters’ perspectives. This is clearly signalled in the paratext in Case Histories where chapters, apart from the first ones recounting the crimes, are headed by the characters’ names: Jackson, Amelia, Theo and Caroline. The events are depicted from their perspectives, including that of the detective. Yet, traditionally, ‘English classic stories do not allow access to the detective’s mind; a first person or a third person can’t be used because then the author could not fairly hide the detective’s developing conclusions from the reader’ (Brownson 63). The reader is thus usually not privy to the detective’s point of view but follows a puzzled sidekick or witness so that the detective’s powers of logic and deduction can be emphasised and admired. Conversely, the investigation in thrillers is often seen through the private eye’s first-​person narrative because ‘In this way, the figure of the investigator is firmly placed centre-​stage and duly fleshed out, becoming much more than a stylised function in the

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plot’ (Ciocia 111). Atkinson opts for neither and uses third-​person narration, with Brodie as a focaliser amongst others, which denies him any special status and places him on the same level as the others. Narratorial omniscience alternates with free indirect style (or speech), when the narrative adopts a character’s viewpoint, which has the ‘potential for combining both distanced observation of a character and a sense of how he or she sees the world’ (Mullan 76). As the narrative replicates Jackson’s observations and grants access to his thoughts, it conduces the reader to appreciate and participate in the detective’s doubts and bafflement. At times, Atkinson actually uses the stream-​ of-​ consciousness technique –​‘not just the unvoiced thoughts of a character …, but the leaps of association that connect those thoughts’ (Mullan 247) when ‘narration follows the activity of memory but without actually returning us to the past’ (Mullan 248) –​to convey her reader a sense of the interiority of her characters. For instance, in Started Early, Took My Dog, Tilly, an elderly actress who only plays an important part in the plot at the end, is used as focaliser in several chapters. Her thoughts constantly hover between present and past, with recurring references to or quotes from previous roles in different plays such as: ‘Bluebell cottage. That was the name of the place she was staying in. A made-​up name obviously. Used to be a farm worker’s cottage. Poor peasants, all mud and blood … She’s done a Hardy, oh years ago, for the BBC, learned a lot about agricultural labourers in the course of it’ (SETD 48). The alternating between free indirect style and stream of consciousness gives an original and touching rendition of Tilly’s disorientation, her perception of it and reactions from her environment as she descends into some form of dementia (SETD 276–​278). In Big Sky, which also uses various focalisers, the characters’ thoughts are often disrupted by remarks or by their own reflections on what they, or other characters, think, which –​­ sometimes humorously –​interrupt and fragment the flow of thoughts represented. For instance, the narrative of young Harry Holroyd’s thoughts as he is being kidnapped with his half-​sister incorporates comments previously made to him: ‘she had a fairly phlegmatic ­personality. (“That sounds like a disease, Harry,” Crystal said.) … He wondered what Pinky had texted and who he had sent it to. (Or was it “whom”? Mrs Dangerfield was very strict about grammar.)’

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(BS 244–​245). Harry’s multi-​directional train of thoughts is an example of Atkinson’s adoption and rendition of the stream-​of-​ consciousness technique. As in experimental texts like Christine Brooke-​ Rose’s (see Williams 181), the narrative occasionally does not differentiate between a character’s speech and thought. In One Good Turn, for instance, the narrative follows Gloria’s thoughts but these are verbally answered by another character to the effect that the reader is startled and disorientated: It seemed a shame now that Graham’s demise might rob Gloria … Half his income, half his business. ‘Half of nothing, Gloria,’ Tatiana said to her. ‘Remember, Proceeds of Crime Act, 2002.’ (OGT 459)

The narratives give access to the ‘interiority’ of a selection of characters. In When Will There Be Good News?, the viewpoints of Reggie, Louise Munroe and Jackson Brodie are conveyed but Jo Hunter’s thoughts remain inaccessible. This mystery preserves the unfolding of the plot and her role in the suicide of Andrew Dexter, her family’s killer. However, as Joanna is the survivor of a tragedy she witnessed as a child, this silence can also be read as a statement on the non-​narratability of the traumatic event and of the ensuing trauma. Atkinson’s Brodie novels encompass a variety of characters whose ambivalence and complexity is revealed through the plot but also through access to their thoughts. It can be noticed that criminals and other negative figures tend to be undeveloped or flat characters, like Graham Hatter (who never actually appears) and Terence alias ‘Honda Man’ in One Good Turn: Graham Hatter can be summed up by his dishonesty both in his private and professional lives and Terence is no more than his henchman. As a rule, Atkinson hardly ever uses villains, criminals or perpetrators of violence as focalisers, which can be interpreted as a refusal on Atkinson’s part to explain or understand criminality and violence. Sylvia, the eldest Land sister who turns out to have murdered Olivia, her three-​year-​old sister, is a focaliser in Case Histories but the narrative makes clear that Sylvia is a victim of her sexually abusive father who ‘murders by proxy’ (Armitt 21). When accomplices in activities that are morally wrong are used as focalisers, it is because their consciences tug at them, as is the

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case with Ray Strickland in Started Early, Took My Dog and Andy Bragg in Big Sky. Because of their multiplicity of fully fleshed characters, the Brodie novels tell several stories and are reminiscent of Victorian multi-​plot novels with ‘multiple narratives that propose a confident and inclusive grasp of their large, diverse fictional worlds’ (Garrett 222) and whose particularity, present in the Brodie novels, is that ‘there is often no clear or consistent principle of subordination’ (Garrett 4). In other words, Theo’s story develops alongside that of Julia and Amelia Land’s in Case Histories, just like the story of Tilly, the ageing actress in Started Early, Took My Dog, develops alongside that of retired policewoman Tracy Waterhouse who has bought a child. These stories may intersect briefly at some point (as when Tilly unwittingly enables Tracy and the child to escape from danger at the station), suggesting a coherent whole but they remain independent, as insisted upon with the use of focalisers. Conversely, in One Good Turn, in When Will There Be Good News? and in Big Sky the stories turn out to be interdependent –​but still without subordination to one in particular, preserving the importance of individuals. Like their Victorian predecessors, Atkinson’s multiple narrative novels can be said to ‘present not a direct vision of the world but a dramatization of the process and problems of making sense of it’ (Garrett 22). While Victorian multi-​plot novels tend to be unified by a (mostly) omniscient narrator, Atkinson’s reliance on various focalisers, which means that the same experiences or events are revisited from different viewpoints, conveys a sense of fragmentation more than or as much as unity. While the classic detective fiction tells the story of the investigation to reconstruct the story of the crime, in the thriller, ‘the narrative coincides with the action’ (Todorov 47 qtd in Ciocia 111). Both temporalities are upset in Atkinson’s novels as past and present crimes which Brodie tries to solve are often intertwined so that the investigation concomitant with the time of the action also serves as a story to explain past crimes. For instance, in Started Early, Took My Dog Brodie’s search for Hope’s biological parents is linked to a sordid crime from the 1970s. Narrative time progression is upset in every novel because sections in the past are interspersed with the present. At the structural level, whole parts are set in the past as in precisely dated chapters at the beginning of Case Histories and in Started Early,

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Took My Dog. Yet, the consequences of the past facts seep through the present and inform the main contemporary plot. Not only does non-​linearity foreground the importance of the past but it works as a technique to create surprise and maintain curiosity or suspense. Big Sky opens with a brief section entitled ‘eloping’ (BS 3) that holds the position of prologue. As noted by John Mullan, ‘Prologues are not uncommon in novels of murder and mystery’, as shown in novels by Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, Patricia Cornwell, James Ellroy or Henning Mankell (Mullan 29). These prologues may serve to throw the reader in the thick of things, confronting him or her with unexplained violence, at the scene of the crime. For instance, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter begins with a ‘prelude’, just like the first Simon Serrailler novel by Susan Hill opens with a section that acts as a prologue so that, as John Mullan puts it, ‘we have to work back to the events of the prologue, only seeing their true significance by the novel’s end’ (Mullan 29). Big Sky opens with this same ‘unit of narrative that begins a novel but is detached from it’ (Mullan 28) but it contains no crime. In fact, it is no actual prologue: ‘eloping’ is nearly the anagram for ‘epilogue’ and the scene takes place in the aftermath of most of the events narrated next and introduced by a page bearing the title ‘one week earlier’. The reader’s narrative curiosity is deliberately aroused by the unnamed ‘he’ and ‘she’. Jackson’s identity is eventually revealed but not that of the woman with him; the closing sentence –​‘ “It’s not what it looks like” ’ (BS 1) –​duly promises complexity. In order to explain this enigmatic situation, the narrative returns to the past, again suggesting that non-​linearity does not mean absence of ­causality. Curiosity is not about what happens next as is usually the case but about how the characters came to be in this situation. Because the narrative is focalised through a set of characters, narrative temporal progress is regularly disrupted by analepses of varying length when characters are assailed by memories, recent or not, in the course of their actions. The narrative therefore follows the thoughts occasioned by this or that event in a sort of stream of consciousness: in When Will There Be Good News?, when the train crashes with Jackson on board and the character is ejected from it with another man: ‘the best he could do was to turn the man’s head to the side to stop him suffocating in the mud. He thought of his grandfather’s brother, going over the top at the

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Somme, drowning in the mud at Passchendale’ (WWGN 154).11 Still because of the use of characters as focalisers, the same event may be repeated though coloured by a different perspective. For instance, in Case Histories, Chapter 18 entitled ‘Amelia’ (CH 316) returns to the same day and events as Chapter 14 entitled ‘Jackson’ (CH 277), both encompassing Theo’s rescue from a bout of asthma (CH 321) that already appeared from his point of view (CH 15 288–​289). Individual subjectivity is both foregrounded and put in perspective by its juxtaposition with other focalisers. This combination underlines relativity or limitation of knowledge as the same event gets presented under a different angle: at the end of Big Sky, the reader first sees the killing at Silver Birches and its aftermath through Reggie, then the facts as perceived by her partner Ronnie and as they are told to her (BS 309), before we get the details through Jackson (BS 312). Yet, there is a sense of unity over the group of novels. It is brought of course by the recurring presence of Jackson Brodie and the sets of beliefs he stands for which resurface from one book to another, such as ‘he liked to think truth was absolute’ (CH 305) repeated as ‘Truth is absolute, but the consequences of it aren’t’ (BS 342). The recurrence of the detective character is a common feature of the genre, hence the term ‘series’ that is often used. Case Histories and its sequels are indeed sometimes referred to as the Jackson Brodie series. Yet, rather than a series, this body of work published between 2004 and 2019 is better described as a cycle or a novel sequence. Indeed, the series built around Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or D.I. Morse defy change as the books feature little or no chronological development, stand independently from each other and can be read in whatever order without any consequence. Conversely, in a novel sequence, ‘attempts to represent the passing of real time in an aesthetic form is an important element’ (Bentley 2016, 259). In Steven Connor’s words, ‘The novel-​ sequence, which follows through the experiences of a range of characters, sometimes in one setting and period … in a number of different, but interconnected novels, is an exercise in world-​making’ (Connor 136). The Brodie novels can be read as a novel sequence because a coherent time progression develops from one individual book to the next. There is coherence over the whole sequence, with the trauma of his sister’s rape and murder and Julia’s dysfunctional family

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introduced in Case Histories then referred to throughout the set of novels as, for instance, in Started Early, Took My Dog (109). Typical of sequels, a summary of Jackson’s past is indeed given in every book after Case Histories. Carefully taking on board what happened previously (see OGT 57), this imposes the sense of continuity and of the passing of time. The recurrence of a few characters surrounding Brodie also conveys the sense of a diegetic world that encompasses several novels: his daughter Marlee, his son Nathan, his ex-​wife Josie, his girlfriend Julia met in Case Histories who breaks up with him at the end of One Good Turn but is the mother of his son and remains in the subsequent novels as an interlocutor, imagined or not, as the case may be. More generally, a sense of temporality is foregrounded as relationships develop and the narratives map Jackson and the cast of recurring characters ageing: ‘He could see wrinkles around her eyes that he didn’t remember being there two years ago’ (OGT 54). Throughout the sequence, Jackson comments on his children growing up: ‘His daughter, Marlee, was ten now and getting to an age when she preferred the donkeys [in his French house] to him’ (OGT 58). Big Sky, published after a much longer gap than the others, sees Marlee, aged twenty-​three, about to get married. There are no inconsistencies in the narrative timeline of the characters’ lives to challenge the reader’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (Coleridge). On the contrary, this smooth continuity contributes to the overall realistic frame of the Brodie sequence. As Steven Connor puts it, ‘The world of the sequence has the self-​ sufficient density it supposes of the “real” world. It is closed and complete in itself, a parallel universe or working simulacrum of the real not only in the encyclopaedic abundance of its narrative detail but also in its plethora of different possible perspectives’ (Connor 136). In Big Sky, Jackson’s encounters with his teenage son, aged thirteen, also convey the sense of time passing as Jackson compares his younger self to Nathan. Significantly, it does so intradiegetically as well as extradiegetically in the sense that it refers to changing times and changes in society that readers can relate to: ‘When Jackson was his son’s age, he had two sets of clothes and one of those was his school uniform’ (BS 11). The generation gap is broached on with humour: ‘Looking on the bright side, Nathan was talking in more or less whole sentences this afternoon, rather than the usual simian grunts’ (BS 11). Finally, continuity is established through

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the reappearance of other characters, such as Reggie Chase, the orphaned sixteen-​year-​old looking for Joanna Hunter and temporarily posing as Jackson’s daughter in When Will There Be Good News? who reappears as a young Detective Constable in Big Sky, along with Tatiana, the Russian dominatrix from One Good Turn. At odds with traditional detective fiction, this recurrence, which pretends to give the characters an existence beyond the limits of the first book, adds to the illusion of referentiality or ‘simulacrum of the real’ while possibly reminding the reader of famous precedents like Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Yet, typical of Atkinson’s fiction, self-​reflexivity is also present as she has Brodie remark: ‘Worlds were colliding all over the place’ (BS 301). Steven Connor observes a link between the novel sequence and the condition-​of-​England novel in the ‘attempt to connect the realm of private extended time to the public time of history’ (Connor 136). Atkinson makes the connection between the public and the private, or wryly points to the absence of connection at the beginning of Started Early, Took My Dog when the list of 1975 political, economic and sociological facts comes to an end with young policewoman Tracy’s concern for a hole in her tights (SETD 17). Public events like the 2008 credit crunch and worldwide financial crisis are seen through the eyes of individuals in Started Early, Took My Dog: ‘You go to sleep living in a prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen? Where had the money gone, and why couldn’t they just get it back?’ (SETD 50) and ‘it had seemed an immense sum at the time, diminished now in comparison to the trillions lost by the master of the universe, although two million would still probably buy you Iceland’ (SETD 67). Marked allusions or references are made to Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who attacked prostitutes and lonely women in the 1970s in Started Early, Took My Dog, and the mid-​2010s Jimmy Savile scandal of children sexual abuse runs through Big Sky. Changes in society are taken in by a melancholic Jackson in Started Early, Took My Dog: ‘He had zigzagged across the Pennines to take in the bleak victims of Thatcherism. The coal gone, the steel gone, the ships gone’ (SETD 68). If Case Histories is about crimes within the home, individual acts brought about not so much by the environment (society) as by individuals (the murders of Olivia, Theo’s daughter and Michelle’s

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husband are committed by deranged individuals), the subsequent novels combine or replace domestic crime with societal problems. For instance, in When Will There Be Good News?, on top of the domestic violence represented by Alison Needler living in fear that her husband will return to shoot her and their children, organised crime features at micro and macro level, from Reggie’s brother, a small drug-​ dealer to a bigger one, Michael Anderson, who blackmails Joanna Hunter’s husband and has her kidnapped. The corruption, prostitution and paid violence underlying the plot of One Good Turn are prominent in Started Early, Took My Dog (set in Leeds) with its insistence on generalised prostitution, violence, misogyny and bad treatment of children depicted through the experience of police officers Tracy and Barry while child prostitution, human trafficking and modern slavery are at the centre of Big Sky. Despite the use of focalisers that evoke modernist techniques, there is also something Dickensian to this part of Atkinson’s oeuvre in its multiplicity of characters and stories but also in the darkness of the novels denouncing contemporary child abuse and corruption. Atkinson displays her feminist concerns in her depiction of a society (especially in the past) in which men are predators and women are in constant danger as we are reminded through the enumeration of Jackson ‘thinking about all the lost girls over the years. The ones lost in woods, on railway lines, in back alleys, in cellars, in parks, in ditches by the side of the road, in their own homes. So many places you could lose a girl. All the ones he hadn’t saved’ (BS 260–​261). As Glenda Norquay notes, ‘the intersections of women’s lives and criminality become an increasing focus of attention in the series’ (Norquay 2017, 122). In this sequence, not only are women very often targets or victims of criminality, but on a more ordinary level, they are trapped in domestic roles which they struggle to get out of while the novels make fun of the domestic ideal. For instance, in Case Histories alone, women of all ages and at different times of the twentieth century are broken by their marriage and harassed by their ensuing motherhood: in 1970, married to an abusive husband, Rosemary is the pregnant mother of four young daughters; Victor’s mother in the 1920s is considered insane because of a severe postpartum depression; in 1979, Michelle is a young mother who tries to prepare for her A Levels while keeping a perfect home and ends up attacking her boyfriend out of frustration with her

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life. Or, in a more subtle way, women lead the boring life of Nicola Spencer in 2004, the suburban wife Jackson is hired to shadow at the beginning of Case Histories. In Big Sky, marriage is equated with domestic prostitution through Crystal, a victim of child prostitution, later happy to marry for money. All these elements reinforce the realist dimension of the Brodie novels but realism in Atkinson’s fiction is often doubled with a form of self-​reflexivity or self-​consciousness that informs her appropriation of the detective genre.

The relationship to the past Charles Brownson lists Case Histories in his examples of the whodunit’s comeback (Brownson 131), a trend which he refers to as ‘the Neoclassic revival’. For Brownson, the Neoclassic derives from the English classic since it features its main characteristics, but it takes on board the contemporary cultural context. This revival is interpreted as a sign of nostalgia, and of a general erosion of confidence pertaining to postmodern times (Brownson 132). Brownson suggests ‘the figure of the Neoclassic Detective is restorative, an instance of reconstructive, anti-​modern myth-​making’ (Brownson 141), an example of what Svetlana Boym calls restorative nostalgia that ‘manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past’ (Brownson 141). As Brownson himself concedes, his category is a catch-​all one and one may wonder if Case Histories really fits. Mostly, Brownson’s remark enables us to introduce the role of the past, particularly the notion of nostalgia, of a sense of present longing for the past, in relation to the Brodie novels. Even though the Brodie novels are set in the present, the past looms large, either with the reference to historical events like the Yorkshire Ripper murders (1975–​80), because the characters are haunted by an event in their pasts (Brodie and Martin Canning in One Good Turn) which they try to forget (Crystal in Big Sky), or simply because memories are part and parcel of the present. In fact, most of the Brodie novels are partly directly set in the past: Case Histories begins with cold cases, When Will There Be Good News? with a section entitled ‘past’ and Started Early, Took My Dog in 1975. In other words, the narrative either immerses the reader in the past

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or displays characters who are, in some way, affected by the past, thus bringing up a strong cause-​and-​effect connection between past and present, stressing the weight of consequences of past actions. Nostalgia relies on a sense of disjunction between past and ­present. A sense of disjunction, of being at odds with the present, already defines Brodie in Case Histories. His attitude to his daughter, his approach to love, sex and women as well as his belief in absolute truth are introduced as old-​fashioned, i.e. disconnected from his times. This dimension develops through the sequence as the character grows older. In Started Early, Took My Dog, when Jackson has just turned 50 (SETD 82), ‘This was no country for old men’ (SETD 72), the first line of Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, is appropriated as part of the protagonist’s stream of consciousness to indicate his sense of time passing and of growing old, which reaches new heights in Big Sky where Brodie is quite melancholic. But this sense of inadequacy between past and present does not lead to nostalgia. Indeed, Atkinson plays with the sense of nostalgia rather than enacts it. In fact, Atkinson includes a reflection on the relationship between past and present in these novels through the problematisation of nostalgia that takes diverse shapes. The past is a dark country in Atkinson’s novels, the source of pain and/​or of trauma: there is no trace of nostalgia in the Brodie sequence in the overall presentation of the past that is often the setting for violence, domestic or not, murder, crime and corruption as is the case with the depiction of a corrupt police force in the mid-​ 1970s in Started Early, Took My Dog so that when Barry, Tracy’s former colleague in the police force, says he misses ‘the good old days’, she retorts ‘ “They weren’t good, Barry. They were rubbish” ’ (SETD 130). Yet, Atkinson’s novels do display characters who are nostalgic, who hark back to times gone by, in the sense that they have a sense of loss. ‘Nostalgia (from nostos –​return home, and algia –​longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (Boym xiii). If treated lightly or humorously, this sense of loss is nonetheless acknowledged and taken seriously. The best example in One Good Turn is Martin Canning and his imaginary life and imaginary wife based on the character of Mrs Miniver, a brave upper-​middle-​class English woman during the Second World War who is the heroine of William Wyler’s

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eponymous film (1942). As Boym states, ‘At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time –​the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams’ (Boym xv). Both place and time are linked in Martin’s flights of fancy into an alternative imaginary homely life: ‘The cottage they lived in was chintzy and had beams and a lovely garden and was very much like Mrs Miniver’s’ (OGT 269). The polysyndeton, with the repetition of ‘and’, contributes to making Martin’s dream life look childish. Indeed, the reader is meant to laugh at Martin’s flights of imagination because they are based on clichés and clearly outdated. The direct reference to Wyler’s Mrs Miniver is quite telling of Martin’s naivety and yearning for an imagined past since this American film depicting Mrs Miniver and her family in England during the Second World War was a piece of propaganda. Nostalgia means longing for a home and this is a quest that defines Jackson and thus runs through most of the novel sequence. When Jackson appears in Case Histories, he lives in Cambridge even if originally from the north of England. He has been ousted from the family home, which has in fact vanished since both Brodie and his ex-​ wife now live in different dwellings and he dreams of a house in the south of France (CH 72–​73). When his house explodes, this completes the image of the rootless lonely character. He owns the house of his dreams in France in One Good Turn but it never becomes home because his then girlfriend Julia remains in London. Jackson’s idea of home is accordingly traditional: ‘now, with the curse of hindsight, he could see that perhaps Cambridge had been a real home –​a place of safety with a wife and a house and a child’ (OGT 95). Going home is Jackson’s main business in When Will There Be Good News?: ‘He was a man on the road, a man trying to get home. It was about the destination, not the journey. Everyone was trying to get home. Everyone, everywhere, all the time’ (WWGN 86). Jackson’s yearning is humorously deflected by the fact this sounds like lyrics from the country songs the character likes. Moreover, Jackson’s destination and notion of home at that point is Tessa’s flat in Covent Garden, a home which turns out to be fake. Jackson finds himself still looking for a place to settle in Started Early, Took My Dog, the repetitive situation underlined by the similar sentence structure and country music ambiance: ‘He was a man on a real-​estate mission. He was looking for a peg to hang

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his hat on, an old dog looking for a new kennel, one untainted by the past. A fresh start’ (SETD 69). In Big Sky, Jackson seems temporarily settled in ‘the cottage he was currently renting, on the east coast of Yorkshire, a couple of miles north of Whitby’ (BS 13), described as ‘a nice warm cottage … Logs in the wood store, honeysuckle round the door. … He had been living here since the spring and liked it enough to think about making it more permanent’ (BS 80). Indeed, the cottage conveys the sense of ‘home’ where he welcomes his son Nathan and also tries to bring comfort to a suicidal Vince (BS 149–​150). Nostalgia is expressed through other characters who are in search of an ideal home in One Good Turn but the very notion is mocked as a lie. Martin buys his expensive house on the spur of the moment, urged by ‘a vision of how it must have been once’ (OGT 75). His fancy of old-​fashioned domestic happiness is distinctly set in the past as appears in the lexicon used –​‘the children were conspirators, thinking up merry japes in front of the nursery fire’ (OGT 75) –​ and no less distinctly based on fiction, namely Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906): ‘On darker days Father was mistaken for a criminal or a spy and the family was forced into temporary hardship and poverty (Mother pulled it all off magnificently) before everything was explained and restored’ (OGT 75). Martin’s notion of home is humorously fanciful but his reliance on clichés and fiction to help him define it indicates a total lack of experience due to a loveless childhood so that his decision to buy the house is ‘a cry from the heart for a home’ (OGT 75–​77). Similarly, the description of Detective Inspector Louise Munroe’s house connects the home with childhood, stereotypes and the notion of an ideal shelter while pointing to it as a sham: ‘The house was only three years old but had all kinds of small annoying things wrong with it … but it was a house, a proper house, the two eyes and a mouth kind that she used to draw when she was a child’ (OGT 145). Gloria Hatter’s house also falls short of the character’s ideal as it has been paid for with dirty money and ‘she wonder[s]‌what she would miss if it was all taken away from her’ (OGT 102). All the characters seem somehow to be in search of a home, which contributes to their characterisation as solitary individuals but is also part of Atkinson’s demythication, here as in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet, of the domestic ideal as

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fake or artificial. Notions of family, motherhood and the mother–​ child love bond all are cases in point. In the Brodie sequence, not to mention the absence of fathers, most characters are part of a disappointing and/​or dysfunctional family. For instance, in One Good Turn, Louise suspects that, at times, she might like her cat more than her son, while Gloria is estranged from her children who only use her as an inverted pattern of who they want to be.12 When Emily, Gloria’s daughter, mentions difficulties in her own relationship, ‘Horror clutched at Gloria’s chest at the idea that Emily might move back home’ (OGT 295). On the other hand, women with a traumatic past like Joanna Hunter in When Will There Be Good News? and Crystal in Big Sky want to give their children the childhood they never had, and in Started Early, Took My Dog the would-​be loving and protecting mothers are the women who cannot have children: former model Kitty, Ray’s wife Margaret, actress Tilly and policewoman Tracy.

Parody, metafiction and intertextuality As famously put by Tzvetan Todorov in ‘Typology of detective fiction’, ‘The novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’ (Todorov 44) and the point of the detective novel is typically to reconstruct the story of the crime. In her Brodie sequence, Atkinson draws attention to this narrativity through parody, metafiction and intertextuality. In Atkinson’s Brodie novels, the reader is kept active by the constant time shifts and changes in focalisers from one chapter to the next. But these novels are not an instance of detective fiction in which the reader actively looks for the solution to the mystery and the identity of the perpetrator of the crime. In Case Histories, the reader follows Jackson’s enquiries but the very multiplicity of crimes and the fact that they are unconnected dilutes their importance in the economy of the book, all the more so as the detective’s private life is developed, along with other characters. Conversely, Atkinson’s second Brodie novel, One Good Turn, self-​consciously subtitled ‘A Jolly Murder Mystery’13 draws particular attention to the genre all the better to play with its conventions, to the extent that in the end, one may wonder if One Good Turn is a murder

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mystery at all. The novel features the obligatory character of the detective but Jackson is ironically not officially working anymore since he unexpectedly inherited a client’s fortune at the end of Case Histories (OGT 57). In One Good Turn, there are murders but they do not structure the plot. Jackson first spots a corpse floating in Cramond, but the body disappears and the matter is ignored. Then there is the murder of comedian Richard Moat but the identity of the perpetrator (Terence Smith) is no mystery. Some sort of formal investigation only actually starts when Martin Canning asks for Brodie’s help three-​quarters through the book. In fact, in One Good Turn, the reader’s attention is diverted and the actual crime that underlined the whole plot and narrative goes unnoticed until it is revealed at the end. The actual murder that was planned (Graham Hatter’s by his wife Gloria) is not the one that is the object of the investigation. It is delayed and remains peripheral to the main narrative. The same happens in When Will There Be Good News? in which an indirect crime is organised by Joanna Hunter in the gaps of the narrative. In Atkinson’s novels, a number of crimes remain unknown to the detective and to the police. These are always committed by a character who has been introduced as a victim: in One Good Turn, Gloria the downtrodden housewife has hired a hitman to get rid of her husband and in When Will There Be Good News?, Joanna whose family was murdered when she was a child has convinced the killer to commit suicide on getting out of prison after his thirty-​ year sentence. While the reader’s expectations are defeated, the victims are empowered. Indeed, Gloria escapes unscathed with her husband’s money to start life afresh and Joanna Hunter in When Will There Be Good News? resumes her life with her child. In Big Sky, a victim of sexual exploitation kills the organiser of the ring and Crystal, herself a former victim, kills her husband when she realises his part in it. Both killers get away with their crimes. With these conclusions that, for the most part, remain unknown to Jackson as to the police, Atkinson brings closure to her characters damaged by life. When Jackson finds the solution to a mystery or a murder, he often keeps it to himself or informs only the persons concerned. For instance, in Case Histories which mostly deals with domestic crime, Jackson gives Theo (not the police) the name of his daughter’s killer

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and never reveals to Amelia and Julia that their eldest sister killed the baby of the family. The effect is that there is no overall restoration of order as expected in classic detective fiction. Big Sky also goes against the rule of the genre when solving the murder of Wendy, Vincent’s wife. The murder fades in the background as the narrative develops. The solution is given as a sort of afterthought in a chapter that is tying all the loose ends and merely introduced by ‘so who did kill Wendy Easton?’ (BS 327). The answer is the name of a character only mentioned once before as Wendy’s lover. Here, Atkinson again departs from the rules of detective fiction (see Van Dine and Segal 172). Despite the overall realist framework of the Brodie sequence, the novels are still rife with self-​reflexivity and intertextuality. In Big Sky, Atkinson combines psychologically convincing characters with references to well-​known fictional constructs: Jackson sees himself as a character in a western, thinks of Crystal and her daughter as ‘Snow White and her Ninja mother’ (BS 280) or the Amazon queen (BS 257), and Steve Mellors and his gang call themselves the three musketeers. Additionally to their metafictional dimension, these references also point to the role that fiction plays in one’s life, as a potential pattern, as a narrative on which to peg one’s identity. Atkinson instils self-​consciousness in Brodie about his profession with direct reference to Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’ (BS 141) and to Chandler’s characters (BS 19) in Big Sky. As said above, in One Good Turn, Atkinson foregrounds the genre she is playing with more than writing with the addition of a tongue-​in-​cheek subtitle ‘a Jolly murder mystery’ and the inclusion of a crime writer amongst her main protagonists. The oxymoronic phrase used as subtitle is uttered by an editor to refer to the type of novels Martin Canning writes under a pseudonym: ‘what I see is a book I can sell. A sort of jolly murder mystery. People crave nostalgia, the past is like a drug. How many books do you envisage in the series?’ (OGT 26, emphasis in original). There is no real mise en abyme here however because Martin’s fiction seems at odds with the novel we are reading. Martin is the author of (classic) detective fiction set in the 1940s, described as ‘old-​fashioned, soft-​boiled crime novels featuring a heroine called “Nina Riley”, a gung-​ho kind of girl who had inherited a detective agency from her uncle’ (OGT 24), reminiscent of Caroline Keene’s Nancy Drew. Nina, in Martin’s books, is

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an amateur detective, a type of character that is definitely a thing of the past, according to Brownson who explains its disappearance in contemporary detective fiction by the fact that it is completely unbelievable today: ‘the amateur detective is too difficult to build a plausible story around for writers to take their time to do it’ (Brownson 134).14 Ironically, an amateur detective is precisely what Brodie is in the novel but the suggested comparison with another fictional character surrounds him with the illusion of reality. Having a crime fiction writer as a protagonist in a would-​be detective novel sequence may also intimate a metafictional tinge. Martin’s character certainly offers a reflection on the genre and its reception as he is quite critical of what he writes and hopes to write something ‘better’15: an allusion to the way genre fiction is considered and to a common wish amongst detective story writers since Arthur Conan Doyle. On top of Martin’s self-​depreciation, having fourteen-​year-​old characters sniggering at the text when the author’s computer is stolen and falls into the hands of Louise’s son confirms the idea that these novels are nostalgic and out of touch with the contemporary world. Indeed, Martin’s books serve to introduce a contrast not only between ways of writing crime fiction but also between past and present. In Chapter 45 of One Good Turn, all the characters are gathered in the same place in a parody of what happens in classic detective fiction: ‘the detective assembles the whole group of suspects and then presents to this audience his solution of the mystery, unmasking the criminal and explaining in full his chain of reasoning’ (Segal 170). Here, however, the detective has not convened the suspects but they all seem to be assembled there by a set of circumstances and verbal explanation is replaced by a scene of violence and a shootout. Atkinson constantly foregrounds the relentless blending of fact and fiction. Thus, in One Good Turn, when Martin is confronted with crime and his own house becomes a crime scene, a comparison is made with representation of crime on TV and in his own old-​style detective novels (OGT 276). As in One Good Turn when Martin compares the situation with the popular American TV show, CIS (OGT 276), in Started Early, Took My Dog (255) and in Big Sky, real police is compared to its fictional representation on TV through a series called Collier. This of course creates a mise en abyme but the supposed difference between fiction and reality is also a source

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of humour as Jackson, who is supposed to be the real thing, talks ‘Moviespeak’ (see OGT 428, 444) and borrows clichéd sentences from the script of Collier when addressing Crystal or Vince (BS 236). Many metafictional comments about the difference between fact and fiction are also wrapped in Brodie’s thoughts (SETD 255) and dialogues (SETD 349). Intertextuality also plays a major part in defamiliarising detective fiction. The reference to other texts constantly diverts the reader from ‘the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion’ (Van Dine, rule 16): it adds layers to the fleshing out of the characters and to the narrative. When Brodie turns up on her doorstep, Gloria in One Good Turn says ‘An inspector calls’ (OGT 461), assuming he is a fraud officer. Her announcement also reads as an allusion to J.B. Priestley’s play (1945) based on the arrival of an inspector whose actual identity turns out to be unclear, as is echoed in Gloria’s private interrogations: ‘… trying to remember if he had shown her any ID. Where was his warrant card?’ (OGT 461). Significantly, in Priestley’s play, all the characters turn out to be linked as they all took some part in bringing about the downfall of a young working-​ class woman. The reference therefore reinforces the interlinking of the characters in Atkinson’s novel. Another similarity between the two works that is foregrounded by the allusion is the fact that they are not just detective stories: ‘J B Priestley’s play … is a morality play disguised as a detective thriller’ (Power). Brodie is associated with Priestley’s inspector who is ‘a moral force, one which mercilessly pursues the wrongs committed by the Birlings and Gerald’ (Power) and whose final speech forcefully states ‘We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other’ (Priestley Act III, p. 63). Just like Priestley’s play, Atkinson’s One Good Turn denounces the human damage done by ruthless capitalism, now embodied by Graham Hatter’s empire and the foreign girls of ‘Favours’, employed and crushed by it. One difference however is that at least some of the downtrodden females (Gloria and Tatiana) are empowered in Atkinson’s novel. In When Will There Be Good News?, chapters are headed by parodies of book titles such as the lengthy ‘The Life and Adventures of Reggie Chase, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings and Complete Career of the

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Chase Family’ (WWGN 38) that parodies the full title of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, quotes from Virgil’s Aeneid (WWGN 387) because Reggie is studying the classics, or film titles like the western High Noon (WWGN 421) and Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (WWGN 429), quotes from novels like ‘God bless us, everyone’ (WWGN 473), which is the final sentence in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. What these titles, phrases and quotes have in common is the fact that they are used ironically because of the discrepancy between their original source text and the contents of the chapter they head. For instance, the final sentence in A Christmas Carol is uttered by Tiny Tim at the Christmas table gathering the whole family and together with the character the words embody good will and benevolence. Atkinson places these words above a brief chapter that reveals the unlawful activities of Billy, Reggie’s good-​for-​nothing brother ambling along the streets of Edinburgh at Christmas time. Intertextuality is also used at the intradiegetic level. When D.I. Louise Munroe, now married to an understanding Irish doctor, feels jealousy towards his first wife and is upset at what she feels to be her inadequacies, this is expressed through a reference to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: ‘The first Mrs de Winter, Samantha, had been the green-​fingered type’ (WWGN 163), which indicates self-​ consciousness on Louise’s part. The intertextual reference may be less explicit. The chapter entitled ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ (itself a reference to Luis Bunuel’s 1972 film based on repetition with variation) opens with ‘She should have got the flowers’ (WWGN 157), which reads as an allusion to the famous incipit to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, all the more so as Atkinson’s novel makes use of the stream-​of-​consciousness technique and as ‘She would get the flowers herself’ is used earlier as the chapter title (WWGN 87). In Started Early, Took My Dog, quotes abound in the sections where actress Tilly is the focaliser, as lines from previous performances help her apprehend her present. When pushing Lomax away from Courtney at the station: ‘A brief encounter on a railway station. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. She’d played Laura Jesson once, a pretty dreadful repertory production’ (SETD 446–​447, emphasis in original). Significantly, the quote and reference to the sentimental

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involvement in David Lean’ Brief Encounter (1945) has nothing to do with the actual situation but serves to convey the muddle in Tilly’s brain, as her descent into dementia accelerates. Atkinson thus peppers her novels with direct or indirect allusions to culturally central texts, occasionally allowing herself a private joke as in Big Sky where a Madame Astarti, a fortune-​teller, is briefly mentioned (BS 223, 346), Madame Astarti being a minor fictional character supposedly invented by another character in Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird... The Brodie novels also feature Atkinson’s typical remarks about language and phrases commonly taken for granted, now defamiliarised by a character stumbling on them (as Isobel reflects on phrases to do with time in Human Croquet). Gloria thus comments on the marketing of new houses: ‘It had been known as a “starter home”. No one sold “finisher home”, did they?’ (OGT 489). Tracy notes about her newly acquired child: ‘Courtney was astonishingly reckless, a kid without reck was a dangerous thing’ (SETD 207) and Jackson reflects ‘There was a girl manning the attraction –​if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms’ (BS 281). These self-​ reflexive comments on language all make the reader pause as they invite reflection on the discrepancy between signified and signifying. Usually at odds with the genre of crime fiction, wry humour, typical of Atkinson’s prose, permeates the Brodie sequence, finding its way through the protagonist. For instance, for Jackson, a speeding driver is deemed ‘eager to donate an organ in time for someone’s Christmas’ (WWGN 426) and when visiting a large London department store, ‘The shoe floor was so big that Jackson thought it probably had its own postcode’ (BS 335).

Chance and coincidence as narrative strategies One of the rules of classic detective fiction, set notably by S.S. Van Dine in 1928, is that the detective should reach the solution through logic and deduction.16 Therefore, chance and coincidence traditionally have little or no part in the solving of the crime in a detective novel. Yet, Stefania Ciocia has noted ‘the prominent function played by chance in the unfolding of the plot’ (Ciocia

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116) in postmodern subversions of the detective novel and, indeed, Atkinson certainly makes extensive use of chance and coincidence in her Brodie sequence. Things and characters, like Martin in One Good Turn and Vince in Big Sky, thus come across Brodie’s path by chance, not in his official capacity as a detective, which illustrates how Atkinson’s novels deviate from the traditional crime-​only focus but is also significant at the level of the narrative. Similarly, her plots tend to rely pointedly on coincidence (in One Good Turn and Big Sky), as defined by Hilary Dannenberg: ‘Coincidence is a constellation of two or more apparently random events in space and time with an uncanny or striking connection’ (93, italics in the text). Chance (‘apparently random events’) may thus appear part of a coincidence and this co-​ incidence (concomitant occurrence of two elements or more) may remain unexplained (‘uncanny’) just as this link may also be rationally explained and accounted for. Reliance on coincidence tends to be criticised in fiction. In his scathing approach to nineteenth-​ century novels, Henry James equates chance and coincidence in a narrative with lack of control and mastery: ‘what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?’ (James 84, emphasis in original). The common opinion is summed up by David Lodge: ‘Coincidence, which surprises us in real life with symmetries we don’t expect to find there, is all too obviously a structural device in fiction, and an excessive reliance on it can jeopardize the verisimilitude of a narrative’ (Lodge 2011, 150). On the other hand, for Balzac, ‘Chance is the greatest novelist in the world: to be creative, one only need to observe it’ (my ­translation17), and, more recently, for Paul Auster: From an aesthetic point of view, the introduction of chance elements in fiction probably creates as many problems as it solves. I’ve come in for a lot of abuse from critics because of it. In the strictest sense of the word, I consider myself a realist. Chance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence, the unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in all our lives. And yet there’s a widely held notion that novels shouldn’t stretch the imagination too far. Anything that appears ‘implausible’ is necessarily taken to be forced, artificial, ‘unrealistic.’ I don’t know what reality these people have been living in, but it certainly isn’t my reality. In some perverse

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way, I believe they’ve spent too much time reading books. They’re so immersed in the conventions of so-​called realistic fiction that their sense of reality has been distorted. Everything’s been smoothed out in these novels, robbed of its singularity, boxed into a predictable world of cause and effect. (Auster 1992, 287–​288)

Views thus differ as to the effect of coincidence on narrative because of its impact on verisimilitude. Lodge thus specifies that the frequency of coincidence varies according to genres and states that ‘audiences of comedy will accept an improbable coincidence for the fun it generates’ (Lodge 2011, 152), with the underlying assumption that verisimilitude matters less in comedy. For Dannenberg, however, coincidence may lead to comedy but also to tragedy18 and should be treated not as ‘an example of Victorian excess’ but as ‘a fundamental narrative strategy’ to be found in literature regardless of the period (Lodge 2011, 91). Our contention here is that rather than oppose chance and coincidence to realism, Atkinson offers an interesting combination of these in her crime fiction. Atkinson is aware of the general view on chance and coincidence in literature and plays on it to defamiliarise both the genre and the world it depicts. Chance refers to ‘the unforeseen, the random occurrence with no obvious cause or design’ (Julia Jordan 6). Paradoxically, randomness, the absence of the reassuring cause-​ and-​ effect link, the sign of chaos that may lead to absence of a story is used as a narrative strategy when the irrational, the abnormal, the extraordinary, the unexplained apparently invade and disrupt the lives of characters. Case Histories begins with three unrelated stories that occupy the first sixty-​ eight pages of the book. Each story has a realistic background with a clear spatio-​temporal setting to introduce characters whose lives are suddenly disrupted. Murders, attacks, disappearances, which are to be expected in crime fiction, are here emphatically presented as disruptions in ordinary lives as the narratives introduce characters engaged in ordinary situations (photocopying a file in a lawyer’s office in Case Histories, getting off a bus and walking the last stretch home in When Will There Be Good News?, getting caught in traffic/​lost in an unknown city in One Good Turn) whose lives are suddenly interrupted or take an unexpected turn for no reason, be it foreseen or explained.

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Chance is a narrative strategy because it makes the plot move forward. The aim of the detection story is indeed to try and make sense of the apparent randomness and chaos, to constrain what happened: to make it acceptable to reason. For instance, in Case Histories, Theo wants to find out who killed his daughter apparently out of the blue and hires Jackson to do so. He needs to inscribe the event into a logical coherent sequence and the narrative of Jackson’s investigation does just this. One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News? respectively open with road rage violence and a murderous attack on a country lane, which consequently seem random and unjustified. The initial viewpoint in One Good Turn is that of the victim, Paul Bradley/​Ray, who sees his life unexpectedly diverted by this attack. So does Martin Canning, author of soft-​boiled detective fiction, who throws his bag at Bradley’s aggressor to stop him. Contrary to what the reader might expect, the narratives leave these events unexplained. These are ‘orphan events’ (Duprat, my translation) in the sense that no cause, no explanation is given for the attacks. However, they are not ‘sterile events’ (Duprat) as the narrative develops the consequences or chain of events deriving from these attacks. The rest of the novel will account for almost every character’s movement or presence at or near the scene, everything apart from the road rage incident. In When Will There Be Good News?, the murderer arrives out of nowhere and the narrative follows the traumatised survivor of the chance attack, Joanna Hunter, who never recovers from the event nor accepts it and organises for the death of the killer thirty years later. In both cases, the chance event is enmeshed in a narrative chain, even if it is not an explanatory one. In every case, what seems like ordinary days and lives are shattered by the irruption of exception in the guise of a murderer and shows how the survivor never fully recovers. If Atkinson makes a marked use of chance as structural strategy to open the narratives, she also self-​consciously relies on coincidence. Hilary Dannenberg identifies ‘three main phases in terms of the story sequence’ in a traditional coincidence plot: A. The previous relationship (prehistory). B. The coincidental encounter (intersection) of the characters in time and space of the narrative world.

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C. A cognitive process involving the characters’ recognition (discovery) of each other’s identity. (Dannenberg 94, emphasis in original) Coincidences abound in Atkinson’s crime fiction. In One Good Turn, the focalisers are apparently unconnected characters except for their presence as witnesses to the road rage accident: Gloria Hatter, Martin Canning, a couple of teenagers and Jackson Brodie all seem to be there by chance but a reason is later given for each of them to be there, including Bradley whose motive for being in Edinburgh is only revealed at the very end of the novel. The characters present at the scene lead to other characters who turn out to be interconnected: one of the teenagers’ mother is D.I. Louise Munroe whose house was built by Gloria’s husband, Graham Hatter, who was a client of Tatiana the dominatrix; and Louise sees a show by some has-​been comedian whom we recognise as being the self-​invited host at Martin’s house. Atkinson makes use of what Dannenberg calls coincidental relationships in which characters discover connections that were unknown to them: ‘In coincidental relationships, as opposed to the coincidental encounter, the emphasis is on the network of links between characters who are uncannily connected by the existence of multiple relationships. Here, accordingly, recognition takes the form of the discovery of connections by a character’ (Dannenberg 97, emphasis in original). Such is the case at some point in When Will There Be Good News? where it conveys a touch of comedy underlined through simple repetition (WWGN 202). Alternatively, in Big Sky, when Crystal realises that her husband was involved in the organisation that sexually exploited her as a child, she kills him. Coincidental encounters or relationships do not systematically lead to ­recognition. In Case Histories the girl begging in the street who saves Theo turns out to be Michelle’s daughter (and part of another investigation by Jackson), just like Julia and Amelia (again part of another investigation) happen to be around to help and save Theo from a bout of asthma. However, while the reader notices the coincidence because she has some knowledge of a ‘prehistory’ (phase 1 for Dannenberg 94), the characters remain oblivious to it, and nothing comes of it in terms of plot. There is no diegetic ‘discovery’. Contrary to the use of coincidence made by Dickens, for instance, in Oliver Twist, which suggests some overall reassuring meaningful

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order, the use of coincidence in Atkinson’s novels does not necessarily create a coherent whole but reinforces the atmosphere and part played by chance. Towards the end of Case Histories, a ‘coincidental encounter’ (Dannenberg) takes place. On his flight to France, Jackson recognises Nicola Spencer, whose husband hired him to tail her at the beginning of the novel. But he looks into a ‘bland, indifferent face’ (CH 368) and the recognition is only one way. The fact that these coincidences and chance encounters do not lead to development in the plot suggests aimlessness and the predominance of chance in a non-​teleological world. Very often in Atkinson’s fiction, it is up to the reader to notice the coincidences: ‘both the specifically modernist and postmodernist forms of coincidence are constructed through an indirect or figurative system of connection: relationships are no longer story based through plots of kinships or friendship but are only cognitively constructed through the perception of correspondences’ (Dannenberg 105, emphasis in original). Atkinson refers to her Brodie novels as ‘jigsaw novels’ (Guardian podcast), which implies assembling diverse elements, going back and forth in the narrative. The term ‘jigsaw’ is sometimes applied to the classic detective novel: it evokes the process by which the protagonist tries to assemble the clues into the story of the crime to find its author. The word also implies a complete, finite picture that does not necessarily appear at the end of Atkinson’s novels since there is often no overall exposition of the naked truth at the level of society. In Atkinson’s case, the term refers mostly to the reader’s activity. The story unfolds through various focalisers: third-​ person narration limiting itself to the point of view of one of the characters in the same narrative time means that temporal narrative linearity is disrupted. Indeed, the same event and same point in time reappear viewed from a different angle and the reader assembles the diverse representations or perceptions of the same event into a broader picture. For instance, in When Will There Be Good News?, the train crash is narrated through Jackson’s point of view then Reggie’s (WWGN 181), which gives a broader understanding of what happened.19 In assembling the various narratives, the reader will notice recurring elements from which to draw conclusions. The reader, like the investigative figure in a crime novel, actively tries to reconstruct the story. In many cases, this attempt is frustrated as the

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elements may not assemble and cohere. For instance, in One Good Turn, the corpse Jackson finds on Cramond island coincidentally wears the same earrings as Tatiana, previously noticed by Gloria when she is talking with the young woman. The reader therefore interprets the coincidence by identifying Tatiana as the corpse. In this particular case, an explanation will be given later: the pleasure of the explanation is not denied but delayed. This is however a case of coincidence that is misleading but forces a form of self-​ reflexivity as it plays on the reader’s expectations of coherence and deflates them. Coincidence is also used in a traditional manner, hidden and revealed at the end, for a surprise effect. In When Will There Be Good News?, Jackson unknowingly sits next to Jo Hunter’s family’s killer on the train. Likewise, in the last but one chapter, the narrator reveals that Jackson was the young soldier who found Joanna in the field after the slaughter of the rest of her family. If this revealed coincidence does not propel the narrative, it is however significant for the characterisation of Jackson and for the workings of the novels as a whole: one of the links contributing to turning the body of novels into a sequence established in every novel is Jackson’s impossible recovery from his sister’s murder. A high degree of self-​ consciousness prevails in the combination of chance and coincidence in the Brodie sequence. In One Good Turn, when most of the main characters happen to gather at Gloria’s house, ‘Jackson began to wonder if he was on some new kind of TV reality show, a cross between Candid Camera and a murder mystery weekend’ (OGT 464).20 Through Jackson’s reaction, Atkinson playfully flaunts the idea that too many coincidences offend verisimilitude. Jackson Brodie’s distrust of coincidence established in One Good Turn –​‘you say coincidence, he thought, I say connection’ (OGT 369) and ‘everything was connected. Everything in the whole world’ (OGT 463) –​metafictionally allows remarks on the narrative device and runs like a leitmotiv through the novels from then onwards. ‘What had Jackson said? A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen’ (OGT 472) is repeated in When Will There Be Good News? (WWGN 402) and the assertion reappears verbatim in Big Sky as a defining belief of Brodie’s (BS 107, 132).

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‘Discontinuities and variations within a genre and around its borders are the effects of artistic experimentation and innovation’ (Weston 173). Atkinson’s crime fiction is definitely innovative as it defamiliarises the genre, notably through an idiosyncratic hero and the peripheral part he is given. Her appropriation of a genre that may seem at odds with her highly intertextual and metafictional early coming-​of-​age novels, her neo-​Victorian play and her following forays into the Second World War actually fits in with the rest of her oeuvre. The novels that make up the Brodie sequence display Atkinson’s aesthetics of hybridity as the novelist borrows from various types of crime writing and additionally distances herself from the genre through a marked realist inflexion with substantially fleshed-​out characters and context coupled with a high level of self-​reflexivity.

Notes 1 ‘The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty of length and perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important’ (Shklovsky 2017, 9, emphasis in original). 2 Respectively Dan Kavanagh, Benjamin Black and Robert Galbraith. Regarding the first two, Joel Black considers the use of pseudonyms as a sign of their wariness as having their names ‘associated with a form that is today still considered artistically suspect in some quarters’ (Black 76). 3 Interestingly, Heather O’Donoghue also links Atkinson’s first crime novel to her previous work but takes the opposite perspective opening her TLS review with ‘Kate Atkinson’s previous books have all been latent crime novels’. 4 Atkinson’s detective fiction remains distinct from the ‘metaphysical detective story’ whose aim is to ‘ask … about mysteries of being’ (Merivale and Sweeney 2). 5 For instance, Morse falls for the victim in The Dead in Jericho and for the criminal in Last Seen Wearing. 6 Diemert notices links between Brodie and Ian Rankin’s John Rebus (54–​55).

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7 Brodie’s adventures were initially meant to stop at this point: ‘The first book was such a joy to write because I came to it absolutely fresh … It went so well that I carried on with a second novel, even though I had never intended to’ (Atkinson The Scotsman 2010). 8 And again in One Good Turn by Honda man, and in Started Early, Took My Dog where two men beat him up before eventually dumping him a bin. 9 Similarly, Jackson is mockingly compared earlier to a Saint Bernard after rescuing a boy drowning. 10 The setting usually contributes to distinguishing classic detective fiction from hard-​boiled fiction: the idyllic English countryside and a limited, contained setting in classic detective fiction are opposed to ‘the anonymity, the chaos and the endemic corruption associated with the sprawling metropolis’ in hard-​boiled fiction (Ciocia 110). This distinction is somewhat blurred in Atkinson’s Brodie novels that pertain to a hybrid between the two. Instead of setting her P.I. in a seedy milieu adequate to the genre (see Todorov), Atkinson originally introduces her private detective in rather genteel settings. Indeed, in her novels, Atkinson disrupts the reader’s expectations by having murder, chaos and mayhem irrupt in the countryside at the beginning of When Will There Be Good News? when Joanna’s family is decimated for no particular reason, thus dismissing the notion of a pastoral retreat, or in culturally charged settings like Cambridge in Case Histories and the Edinburgh Festival, which is the setting for a case of road rage and leads to a network of corruption in One Good Turn. 11 Watching Alison Needler’s house, Louise’s thoughts move towards Joanna Hunter and the narrative returns to their encounter earlier in the day (WWGN 158). See also other examples (WWGN 148, 153, 154, 158). 12 See the rendition of their last family Christmas (OGT 292–​295). ‘The main topic of conversation for Ewan and Emily at Christmas had been how much their lives had changed, evolved, grown, but from one year to the next they expected Gloria to stay exactly the same. If she mentioned anything new in her life … their response was always the same: “oh, Mother,” said in an exasperated tone as if she was a particularly stupid child’ (OGT 292). 13 The subtitle, like the self-​reflexive dimension of One Good Turn, may have been an ironic response to the reception of Case Histories as genre fiction. 14 A counter-​example is to be found in Quirke, a pathologist, in the novels written by John Banville under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

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15 A similar self-​deprecatory tone is to be found in another crime writer, a secondary character in Started Early, Took My Dog. 16 Rule number 5 in S.S. Van Dine’s list states: ‘The culprit must be determined by logical deductions –​not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession’ (see also summary of rules in Brownson 55). 17 ‘Le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde: pour être fécond, il n’y a qu’à l’étudier’ (Balzac 52). 18 Dannenberg gives the example of Tess’s letter written to Angel in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and calls this ‘negative coincidence’. 19 Similarly, in the same novel, the episode of the book event is seen through Martin Canning’s eyes, then Jackson’s, and finally briefly summarised by Pam, Gloria’s friend. 20 The relationship to fiction characterises the protagonists. Writer Martin Canning finds real life disappointing compared to fiction while Brodie thinks that when something is particularly bad or wrought, it must be fiction.

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4 Re-​imagining the war in Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription

This chapter examines Kate Atkinson’s experimentation within the historical novel form in her later fiction, the focus of which is on the Second World War. The contemporary historical fiction practised by Atkinson certainly illustrates how ‘the fiction of the twenty-​first century … invents new forms with which to narrate the past’ (Boxall 2013, 40) and the aim of this chapter is to discuss the reconstruction of history achieved by the narrative aesthetics of these novels.

Contemporary trends in the historical novel One of the major trends in the British novel at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-​first century has been the return to the past and the renaissance of the historical novel after its eclipsis (in terms of the literary value attached to it) for most of the twentieth century. As observed by Leigh Wilson, historical fiction now ‘wins literary prizes, is the primary choice of book clubs, dominates bestseller lists and is snapped up for film and TV adaptations’ (Leigh Wilson 145). For instance, when shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, mostly set at the time of the Second World War, was beaten by another historical novel, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang that revisited the colonial past through the life of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. Hilary Mantel was awarded the Prize for the first two instalments of her trilogy devoted to Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012). Atkinson won the Costa Novel Award for Life After Life and A God in Ruins, her two novels

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based around the Second World War. This remarkable revival in historical fiction is also visible in the creation of the Walter Scott Prize in 2009 which, in reference to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, is dedicated to fiction set sixty years earlier. Contemporary historical fiction is thus critically recognised, the topic of many critical studies –​Wesseling (1991), Middleton and Woods (2000), Keen (2006 ‘Historical’), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010), Robinson (2011) –​and commercially successful, regularly adapted for the screen as McEwan’s Atonement was by Joe Wright in 2007 or, more recently, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) by the BBC in 2015. As for Kate Atkinson’s fiction, an adaptation of Life After Life in a four-​part drama was aired by the BBC in 2022. The re-​introduction of history in fiction in the 1980s was originally marked by ‘experimentalism’ and was at odds with the traditional historical novel defined by Georg Lukacs on the basis of Walter Scott’s novels. Linda Hutcheon coined the phrase ‘historiographic metafiction’ to refer to these novels whose approach to the past was both referential and self-​reflexive. In order to stress the difference between the two concepts of history, Hutcheon inserts brackets into Barbara Foley’s definition of the nineteenth-​century historical novel: Characters (never) constitute a microcosmic portrayal of representative social types; they experience complications and conflicts that embody important tendencies (not) in historical development (whatever that might mean, but in narrative plotting, often traceable to other intertexts); one or more world-​historical figures enters the fictive world, lending an aura of extratextual validation to the text’s generalisations and judgements (which are promptly undercut and questioned by the revealing of the true intertextual, rather than extratextual, identity of the source of that validation); the conclusion (never) reaffirms (but contests) the legitimacy of a norm that transforms social and political conflicts onto moral debate. (Hutcheon 1988, 120)

Historiographic metafictions illustrate both Lyotard’s demise of master narratives and the notion, following historian Hayden White and philosopher Paul Ricœur, that the historian selects and organises facts and turns them into a narrative in the same way as a novelist does. In historiographic metafiction, this awareness of the similarity between history and fiction may lead to challenging

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established facts. It draws attention to the construction of narrative and certainly allows for the emergence of untold stories. According to Hutcheon, ‘we know the past (which really did exist) only through its textualized remains’ (Hutcheon 1988, 119). Historiographic metafiction foregrounds the fact that the writing of documents considered as authentic is in fact marked by time and ideology, and that the reading and putting together of facts into a narrative is subject to the same rules as the writing of fiction. This is illustrated in the very last part of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, when the elderly Briony believes that her narrative of the past (which states that both Cecilia and Robbie survived the war and possibly forgave her) will remain as the past: ‘As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love’ (McEwan 2001, 371). As Middleton and Woods put it, ‘Postmodern historical fiction is unconvinced that there is a single unitary truth of the past waiting to be recovered’ (Middleton and Woods 21). The postmodern trend in historiography declares: ‘History can only ever be contested versions of the past; it is not an objective truth, but fragmented, subjective, and plural, made apparently coherent by the use of narrative techniques borrowed from fiction’ (King 179). In fiction, the past thus often returns shrouded with doubt, not a given but the object of a quest as in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or a questioning by characters as in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Ever After (1992) that all include reflections on the issue of the representation of the past. A novel like A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) foregrounds the textuality of history by including excerpts from diaries, biographies, letters, i.e. factual documents that are, in some cases, revealed to be the objects of a construction by its fictional author. Atkinson’s early Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet both emphasise the fictional dimension of the past –​depicting it as unstable, the subject of competing versions –​in a way that her later novels about the Second World War do not. It has been suggested that fiction’s challenging approach to history and the experimental dimension, both in terms of form and themes, of late twentieth-​century historical novels got diluted in mainstream culture (see Leigh Wilson 145; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2007, 3). For Mariadele Boccardi, contemporary historical fiction

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can even be subdivided into categories like crime, romance and adventure (Boccardi 1). For Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, the questioning of the past is a defining characteristic of neo-​Victorian novels that often emphasises the process of construction in order to challenge a monolithic view of the past.1 This approach has since permeated other periods in what Elodie Rousselot sees as a coherent sub-​genre: the ‘neo-​historical’ novel that is marked by ‘creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits’ (Rousselot 2). Rousselot points out that this sub-​genre is home to a paradox: ‘on the one hand it strives for a high degree of historical accuracy, while on the other it is conscious of the limitations of that project’ (Rousselot 4). Some form of questioning therefore remains but scholars have however noticed a change since the end of the twentieth century: if ‘the postmodern sense of uncertainty about knowledge of the past’ remains, the twenty-​first century has shown ‘eschewal of radical uncertainty’ (Stewart 2011, 3), ‘a move away from the “postmodern” celebration of story over history’ (Leigh Wilson 146). The issue of history and its narrative is addressed directly when the narrator asks in Flaubert’s Parrot, ‘How do we seize the past?’ (Barnes 1985, 90) or in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, ‘History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us’ (Barnes 1990, 242) but, looking at more recent novels by writers as diverse as Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell, Joseph Brooker notes that such intrusions have disappeared from their novels: ‘the formal pendulum has swung from loud authorial intrusions to more seamless diegeses’ (Brooker 174). Indeed, rather than using the authority of the narrator, Atkinson has her characters reflect on the bias, choices and mistakes of history. Thus, in Life After Life, Izzie comments on Queen Marie-​Antoinette (in what also seems self-​reflexive for the character), ‘She’s a rather maligned figure in history. You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-​truths at best’ (LL 159); and Ursula on the pictures taken by Hitler’s mistress: ‘Ursula imagined in a future time someone leafing through Eva’s many albums and wondering who Ursula was, mistaking her perhaps for Eva’s sister Gretl or her friend Herta, footnotes to history’ (LL 324). However, the historical novel at the beginning of the twenty-​ first century has moved away from Jameson’s idea that ‘the historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past;

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it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby becomes pop history)’ (Jameson 1991, 25) and displays a renewed claim to the representation of historical facts, even if self-​consciously, without adopting the naive stance that the past is transparently accessible. While Jameson asserts ‘In the postmodern, where the original no longer exists and everything is an image, there can no longer be any question either of the accuracy or truth of representation, or of any aesthetic of mimesis either’ (Jameson 2013, 293), Peter Boxall oberves ‘a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history’ (Boxall 41) and evokes a ‘struggle towards a historical realism that remains beyond the grasp of a narrative that is alive to its own limitations’ (Boxall 64). This approach to the past can be contextualised as part of ‘post-​ postmodernism’ that could be described as ‘the broad desire in literary and cultural criticism to move beyond the postmodern, while recognizing its continuing importance as a critical shadow cast over the first decade of the twenty-​first century’ (Bentley et al. 17). The two world wars feature largely in the contemporary novel2 and the Second World War is indeed the period re-​imagined by Atkinson in parts of Life After Life (2013), A God in Ruins (2015) and Transcription (2018). Looking at a number of writers, namely Pat Barker, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan, who took the world wars as temporal settings, Natasha Alden observes an approach that differs from the relativism ascribed to postmodernism: these writers may deviate from the historical record but they nevertheless have a commitment to historical truth and purport to assert their interpretation, i.e., they offer ‘an accurate revisioning of a forgotten aspect of the war’ (Alden 11). In other words, they foreground a new look at the past but they eschew fantasy and aim for a form of realism. For Alden, ‘These novels do make a claim to know the past, and to depict it with a degree, at least, of the accuracy their research is designed to bring. They all offer an account of particular events which is intended to ‘put the record straight’, and is carefully grounded in detailed historical research, evident in the amount of historical material woven into each text, with which each author intends to give their account historical veracity (Alden 12). Born in 1951, Kate Atkinson belongs to this generation of contemporary British novelists born shortly after the war who, according to Alden, experience what Marianne Hirsch has named, in the context

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of the Holocaust, ‘postmemory’, memory at a remove, and have felt compelled to write about a world that was known to the generation before them. Atkinson has confessed to feeling she had just ‘missed the Second World War’,3 which seems common amongst other writers of her generation, according to Alden, and ‘is related to a sense of belatedness, of having missed the most intense experience of their era’ (Alden 4–​5). Contrary to historiographic metafictions, these contemporary historical fictions do not ‘escape the confines of realism’ (King 179) but strive for accuracy as is attested by the list of sources now present at the end of Atkinson’s books.4 It is my contention that this ‘fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history’ (Boxall 41) is present in Atkinson’s three historical novels and that the past is thus rendered through specific innovative ways, as we shall see later. Rather than a frank political ‘rewriting’ of the past that means challenging the record, going against what has been written before, Atkinson’s novels are ‘re-​ imaginings’. Here again, Atkinson’s work is marked by the notion of hybridity. Indeed, in their form, structure, narration mode and intertextuality, her three historical novels point to the re-​imagining process and signal their representation of the war as the work and result of imagination. Yet, all this is combined with techniques that convey a sense of realism and immersion that draw the reader in the novel. Before looking at Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription separately, it is possible to point to overall tendencies by which Atkinson’s engagement with historical fiction renews the genre as it negotiates the line between tradition and historiographic metafiction through her choices in terms of event, character and novelistic form. Concern for the past, its memory, be it private or public, has always been present in most of Atkinson’s work in different guises (see Micir 527) but her later work can be considered as historical fiction because the core of the novels is set in the 1940s, during the Second World War, and thus dates from over sixty years before the publication of the novel.5 However, it is significant that not a single one of them is set exclusively during the Second World War. In this respect, Atkinson’s work has the ‘hybrid form’ noticed by Jerome de Groot in novels published over the past three decades: ‘neither historical nor contemporary fiction –​mixing precise accounts

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of moments in the past with historical specificity, melding past narratives to contemporary moments, with little concern for “genre” per se’ (de Groot 2019, 170). The different versions of Ursula’s war in Life After Life all have a before and sometimes an after as the novel begins in 1910 and refers at length to pre-​war life and to the First World War before getting to the Second World War (and continuing on to later years in a few chapters). Teddy’s war in A God in Ruins is the object of about a maximum third of the narrative which otherwise focuses on its aftermath, both in Teddy’s memory and in his daughter and grandchildren’s reactions. As for Transcription, about half of the novel is set in 1940 but the period is also discussed in the other half of the narrative set in 1950. Atkinson’s novels (especially A God in Ruins and Transcription) thus include re-​ imaginings of the war along discussions of its memory: the reader is invited to experience the past but also to reflect on history and the past as they are put in perspective. Atkinson’s historical fiction shares the aim of its traditional forebears in that it aims at creating ‘a living empathy, a live connection between then and now’ (De Groot 2010, 27). Indeed, for Lukacs, ‘what matters … in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events … What matters is that we should re-​experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality’ (Lukacs 52). But while Lukacs associates historical fiction and realism, the historical novel practised by Atkinson plays games with the reader and includes a form of self-​consciousness relying on (post)modernist techniques of repetition, ellipsis, fragmentation and discontinuity. Because they are distant enough, the First and Second World Wars offer material for ‘potentially overly romanticised historical exoticism’ (Bentley 2014, 139) and one may wonder how Atkinson negotiates the line between an embellished portrait of a past and challenging some of its myths.6 In fact, Atkinson has directly confessed to feeling nostalgia for the Second World War because of its drama and because ‘women had very good wars’ (Atkinson, Penguin podcast 00.12.21). While she offers versions of Ursula’s war that show women’s various forms of involvement, she also offers a very bleak post-​war world that has little place for these active single women when in one version of her life in 1947, Ursula lets herself die (LL 141) and in another, she looks back on her work

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at the Home Office without minimising the gender restrictions at work: ‘It wasn’t quite the “interesting job” she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. … Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress’ (LL 241, italics mine). In A God in Ruins, Nancy, Teddy’s girlfriend then wife, is one of the bright women who work at Bletchley Park but she is aware of this as being ‘temporary’ (GR 407), a parenthesis in her life.7 Overall, Atkinson’s desacralising humour may act as a safeguard against nostalgia.8 Besides, as Atkinson has Ursula remind the reader: ‘Nostalgia is predicated on something that never existed’ (LL 367), which can read a metafictional comment on the depiction of life at Fox Corner, the Todds’ family home. Ursula is born in 1910, the year E.M. Forster’s Howards End was published, and the year when famously, according to Virginia Woolf in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, ‘human character changed’ leading to a change in literature. Atkinson is fully aware both of the literary influence and of the nostalgic mist that envelops the pre-​war period. As she writes in her ‘author’s note’, I begin it –​again and again –​in 1910, the ghost of Forster always at my back. There was something hypnotic and dreamlike in returning endlessly, remorselessly, to what seems to us now (quite wrongly) to have been that prelapsarian period before the First World War –​an Arcadian scene viewed through the lens of nostalgia (and Merchant Ivory films).

Chapter 47 evokes Fox Corner as particularly idyllic, like a sort of haven. It is set over two days at the end of July 1914, just before Britain joined what became World War I. In one of them, Sylvie is hostess to two of her former girlfriends, one of which, named Margaret, ‘an artist, militantly unmarried, conceivably someone’s mistress’ (LL 47), can be read as an alternative version of Forster’s Margaret Schlegel, had she not fallen for the Wilcoxes. The women are having tea on the lawn while the children are romping around in the garden. The Londoners’ superficial reaction (LL 47) to the pastoral ambiance is complemented by the sense of perfection expressed through Ursula’s senses (LL 49). The remoteness of Fox Corner from the war to come (and Britain’s detachment from the situation

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at the time) is indicated by the adverb in ‘ “Austria has declared war on Serbia,” Hugh said conversationally’ (LL 51, italics mine). Yet, there is, through Sylvie as focaliser, an awareness of the political or social changes regarding the condition of women, not only with the ‘militantly unmarried’ Margaret, but also with the direct reference to the suffragettes’ movement (LL 47).9 Besides, the narrative is not blind to the conservative social ideology of the times that is humorously deflated by Sylvie when the nine-​year-​old Maurice’s future boarding school is mentioned: ‘It was the same school that Hugh [his father] had been to, and his father before him. (“And so on, back to the Conquest probably,” Sylvie said.)’ (LL 49). ‘One afternoon of heat a few days later, they went to watch the harvest being brought in’ (LL 54): ‘They’ includes Sylvie, the children and Bridget and the sentence is reminiscent of the final scene in Forster’s Howards End when Helen with her son and a local child watch the field being harvested. Indeed, the episode in Life After Life is a celebration of the rural world but through the senses of an upper-​class character who is not part of it. While historical fiction was initially ‘a nation-​building exercise’ (Anderson), ‘often … marshaled to serve political ends, of which nationalism is only the most obvious’ (Jameson 2013, 260), contemporary returns to the past in fiction tend to focus on more disturbing moments in the past, recent or not, including colonialism and its legacies. In Atonement, McEwan returns to the so-​called ‘Dunkirk miracle’ and depicts it as chaos and horror. Revisionism, defined by Brooker as ‘the attempt to reconsider historical consensus and offer critique, or to include unaccustomed agents in the historical account’ (Brooker 169) is a major component of contemporary fiction, including Atkinson’s historical novels. In Life After Life, Atkinson evokes not only the Blitz in London but also the situation in Berlin as the Russians approach. The bombing of German civilians is briefly touched upon as Ursula living with her daughter ‘in the cellar, like rats’ (LL 341) wonders ‘Perhaps it was Teddy up there, dropping bombs on them’ (LL 342). It is picked up through Teddy in A God in Ruins, while Transcription involves pro-​Nazi British supporters of all classes in 1940. Except for Teddy’s experience in his bomber plane rendered in detail in A God in Ruins, Atkinson’s fiction stays away from the battleground where soldiers fight. In Life After Life and in

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Transcription, war is seen in terms of its consequences on the lives of the civilians, mostly female characters in both novels, illustrating Diana Wallace’s point that ‘The re-​ imagining and re-​ evaluation of women’s lost histories or “herstory” … has been accepted into mainstream fiction’ (Wallace 2004, 205). For Atkinson, art can restore people’s lives –​‘I’ve always seen writing … as a form of rescue’ (Front Row 2015) –​and her fiction typically fills in the blanks of historical records by imagining the lives of women, giving more visibility notably to their experience of the war years. While the well-​known figures of history remain in the background, Scott’s novels focus on characters who do not feature in official histories but are ‘both individual and emblematic’ (de Groot 2010, 28). The contemporary historical novel, following on Linda Hutcheon’s ‘ex-​ centrics’ (Hutcheon 1988, 35), concentrates on the marginalised in the sense of the stifled or forgotten voices of history, the minorities excluded from history and historiography like women, ethnic groups, the lower classes and homosexuals: for instance, The Little Stranger (2009) excepted, Sarah Waters’s historical fiction centres on lesbian heroines, Jane Harris and Jo Baker’s on servants in The Observations (2006) and Longbourn (2013), Andrea Levy’s on Commonwealth immigrants in Small Island (2004). In the same way as Ian McEwan’s pages on nursing and nurses during the Second World War in Atonement (2001) can be read in this light,10 so can Atkinson’s focus on women working for MI5 during the war in Transcription. However, if both Life After Life and Transcription revive the roles of women during the war, A God in Ruins shows that Atkinson’s historical fiction will not be curtailed to feminist revisionism as it represents the war through the viewpoint of a Halifax pilot active in the bombing of Germany. While the traditional historical novel keeps historical figures in the background, historiographic metafiction often makes anti-​realist use of real-​life figures. This has disappeared from much of contemporary fiction, and when real-​life figures do appear, as they famously do in Pat Barker’s and Hilary Mantel’s trilogies, they do not offend verisimilitude and remain in character. As in the traditional novel defined by Lukacs, Atkinson makes sparse use of real-​life figures who remain in the background: if Hitler and Eva Braun appear briefly in Life After Life, Oswald Mosley is merely mentioned in Transcription. In keeping with Lukacs’s depiction of the genre,

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Ursula, Teddy, Juliet and their families and friends, the characters imagined by Atkinson, are impacted by the development of historical events but they do not change its course. Like all authors of historical works, Atkinson imagines her characters on the basis of her research, as indicated by the sources listed at the end of books. It is also through form that Atkinson and others revive historical fiction by finding other ways than the realist mode to summon the past. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) is written in the present tense, which serves ‘to recover the contingency of sequential events from the set patterns of the historical record, and takes up the perspective of the supposed villain rather than that of the victor or the victim’ (Weston 188). Atkinson’s three novels under discussion here are considered historical because they all deal with aspects of the Second World War but they represent more than the Second World War as they include its before and its after, more often than not in non-​chronological order. The use of double or parallel plots has been noted before as it ‘enables historical and contemporary beliefs to engage with each other’ (King 178), the prime example being A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) and, to some extent, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) because of the temporal distance between the narrator and the events he narrates. While these two impose a distance from the past through their protagonists or through their narrator investigating the past, the reader’s immersion in the characters’ stories in Atkinson’s novels is controlled by narrative forms. In Atkinson’s fiction, it is not so much a matter of juxtaposition of plots between which the reader is invited to note similarities as the presentation of temporal discontinuities that feature prominently thanks to the structures of the novels. All three novels are non-​linear in some way. Life After Life keeps returning to the past, to Ursula’s birth, and the chronology in both A God in Ruins and Transcription is jumbled up. Fragmentation is the mark of all three as they all feature disrupted narrative chronology and different focalisers left for the reader to assemble or not.

The forking-​path narrative in Life After Life (2013) If Life After Life qualifies as a historical novel as the period covered ranges from 11 February 1910 –​the day of Ursula’s birth –​to

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the London Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) and the aftermath of the Second World War, it also offers an idiosyncratic way of narrating the historical past. Indeed, if historical fiction rarely challenges traditional narration (with a beginning, middle and end) as it tends to be both written and judged in relation with the realist mode,11 Life After Life blends in a touch of fantasy through Ursula Todd’s ability to keep re-​living her life, each time more or less consciously hoping to improve the world she lives in by trying to avoid causes of death or misery. This touch of fantasy actually illustrates Atkinson’s wide range as Life After Life can be inscribed in relation to modernism and to popular cinema. Indeed, to some extent, Life After Life follows in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), which also plays with history, fantasy and temporality as the eponymous protagonist lives her/​his life through several centuries, starting as a male favourite to Elizabeth I to become a woman novelist in her thirties in the early twentieth century at the close of the novel. The reader may also be reminded of the fantasy film Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) in which the protagonist lives the same day over and over again. This section examines the narrative strategies at work in Life After Life to re-​ imagine the past, especially the Second World War: how the combination of historic background with a forking-​ path narrative contributes to not only a renewal of the historical novel but to a reflexion on the representation of the past (relying on the non-​linearity of time, repetition with a difference, intertextuality and discontinuity) as well as a new representation of the war lived by women. Life After Life was described by a number of enthusiastic reviewers as ‘experimental’ (Craig; Norris 2013; Hore) because of its uncommon structure which breaks away from the classical view that, following Aristotle, narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Several novels famously make a point of challenging this order: Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1963) comes with a preface by the author telling you to read the novel in any order; B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is presented unbound so that its twenty-​five chapters (apart from the first and final one) can be read in any order; more recently, Ali Smith’s How to be Both (2014) tells two interconnected stories presented in a different order in two editions of the book.

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Challenges to traditional narration in historical fiction are however relatively rare, possibly because of the genre’s close link with realism (King 170/​ 8) (unless one considers historical fantasy).12 Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (2006) is another narrative set during the Second World War that challenges representations along with chronology through an inverted structure going back from 1947 to 1941 so that the reader experiences ‘the need to understand the past in order to explain the present’ (King 177) as the ‘explanation of particular exchanges and encounters can only be found later in the novel, when effect fleshes out causes’ (Stewart 2011, 154). Life After Life is completely at odds with the realism often associated with historical fiction in terms of narrativity. In Life After Life, the reader is presented with several versions of Ursula Todd’s life following an untimely death (significantly, her name is a homonym for the word ‘Tod’, i.e. ‘death’ in German). The heroine is always born to the same family on 11 February 1910 but dies in different ways at different ages depending on chance or the heroine’s own (gradually more conscious) choices and actions. For instance, in one life she drowns in the sea in Cornwall and in another she is rescued by an amateur painter who happened to spot her and her life continues. In one life, Ursula is kissed then raped by a visiting friend of her elder brother with disastrous consequences on the rest of her life but in her next life, when confronted with the same advances, Ursula manages to push the man away and remains in charge of her life.13 Atkinson thus uses a ‘forking-​path plot’ in Life After Life, a type of narrative structure that originates from Jorge Borges’s idea in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941): In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses –​simultaneously –​all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel. (Borges 98)

The structure that can be derived from the above description has been little used in fiction even though the alternate-​history novel based on speculative counterfactualism has flourished since the 1990s (Gallagher 22).14 Indeed, it is more present in the cinema,

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if, out of necessity, in a simplified form.15 ‘Forking-​path plots’, according to David Bordwell looking at film narratives where they have been more frequent since the 1990s, ‘proceed from a fixed point –​the fork –​and purportedly present mutually exclusive lines of action, leading to different futures’ (Bordwell 2002, 172). Life After Life however employs the less used and ‘more demanding multi-​ nexus organization’ (Gallagher 23) with several forking points. In Atkinson’s novel, when Ursula dies, the narrator often returns to the day of Ursula’s birth to start a new life that will entail a change in the previous life told and start a new chain of events. Temporality is disrupted as each new life is a return to the past in which chance will intervene differently or Ursula herself will make different decisions. Life After Life thus proves more complex than the films examined by Bordwell in which, ‘instead of the infinite, radically diverse set of alternatives evoked by the parallel universes conception, we have a set narrow both in number and in core conditions’ so that they remain ‘cognitively manageable’ for the audience (Bordwell 173). Linearity is one of the key conventions of the forking-​path narrative described by Bordwell and, contrary to films where only ‘one moment of choice or chance determines what follows’ (Bordwell 175), there are several ‘forks’ in Atkinson’s novel which change from one life to another as it often coincides with the varying events bringing about Ursula’s death. For instance, having survived at birth (which she does not in the first instance), Ursula either dies drowned or she is rescued, which is the new fork. When she doesn’t drown, she either slides off a frozen roof or she doesn’t, which is another fork, etc. In some lives, as she grows up, Ursula gradually becomes aware of her prescience and learns from it: ‘Ursula had been about to plunge out of the window … but something made her hesitate’ (LL 73). Contrary to films that ‘treat information that we learn from one world as a background condition for what is shown later’ (Bordwell 181), the narrative tends to start with a clean slate (returning to the innocence of snow) so that events are introduced as new. For instance, the rabbits given by George Glover to Pamela and Ursula and eaten by foxes (LL 59) are reintroduced in another life: ‘The foxes had taken Pamela’s baby rabbit too, last summer. George Glover had rescued two and Pamela had insisted on making a nest for hers out in the garden but Ursula had rebelled and brought hers inside’ (LL 74–​75) and again

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finally, ‘George Glover had given two babies to Ursula and Pamela before the war. Ursula convinced Pamela that they had to keep them indoors’ (LL 128). The protagonist is introduced as caring, a preserver of lives as she learns not only to save her life but that of others. In one of the last instances of Ursula’s life offered, Ursula decides to plan her future life (LL 458) –​so that she can ultimately kill Hitler. To some extent, Life After Life is close to what Bordwell calls ‘multiple-​draft narratives’ (Bordwell 184) in which the final version of the futures is privileged, especially when the protagonist benefits from his or her previous experiences. However, the situation is more complex in Atkinson’s novel. First, Ursula is not always conscious of her past experience so progress is not a given. In the last but one chapter, the last one in which an adult Ursula appears and which would thus qualify best as the final one, Ursula welcomes her brother Teddy back from the war in 1945, but nothing suggests that she is responsible for this, cancelling the idea of the multiple-​draft narrative. Contrary to what happens elsewhere in the text, the chapter and the novel do not end on Ursula’s death but on a moment of personal happiness. The path stops here, the cycle seems to be broken or suspended as the narrative stops. With Ursula’s ability to relive her life used to structure the novel, the notions of beginning and end are challenged to set up a form of circularity. Indeed, the opening chapter set in 1930, which could read as a beginning in medias res since the characters are not introduced and the action seems to be in full swing, actually tells the end of one of Ursula’s lives. For this very reason, Victoria Stewart excludes it as ‘the opening of a frame narrative’ (Stewart 2015, 426) but it could be argued that it does form a cyclical frame narrative, with the closing chapter which returns to the day of Ursula’s birth (477), within which a multiple-​draft narrative unfolds. The table of contents at the start of Life After Life clearly announces non-​ linearity as the dates dart back and forth. For instance, the first headings indicate (in this order): ‘Be Ye Men of Valour November 1930’, ‘Snow 11 February 1910’, ‘Snow 11 February 1910’, ‘Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year 11 February 1910, May 1910, June 1914’, ‘Snow 11 February 1910’ etc. Throughout the table of contents, there are jumps and leaps in time, sometimes big ones: from the 1918 armistice to ‘Peace’, which is in fact set in 1947 (after the Second World War and not

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the First World War as expected). Life After Life is thus a non-​ linear narrative in the sense that it jumps ahead and stops on certain episodes and that it keeps returning to the past to offer Ursula different futures. However, within each of Ursula’s lives, Life After Life mostly follows chronology. After the customary return to the day of Ursula’s birth, the narrative jumps to the day on which Ursula last died to inflect the unfolding of events. For instance, following Ursula’s death by the Spanish flu on 12 November 1918, the narrative returns four times to 11 November, until Ursula manages to survive along with her family. In a way, as noticed in the cinema (Cameron 12), the narrative of Life After Life manages to combine linearity (from birth to death) and non-​linearity (returns to the past). Going back to the opening chapter set in Munich in 1930 where Ursula attempts to kill Hitler, as it is not immediately followed by a return to that same date, this chapter does appear to be extracted and given pride of place at the very start of the novel, as a prologue that colours the narrative to come, here firmly anchoring Ursula in historical events. Once the reader has identified the pattern, the attention is displaced from ‘what is going to happen?’ to ‘how will it happen?’ and ‘what will Ursula have had time to change in the meantime?’. This change in the reader’s expectations can be interpreted as a new way of reading, or one that is not focused on plot. Indeed, the multiple-​draft narrative used by Atkinson gives importance to character rather than plot. Every narrative is meant to be as valid, as ‘true’ in the world of the diegesis, as the other. Contrary to the postmodernist texts examined by Brian McHale that, like Robert Coover’s ‘Queenby and Ola’ (Pricksongs and Descants, 1969), are ‘self-​erasing narratives’ that ‘violate linear sequentiality by realizing two mutually-​exclusive lines of narrative development at the same time’ (McHale 108), the narratives in Life After Life, as with the multi-​path films examined by Bordwell, tend to add to each other: ‘sometimes a film suggests that prior stories have taught the protagonist a lesson that can be applied to this one, thereby flouting the sense that parallel worlds are sealed off from one another’ (Bordwell 2002, 182). Ursula as a character has a stable identity: she does not change fundamentally but she acquires more knowledge and understanding with each life. The notion of attempts at progress and improvement is put forward as opposed to absurdity or incoherence in McHale’s

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American postmodernist examples. Atkinson adapts the structure of the forking-​path narrative to portray Ursula’s different lives, which serves to convey a wider picture of the war. At the same time, Life After Life conveys a sense of fragmentation both visually and narratively.16 Firstly, the book opens with a table of contents that both performs and announces the fragmentary through a two page-​long series of discontinuous dates and chapter titles that advertise the selection of facts, and therefore the marked existence of blanks or holes in a narrative. Secondly, the narrative is fragmented because it does not tell one story but successive versions of one life as Ursula’s life is repeatedly interrupted by untimely death and starts again. Incompleteness generally characterises fragments (Guignery and Drag xii). Indeed, most chapters begin in medias res with no preliminary explanations as the reader is suddenly plunged amidst new places and characters. For instance, one of the chapters in the part called ‘The Land of Begin Again’, which encompasses Ursula’s life in Germany, begins with: Der Zauberberg. The Magic Mountain. ‘Aaw. Sie ist so niedlich.’ Click, click, click. Eva loved her Rolleiflex. Eva loved Frieda. She is so cute, she said. (LL 320, emphasis in original)

The place is the Berghof, Hitler’s home in the Bavarian Alps, and Frieda is Ursula’s five-​year-​old daughter. Eva is Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. The repetitive structure succinctly reveals Eva’s insensitive character: object and child are placed on the same level; the Rolleiflex draws the same emotion from Eva as Frieda does. However, in Life After Life, despite abrupt starts like this one, each fragment forms a whole in the sense that the reader accepts it as constituting one life of the protagonist. The end of the fragment is accentuated by the repetition, with slight transformations, of the phrase ‘darkness fell’ followed by the blankness of the rest of the page before another chapter and another life for Ursula start again. Even though the characters remain the same, there is no overall unified narrative for Ursula’s life. Life After Life thus forces fragmentation onto the reader. However, somehow, elements of the fragments add up as Ursula is sometimes aware of her past lives. Rather than ‘postmodern acceptance of multiple truths’ (Domínguez García 2019, n.p.) that challenge each other,

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Life After Life’s fragmentation is more in line with modernism that sees fragments as constituting a whole whereas postmodernism considers it as the sign of chaos.17 Multiple versions of the war lived by Ursula constitute fragments that add up to make up a kaleidoscopic or ​jigsaw portrait à la Woolf. In accordance, there is no unifying authorial persona. The third-​person narration is unobtrusive and mostly focalised. When espousing a character’s thoughts, these are transcribed in a fragmented version of Woolf’s stream of consciousness and free indirect style (which makes it impossible to distinguish the narrator’s viewpoint from the character’s), hashed down to brief sentences. For instance, when Sylvie thinks she hears baby Teddy cry: ‘The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in Heaven. Thankfully’ (LL 53). The forking-​path structure introduces a tension at the heart of Life After Life: historical fiction is normally associated with realism. Even though historical events are referenced and the fiction is well researched as attested by the list of sources, Life After Life departs from realism through the jigsaw-​like narrativisation of the past that dismisses history’s chronological unfolding of events, the mostly focalised narrative and Ursula’s ability to have several lives. This ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Buckland 6) remains unresolved. Contrary to Human Croquet, where the three Christmases lived by Isobel are accounted for by the fact that she is in a coma, no explanation or frame is given to rationalise Ursula’s ability or predicament. Ursula’s unexplained ability to relive her life evokes the domain of fantasy while the setting remains realistic and historical facts accurate like Woolf’s Orlando, whose protagonist’s life extends over several centuries in a world recognisable as our own. However, as the word ‘fantasy’ tends to suggest alternative worlds, we may use instead the adjective ‘antimimetic’, which Brian Richardon uses for novels like Life After Life that do not copy or extend but rather violate some of the laws of everyday existence; these events cannot happen in real life. Antimimetic writers do not wish to repeat conventional forms of representation but rather develop new methods and techniques. They transform the patterns found in the world in order to create new narrative possibilities. In the real world, time flows forward and the past is unalterable. Antimimetic authors may run time backward and reverse the order of cause and effect; they may change the past or include incompatible

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versions of it; they may fabricate contradictory temporal sequences as time flows differently for different characters; and they may form temporal loops. (Richardson 3)

When telling the past, these departures from realism also raise the question of what historical fiction is or, at least, extend the limits of the genre. Indeed, for Melanie Micir, Atkinson pursues Woolf’s feminist engagement with history. Life After Life formally challenges historical fiction as it juxtaposes alternative versions of the same days lived by Ursula and shows diverse possible outcomes that might result from small changes. However, it remains within the bounds of realism in terms of theme, as recognisable events, places and people, like the representation of the Blitz, or Hitler and Eva Braun, comply with what is known. Life After Life is not a counterfactual narrative since if it depicts Ursula trying to kill Hitler, the narrative does not say if she succeeds nor develop what happens next as the narratives nearly always stop with Ursula’s death. As Victoria Stewart puts it, ‘[f]‌or Atkinson to maintain a foothold in the historical rather than entering the realms of fantasy, the price of Ursula’s historical agency is her demise’ (Stewart 2015, 428). In Melanie Micir’s convincing reading of Life After Life, Hitler’s death is ‘a tease’ (Micir 534) and what really interests Atkinson are the ‘banal, easily forgotten stories about women’s lives that make up the rest of the book’ (Micir 535).18 It is true that Life After Life remains firmly anchored in the historical background but that the focus is on the war lived by women whereas, Micir says, alternate-​history novels keep revolving around the same historical figures, ignoring ‘the details of women’s lives’ (Micir 535–​536). Life After Life does not describe battlegrounds but it includes gruesome descriptions of bombed London and Berlin as it follows Ursula into the Second World War. The focus is on the individual’s reception of events. Alexander Calder in The People’s War (1969) describes the sounds, sights and stench of bombed London (Calder 170–​171). These are now rendered through Ursula as focaliser. The first depiction of the Blitz experienced by Ursula in November 1940 combines the stream-​of-​consciousness technique with an emphasis on materiality as the description relies heavily on the senses. The description of Ursula as she regains consciousness or battles not to lose it after her building has been bombed lays emphasis on

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the physicality of the event. This chapter is broken into sections that start with Ursula’s sensory awareness of her current situation before the narrative drifts to Ursula’s memories of her recent past. The first two paragraphs introduce the senses of touch and sight with a particular insistence on smell (LL 249) that serve to convey to the reader a feeling of chaos. The aural sense is convened as the second section begins with Ursula wondering about the absence of sound (LL 250) until she hears a warden addressing her in the last but one section (LL 269). The next section opens with the evocation of the sense of sight with the repetition of ‘she could see’ but, as John Berger puts it, ‘The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’ (Berger 8). Ursula is at pains to reconcile what she sees with what she knows until she realises that what she took for a dress hanging in the wrong place is her neighbour’s headless and legless body (LL 268). Ursula’s own death is announced through her senses, by the changes or deceptiveness of what she now perceives (LL 270). As noticed by John Locke, sensation itself is often scarcely taken notice of, while attention is given to the ideas that this sensation leads to (Locke §9, p. 68) but, in this instance, stress is laid on the filter through which notions develop. Atkinson here immerses her reader in the Blitz, burying him or her under the debris caused by bombing through this emphasis on Ursula’s senses. Indeed, as Rosario Arias says of the neo-​sensation novel, the emphasis on Ursula’s perception of her environment ‘mobilises our own sensory perceptions, thus inviting the contemporary reader to conjure up the past though bodily memory’ (Arias 2015, ‘Neo-​Sensation Fiction’, 18). In Silvana Colella’s words, ‘Access to the past –​however illusory –​depends on perception rather than cognition. The senses define a liminal area between past and present where connections become possible’ (Colella 88). The appeal to the reader’s senses works as a technique of immersion to re-​imagine the past. There is no self-​ referentiality in this chapter, no antimimetic technique, whereas the invitation to identify with Ursula is confirmed through free indirect style and the ‘stream of consciousness’ used for her memories of the evening before and a few weeks or months earlier. Not only does the focus on the protagonist’s senses invite the reader to experience the aftermath of the bombing imaginatively but it firmly centres its representation on the lives of individual minor figures rather than

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on major events or figures that are mentioned as a backdrop to what happens to Ursula. For instance, Ursula remembers how she and her mother share the same opinion on ‘Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper’ (LL 250), thus referring in passing to the agreement with Hitler signed by the British Prime Minister in 1938 in the hope of maintaining peace. As pointed out by Micir (518) and Arias (2015, ‘Telling Otherwise’, 136), Atkinson has one of her characters, Miss Woolf, say to Ursula during the Blitz that they must bear witness: ‘we must remember these people when we are safely in the future’ (LL 357). In her author note, Atkinson says that in a way this is what she is doing in Life After Life, even though she did not live through the war. ‘Witness literature’ evokes the testimonies of those who did experience the war. Witness literature is meant to be anything but literature in the sense that form is completely disregarded and ‘the focus remains firmly linked to the contents of testimony and its relationship to truth; a relationship based upon the claim of truth, and implicitly a claim to credibility, setting up a very particular type of relationship between the author and the reader of the testimonial text’ (Sasu 8). Atkinson belongs to the post-​war generation and as such cannot bear witness in the primary sense of the phrase. However, her fiction makes the ‘claim to truth’ and authenticity in her re-​imagining of the anonymous dead civilians in wartime London. Her second-​hand knowledge, and this is emphasised in all three novels, but especially in Life After Life, is signalled through form. In the end, we do get a sense of the Blitz but we are reminded that this is not first-​hand knowledge through the fantastical stops and starts or repetitions in Ursula’s life and use of intertextuality. If we consider just the chapter headings, a number of the ones devoted to the Second World War are playfully borrowed from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s war speeches or reported speech and from contemporary popular songs, deliberately intermingling the public and the private, the political and the sentimental. A song that was released at the beginning of the war and supposed to lift the spirits of the British people, Vera Lynn’s ‘It’s a Lovely day Tomorrow’, is alluded to and used as an antiphrasis for the parts giving three versions of Ursula’s experience of the Blitz. In two cases out of three, the part thus headed is ironically set on the day before the declaration of war and in all three cases, they

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end in Ursula’s death in rubble. It is only in the part headed with Churchill’s phrase ‘a long hard war’ –​initially used in a speech delivered in Washington in 1941 –​that Ursula survives the war. Another phrase used by Churchill to refer to the end of the war, ‘the broad sunlit uplands’ mentioned at the end his 18 June 1940 speech delivered on the eve of what he calls the Battle of Britain, is used in the chapter where Ursula is eventually reunited with her brother Teddy returned home safely from the war. The phrase ‘The end of the beginning’, uttered by Churchill in the autumn of 1942 when hearing of improvements, is now used for a chapter that embraces all of Ursula’s life, in which the heroine understands her potential and decides to take action and try to kill Hitler. Not only are the extracts from war speeches applied to private situations –​ the emphasis shifted to the personal –​but one is also used ironically and deliberately for a gender reversal: while the phrase ‘Be Ye Men of Valour’ is used by Churchill in his first BBC broadcast as Prime Minister to the British people on 19 May 1940 when he only addresses the male part of the population,19 Atkinson picks up the phrase to illustrate Ursula’s resolution and attempt to kill Hitler. Jeanette King explains that if women’s lives have been neglected by historical fiction, it is ‘because they are private and domestic, and therefore considered of little interest’ (King 174). On the contrary, in Life After Life (and in Transcription), Atkinson focuses her re-​ imagining of war on women, using mainly Ursula and her mother, Sylvie, as focalisers,20 to narrate the domestic lives of the women of the Todd family at Fox Corner while the First World War remains in the margins.21 She thus makes room for the ‘private and domestic’ experience of war, as the novel shows women on the ‘home front’, in rural parts of England, in a frenzy of knitting, affected by food restriction and afflicted by the death of their loved ones. Knitting, on which the emphasis is laid (LL 61, 64, 85), appears to be their only contribution possible. Overall, Life After Life contributes to giving visibility to the very diverse ways in which ordinary women experienced the war years. At the time of the Second World War, Ursula’s sister Pamela becomes a resilient, motherly but politically conscious figure while Sylvie turns to breeding animals and growing vegetables. Both represent different types of nurturers, while the narrative gets closer to the physical war through Ursula’s experiences as an ‘agent’ (King 173)

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when she lives through the Blitz, dying in the rubble or working as an ARP warden. Moreover, Ursula’s life broadens the scope of women’s experience depicted in the novel, as it evokes the bombing of Berlin and the consequences on the city’s civilians.22 The multiple lives lived by Ursula are a metaphor for the many roles held by women. Micir aptly suggests that Ursula ‘is an anthology of the experiences open to a relatively average English woman in the early 20th century’ (Micir 535) but the anthology derives from not just Ursula but also from her mother, sister and servants and covers the whole first half of the twentieth century.

Memory and oblivion in A God in Ruins (2015) A God in Ruins is first examined as a companion novel to Life After Life not only because it picks up some of its characters and events focusing mostly on the imagined memories and life of the heroine’s young brother Teddy after the Second World War, bringing into focus issues of memory and oblivion, but because it turns out to be another ‘what if?’ narrative that celebrates the powers of imagination. A God in Ruins can be read as an autographic expansion that develops the same diegetic world as Life After Life. The novel indeed summons the whole Todd family and their neighbours the Shawcrosses but A God in Ruins centres on Teddy Todd, a Halifax pilot during the Second World War. Even though the war actually occupies six chapters only out of the eighteen sections in the novel, Teddy’s war overwhelms the text: not only is it described through chapters set at the time but it is also remembered and put in perspective by other events that take place before and after. Indeed, the title phrase, taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson as is made clear in an epigraph, evokes the aftermath of events: the god in ruins is Teddy who, having lived through the war, is no longer innocent. The novel imagines how his war defines Teddy’s life afterwards and his relationship with his wife –​next-​door childhood sweetheart Nancy Shawcross –​his resentful angry selfish daughter Viola and his grandchildren, insecure Sunny and capable Bertie. Atkinson aptly calls A God in Ruins ‘a “companion” piece rather than a sequel’ to Life After Life in her ‘author’s note’ (GR

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539) because it deals with Ursula’s brother and his experience of life during the Second World War; it is ‘one of Ursula’s lives, an unwritten one’ (‘author’s note’ GR 540). As it inhabits the same diegetic world, a companion novel usually de facto supplements or inflates the world created in the first one. For instance, Jane Gardam’s two companion novels to Old Filth return to the same diegetic world and the same chronotope privileging a different character and perception. Similarly, like Life After Life, A God in Ruins evokes the Todd family and their friends, however no longer focusing on Ursula but on Teddy. The timeframe is partly the same as both encompass the Second World War but while Life After Life evoked the Blitz and the bombing of Berlin from the perspective of the bombed, A God in Ruins follows the story from the point of view of the pilot bombing Germany. Thus, A God in Ruins only qualifies as a sequel to Life After Life insofar as it imagines the various stages of Teddy’s life as a civilian after the war, along with that of his family and friends. What is significant in this type of expansion is the absence of hierarchy between the two interconnected texts as opposed to a sequel that posits itself as necessarily coming after a source text and implies some form of precedence and subservience to an initial plot.23 Life After Life and A God in Ruins can also be advantageously viewed as forming a diptych, as proposed by Catherine Bernard (Bernard 81). The image of the diptych interestingly places the two novels on the same level, linked to each other, without precedence of one over the other, and actually invites us to consider both texts as forming a whole, conveying a dual depiction of the Second World War: one in London, the other the point of view of a pilot flying over Germany. As a narrative expansion, a companion novel can be expected to supplement the blanks necessarily left in the source text. For instance, Izzie’s walk with Teddy as a child in the chapter ‘Alouette 1925’ (GR 13) expands on an episode that occupies merely three paragraphs in Life After Life: Izzie ‘had ignored everyone except Teddy whom she took off for long walks and quizzed relentlessly. … “She just asked me what I did, what school was like, what my hobbies were, what I liked to eat. My friends. Stuff like that.” ’ (LL 178). A God in Ruins expands on this at it recounts a walk taken by Teddy and Izzie, from the eleven-​year-​old boy’s point of view and

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Izzie’s ensuing thoughts, focusing on two characters whose interiority was not accessible in Life After Life. However, just like the two panels of a diptych can tell two parts of a story, a companion novel implies fragmentation at the same time as it purports expansion and wholeness. This section argues that, while adding to the picture of the war drawn over the course of the two novels, the narrative in A God in Ruins also insists on what gets forgotten or remains untold and can only be imagined while developing an overall sense of fragmentation and discontinuity through its structure. This is enhanced by the repetition of the same events and facts told again and again, which shows the process of memory that keeps returning to the same events, always altering them slightly. The issue of memory –​including its inseparable part, oblivion24 –​ is a running theme well worth examining in A God in Ruins, as it is foregrounded through discussion and events.25 As the narrative is not limited to the Second World War years but also moves forward in time, sequel-​like, to Teddy as a grandfather, this entails different generational perspectives on the Second World War, along with remarks on the nature of loss, distortion and interpretation of memory and its objects. But a sense of the past as irretrievable is immediate, obvious to Teddy as soon as the war is over: ‘there could be no going back to the other side, to the lives they had before, to the people they were before’ (GR 99), the ternary structure adding poignancy to the underlying wish and the impossibility of its realisation. It has been noticed that ‘[t]‌he urge to normalize the situation can lead to a desire to put aside or repress memories of war, and to effect closure on the past as a sealed and finished period’ (Adler, Ensel, Wintle 7). Forgetting is not always negative but can also be considered a necessity for one’s development.26 Several instances of deliberate forgetting are depicted in A God in Ruins, regardless of the war at stake as it applies to both the First and Second World Wars : for instance, Izzy, Teddy’s aunt, does not want to remember what she saw when she was an ambulance driver in France during the First World War (GR 33–​36): ‘she accelerated away from this memory as fast as she could’ (GR 36). In 1947, Teddy’s wife, Nancy, comments on one of his articles for a local journal, ‘I don’t think people necessarily want to be reminded about the war when

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they’re reading Agrestis’s Nature Notes. In fact quite the opposite, I imagine’ (GR 132). While Izzy’s rejection is individual, Nancy’s comment evokes a collective desire to somehow forget that was prevalent after the war, bitterly felt by Teddy (‘Nuremberg all but forgotten’ GR 131). The narrative comments on historiography, pointing to our changing attitudes towards the past: ‘Later, much later, when all the history books and memoirs and biographies started to come out and people stopped wanting to forget about the war and started wanting to remember it …’ (GR 294). The novel deals with first-​hand memory: Teddy is a survivor but the rest of his life appears to be measured against the war, which points to the intricate connection between past, present and future that is also highlighted by the jumbled-​up chronology of the novel. For instance, when considering a holiday on the coast of Yorkshire, he immediately makes the link with all the dead without a grave whose names appear on the memorial at Runnymede: ‘The North Sea was the graveyard of so many of the incorporeal dead at Runnymede, the sea-​bed littered with the rich and strange’ (GR 244) and he will not buy from German companies that sustained the Nazi enterprise (GR 177–​179). Teddy’s memory fuels his life but remains private. There is the unwillingness to speak –​‘the horror and the violence, not to mention the fear, seemed an immensely private thing’ (GR 107) –​as well as the refusal to emplot his experience, i.e. to fit into a story form (White 1973, 7–​8): when Nancy suggests that Teddy could write about the war, he is ‘secretly amazed she could think that something so shattering in its reality could be rendered so quickly in fiction’ (GR 124), representing the actual traumatised witness who is unable to put his experience into words. The novel also points to his inability to share his experience (GR 179) or his unwillingness to do so. For instance, Teddy gives his grand-​daughter a false explanation for a stain on a picture, actually left by his friend Keith’s blood after their plane went down, ‘because it was a private thing’ (GR 394). While Life After Life dealt with the London Blitz, A God in Ruins recalls a less palatable episode of the war. Indeed, it addresses the growing sense of guilt about the bombing of German civilians: initially defending his action in a discussion with Ursula about ‘area bombing’ in 1943 (GR 388), Teddy grows a different understanding

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of the situation later: ‘we thought we were crippling their economy but a lot of time we were killing women and children’ (GR 294). Because it deals with the aftermath of the war, A God in Ruins evokes the traces of the conflict, be they ‘psychical’ or ‘material’, to use Ricœur’s vocabulary (Ricœur 2004, 415): Teddy is left with ‘a jumble of random images that haunted his sleeping self’ (GR 131) but also physical marks –​‘the burn tissue on his neck’ (GR 133) –​and objects such as ‘the fruit salad of ribbons on his uniform’ (GR 394). Like Izzie’s disregarded Croix de Guerre after the First World War (GR 33), Teddy’s awards and decorations are not the ‘lieux de mémoire’ they could be because they convey symbolism to no one, not even to the ones who received them. Ironically, the objects which are ‘lieux de mémoire’ for Teddy and incomprehensible to his daughter are items objectively devoid of beauty and value: his old tray and his coffee machine are material elements imbued with symbolism, their aims being ‘to stop time, to block the work of forgetting’ (Nora 19). Forgetting, says Ricœur, works ‘as the effacement of traces and as a defect in the adjustment of the present image to the imprint left’ (Ricœur 2004, 8). Indeed, in A God in Ruins, Teddy’s daughters and grandchildren can see the objects but they are unaware of the value they carry and impervious to their meaning. A God in Ruins is about what is not transmitted and therefore falls into oblivion; the falsification of the past, what gets deliberately erased from memory: what will not be passed on. Instead of complementing the picture of the family and of the war drawn overall, the depiction of Teddy and his descendants in A God in Ruins increases an overall sense of fragmentation, aimlessness and discontinuity, which is heightened when the character is eventually revealed not to have survived the war. Indeed, Atkinson’s re-​ imagining shows what has been forgotten as the novel seems to highlight mostly what gets lost from one generation to the next. The story of the little diamond ring given to Nancy after Viola’s birth illustrates this. The ring and its backstory appear in non-​chronological order as they resurface at different times in Teddy’s memory. When the ring that is filled with significance for Teddy is passed on to his daughter Viola, its meaning is not and ‘he couldn’t recall ever seeing her wearing it’ (GR 337). In another instance, when emptying their relative’s houses, finding their aunt Izzie’s ‘croix de guerre’ (GR 33–​ 34) baffles Teddy and Pamela

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and they never knew why she got it, just like Sunny on finding his grandfather’s medals. Similarly, the reception of the Second World War by the following generation of individuals is represented here through Teddy’s daughter’s indifference (GR 78–​79) and resistance –​‘here comes the history lesson’ (GR 177) –​itself followed by his grandchildren’s interest but inability to comprehend, adding to an overall sense of non-​linearity and fragmentation. A God in Ruins does not replicate the forking-​path narrative in Life After Life and reviewers consequently noted how it appeared more traditional than Life After Life. Yet, linear narrative is disrupted throughout the 2015 novel: not only in the overall chapter arrangement that jumps from 1944 to 1925 to 1980 and then back to 1947 in the first four sections but also within each of them that does not necessarily attach itself to one particular character but moves back and forth through the past, present and future of various characters either through interior focalisation or through zero focalisation (omniscient narrator). The narrative in A God in Ruins relentlessly moves back and forth in time, inviting the reader to see how past, present and future are interlinked. For instance, in a chapter announced as being set in 1947, the depiction of Nancy and Teddy in their freezing house in Yorkshire by the fireplace serves as a frame for Teddy’s years between Fox Corner and now. Besides this temporal fluidity and narrative non-​linearity, the narrative ceaselessly fluctuates, alternating internal focalisation (in turn through Hugh, Sylvie, Izzie, Teddy, Viola etc.) with signs of authorial intrusions and omniscience. On the one hand, internal focalisation courts reader identification and empathy through immersion in the character’s thoughts. Indeed, ‘the interior representation of characters’ consciousness and emotional states’ is one of the ‘devices supporting character identification, contributing to empathetic experiences’ (Keen 2006 ‘Empathy’ 213). On the other hand, an obtrusively omniscient narrator sets up a distance between reader and character. Jonathan Culler strongly doubts the validity of the notion of omniscience in literature, notably because it confuses too many diverse elements (Culler 22). Pointing out a return to omniscience in contemporary fiction as a development of postmodernism, Paul Dawson lists again what is typically (and unhelpfully for Culler) associated with omniscience: ‘an all-​ knowing, heterodiegetic

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narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive commentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world’ (Dawson 2009, 143). For Paul Dawson, the question of the narrator’s knowledge that concerns Culler so much is not essential: the term ‘omniscient narration’ is ‘a trope, a figure of speech denoting a particular type of narratorial performance, and not, or not only, a quality of narratorial knowledge’ (Dawson 2009, 148) and he proposes four overlapping modes of narrative authority that contemporary fiction relies on (Dawson 2009, 152–​156): the ironic moralist who reflects self-​reflexively on the moral authority in classic omniscience; the literary historian who looks back on the past through a ‘double temporal perspective’ and ‘with the benefit of hindsight’ displays ‘hyperomniscience’ (Letissier 121, emphasis in original); the pyrotechnic storyteller, an expansive narrator of the type to be found in what James Wood (2000) denounces as ‘hysterical realism’ marked by an excess in narration; the immersion journalist and social commentator. The use of overt omniscience is unusual enough in Atkinson’s fiction to make one wonder what purpose it serves in A God in Ruins while examining the form it takes. With the exception of the early coming-​of-​age novels, Atkinson’s narrators never say ‘I’ and the narrator in A God in Ruins never becomes ‘a palpable presence in the fictional world’ (Dawson 2009, 143). It does not pretend to be the voice of ‘a general consciousness’ in the manner of nineteenth-​century narrators according to Joseph Hillis Miller nor ‘a form of public intellectual’ to be found in contemporary novels (Dawson 2009, 150).27 S/​he does not lecture the reader nor reflect on the state of the world (see Culler) but s/​he is an intrusive narrator insofar as its superior knowledge of the characters is markedly signalled. Its ability to report the innermost thoughts and feelings of the characters is heavily signposted in ‘Alouette’, the chapter set in 1925 with Teddy age eleven. The narrator takes us on a tour of the characters as it were, announcing his panoptic view when opening a paragraph with ‘The evening’s account for Fox Corner’ (GR 32). Introductory phrases or sentences like ‘The temptation of Hugh’ (GR 37), ‘And what of Teddy?’ (GR 40) and ‘And Nancy? What of Nancy? Where is she, we ask?’ (GR 158) punctuate the start of subparts. The narrator holds knowledge at the

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disposal of his narratees (readers). The narrator in A God in Ruins is akin to Dawson’s literary historian displaying Georges Letissier’s hyperomniscience as he benefits from hindsight. As the flow of the narrative is interrupted by the use of a prolepsis such as ‘he would have been surprised to know that in his sixties, when his grandchildren came to live with him …’ (GR 43). The narrator in A God in Ruins combines hyperomniscience with ‘pyrotechnic storytelling’ through prolepses that are both abundant and verbose and set up a constant to-​and-​fro movement between different points in time (GR 16–​18), obviously playing with temporality.28 The narrator’s use is significant as it ‘emphasises authorial control and implies that the emplotment is shaped by a deterministic and/​or ironic or tragic worldview’ (Robinson 39). Knowledge is often a key issue in omniscient narration where the ‘narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters know’ (Genette 189 emphasis original, quoted in Dawson 2009, 148). In A God in Ruins, the narrator often tells us about what Teddy and other characters do not know (GR 371). Indeed, the novel displays the typical complicitous relationship between narrator and narratee above the heads of the characters that are reduced to puppets: ‘Unknown to Viola, the petticoat had originally belonged to a shop girl who had died of consumption …’ (GR 69). Some of the knowledge thus imparted is actually not essential to the narrative as such but fills in another double function: that of reminding the reader of the presence of the narrator and of his ability to recount forgotten or unknown stories. As Paul Dawson reminds us ‘Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees’ (Dawson 2016, 145). As a result, they may prevent the reader from being immersed in the lives of the characters (Watt 285). Authorial intrusions are indeed deliberately used by Atkinson to keep the reader at a remove from the characters. The use of traditional omniscience signified by authorial intrusions may remind the reader of nineteenth-​century novels like those by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope and as such works as a dubious metafictional device. Undoubtedly, if the reader recognises the device as such, he or she nevertheless adopts it to enjoy the narrative. Omniscience and authorial intrusions are literary devices that the reader may identify and yet serve to establish

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a form of trust and complicity between narrator and narratee. This confidence in a convention makes the disclosure all the more surprising at the end when the narrator pulls the carpet from under her reader’s feet and Teddy is revealed to have died in the war. Paradoxically, narrative expansion as practised in A God in Ruins relies on referential illusion which it exacerbates (see Saint-​ Gelais 14) but referential illusion, the illusion that the novel talks about events to be considered real, as having a referent within the realm of fiction, is precisely what is shattered in A God in Ruins when the narrator lays bare his art and, to some extent, destroys the house of fiction: ‘The fourth wall of the solemn temple falls as quietly as feathers’ (GR 524) announces Teddy’s death in his plane, which is followed by ‘And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it’ (GR 524–​525). Within the fictional world, Teddy’s death is real, which makes his offspring fiction. Atkinson breaks the illusion she has created and the convention she has established so far. A famous authorial intrusion that breaks the illusion is to be found in Chapter 13 of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). As Chapter 12 ends on questions ‘Who is Sarah?/​Out of what shadows does she come?’, Chapter 13 opens with ‘I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind’ (Fowles 97). Here Fowles temporarily ruptures the illusion he has created and declares the diegetic world fake and false (even if he continues his narrative afterwards). The situation is different in A God in Ruins where the diegetic world is not destroyed. Atkinson does not break into the narrative to say that Teddy is an invented character but to say that part of the life she invented for him is false. This does not disrupt the existence of the fictional world nor of its inhabitants like Ursula and Nancy. As the novel tells how they deal with Teddy’s death, poignancy is added because the reader can identify with them and /​or empathise with their pain, which adds weight to the idea that reading may generate empathy and understanding. This revelation of Teddy’s death during the war is all the more unexpected and surprising as the reader has trustingly been following the narrator from one character’s thoughts to another. In terms of narrative, surprise can take two forms: ‘a dynamic, even ephemeral, response; and a static, structural feature of the plot. In the latter case,

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we can refer to “the surprise” in a novel long after we have lost, through familiarity, the capacity to register genuine shock at that development’ (Christopher Miller 2015, 6). Thus, as Christopher R. Miller tells us, surprise is both an emotional response and an element of narrative poetics which combine here to impress the power of imagination on the reader. This disclosure towards the end of A God in Ruins echoes the twist at the end of Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth. However, while the twists at the end of McEwan’s novels rely on the identity of the narrator who is revealed to be a character who has made alterations to events and thus invite a reflection on the manipulative dimension of narrative and the ethical role of the writer to tell the truth or not, the surprise at the end of A God in Ruins emanates directly from the narrator who, in this case, added to the real instead of subtracting information (as the character-​ narrators in Atonement and Sweet Tooth do) so that the role of the writer and his/​her imagination are foregrounded. The revelation that Teddy did not survive the war and that everything we read was invented is a game unexpectedly played on the reader. Examining the lack of success of hypertext novels that try to involve the reader in the creative process, researchers have found that Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ still holds sway: It appears that the hierarchical relationship between the author and a receptive, passive reader, despised by hypertext theoreticians, is really exactly what the reader of narrative fiction wants and expects. The reader, like the storytelling audience, actually wants to relinquish control and be at the receiving end of the author’s manipulations and wants to be confronted with someone else’s consistently and cogently presented point of view so as to be able to test his or her own theory of mind. (Mangen and van der Weel 10)

Readers may like to be manipulated and surprised but gratifying the reader is unlikely to be the only aim of the conceit in A God in Ruins. The belief in the power of the imagination is a strong credo of Atkinson’s, already expressed clearly in Human Croquet: ‘Only the imagination can embrace the impossible –​the golden mountain, the fire-​breathing dragon, the happy ending’ (HC 356). In A God in Ruins, Atkinson demonstrates and pointedly makes the reader aware of the power of imagination to remember the past, to piece it together and to give us some access to it. Objects from the past

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thus resurface in A God in Ruins (as in Behind the Scenes at the Museum). Available for interpretation, they do not speak by themselves. In the instances mentioned above when Izzie’s and Teddy’s medals are found, the characters are baffled by the discovery whereas the narrator has provided the reader with some story and meaning. Through the imagined lives of Teddy and his offspring, Atkinson makes a demonstration of the power of narrative imagination that gives us the ability to understand the past. As Martha Nussbaum believes that literature is a way to discover other stories, histories and viewpoints –​‘narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction’ (Nussbaum 90), since it develops compassion and understanding in the reader (Nussbaum 99) –​Atkinson celebrates the powers of imagination to give us some access to an unfathomable past. Because Atkinson flaunts the constructedness of her re-​imagining, she avoids the criticism levelled at Nussbaum’s empathetic reading that it is limitative and constructive as it subsumes the other into the norm so that it is no longer other.29 It is the novelist’s job to remember the past, albeit in an idiosyncratic way. The precision in location, like Monkgate Bar in York (GR 405), the very precise technical writing about the Halifax flown by Teddy (GR 296–​297), the long list of reference books at the end of A God in Ruins point to a very documented and researched imaginary account, of the type conducted by realists like Charles Dickens and George Eliot, suggesting that accuracy is the aim, even as the account is flaunted as being imaginary. What Alexandra Stewart points out for Atonement and sees as an instance of the ‘naturalisation’ of postmodernism (Stewart 2011, 13) is equally valid for A God in Ruins: ‘Briony’s “revelation” that the preceding fiction is, indeed, fiction does not fundamentally invalidate or undermine its realism’ (Stewart 2011, 16). A God in Ruins is not counterfactual history because historical facts are not tampered with. The fact that Teddy did not live his life does not erase the emotions felt and the understanding achieved by the reader through Teddy’s imagined life and family. What is at stake in this novel seems to be not so much the artifice of fiction and of any reconstruction of the past as the very importance and function of fiction: fiction and the artifice that underpins it offer a form of experience as well as giving a life and a voice to the other, here the lives and voices silenced by the war: the revelation

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that Teddy’s is one of these many unlived lives, cut short by the war, is followed by a list of death figures in various wars. Atkinson fulfils the poet’s role as defined by Aristotle, ‘the poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet … consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be’ (Aristotle 1451 ab).

Transcription (2018) and the art of secrecy Published in the aftermath of Life After Life and A God in Ruins, Transcription is Atkinson’s third major incursion into historical fiction and in the representation of the Second World War,30 this time focusing on a young woman hired by MI5 in 1940. After two short introductory pages that briefly see Juliet Armstrong knocked down by a car in London in 1981, the novel introduces her in 1950, aged twenty-​eight, a producer of radio programmes for schools at the BBC who is now perturbed by the reappearance of acquaintances from ten years earlier, when she was recruited to work for MI5 during the war. The narrative then moves back to 1940 and focuses on an eighteen-​year-​old newly orphaned Juliet who, once in MI5, is quickly picked to transcribe the conversations between Godfrey Toby, who poses as a Gestapo agent, and his pro-​German informants in a flat in London. This was done under the supervision of Perry Gibbons, who then asks her to infiltrate the Right Club, an anti-​Semitic secret society amongst the upper classes, under the name and personality of Iris Carter-​Jenkins. The rest of the novel alternates between these two periods, 1940 and 1950, before returning to 1981 for the closing pages. The recipient of glowing reviews, Transcription also offers another instance of Atkinson’s ‘genre-​ defying’ (Merrit 2015) writing, both in its bending of genre and combining it with another. Historical fiction was famously combined with murder mystery in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1984). In Transcription, Atkinson combines historical fiction with features of the spy novel as her characters work for the Secret Service or are under its surveillance during and after the Second World War. The overall topic is indeed secrecy,

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deception and espionage with agents (double or not), equipped with tools like invisible ink and cameras hidden in lighters. And yet (as Juliet would say), just like the Brodie novels are not actual detective novels even though they feature a detective, Transcription does not fully qualify as spy fiction. Even though spying is being done, Transcription is less interested in actual spying and its technicalities than in the ethics of the Secret Service, i.e. in notions of truth and lying, role-​ playing and nationalism/​ patriotism so that reviewers called it ‘a novel of ideas’ (Merrit 2018) or ‘a serious novel’ (Clark 2018). The following pages examine how in Transcription Atkinson develops the historical novel and ‘manages to find a fresh angle on a war we’ve already seen depicted in literature in every possible way’ (Patrick) as she experiments with narrative technique while revisiting the spy genre and its theme of secrecy. In her book The Second World War in Contemporary Fiction: Secret Histories (2011), Alexandra Stewart ‘assesses the importance of secrecy as both a theme and a structural device in contemporary fiction, and in particular examines the emergence of secrecy as a key focal point for fictional depictions of the Second World War’ (Stewart 2011, 2). She observes how some novels revisit events with the benefit of hindsight or through attitudes that were not dominant at the time, while others include wartime events that have been omitted from the record. Atkinson’s Transcription falls into this second category as it focuses on a young woman. Significantly, this re-​imagining of the period is done though spy fiction, which is an eminently masculine genre both in terms of authors and heroes, judging from David Seed’s comprehensive overviews of the genre.31 Through a female protagonist and focaliser, Atkinson appropriates the genre of spy fiction and highlights the role of ‘secondary’ female actors in MI5 projects during and after the Second World War.32 In the ‘author’s note’ to Transcription, Atkinson explains that the book was inspired by transcripts released by MI5 but that her protagonist is not the main character in the transcript but the unknown forgotten character who typed them. In a way, this is a similar reaction to that of A.S. Byatt who, in ‘two historical fantasies’ (Byatt 2000, 102) develops characters that are mere footnotes in the lives of famous figures.33 Talking about the writing of the book which refers both to MI5 and to the BBC, Atkinson is surprised by ‘how

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much had been lost and forgotten’ and declares ‘My job as I see it … is to plug the gaps’ (Tr ‘Author’s note’ 332). More than Life After Life and A God in Ruins, Transcription is historical fiction based on specific facts: in 2014, MI5 released its files on the fifth columnists, people eager for the Nazis to invade Britain and desirous to pass on information to them (Travis). To prevent the information from actually leaking, a flat in Edgeware Road was equipped with microphones where Jack King (alias Eric Roberts) posed as a Gestapo agent and met with his informers. Behind the story of Juliet posing as Iris to infiltrate the Right Club is that of the real-​life Joan Miller (Tr ‘Author’s note’ 331). Through the characters of Merton and Alleyne, Juliet’s handlers, Atkinson also alludes to the Cambridge spies who, out of conviction, shared Britain’s secret with the Soviets. Atkinson invents her own characters and places them in a third-​person narrative in which Juliet is the only focaliser. Overall, as Lukacs would have it, historical characters and events only appear in the distance, insofar as they enter Juliet’s orbit.34 With this subjective narration mode, temporal (and historical) progress is not indicated. No dates are didactically given but events are to be inferred from what characters or the narrator say; for instance, ‘ “Have you heard the news?”/​ “Churchill’s to be PM? Yes.” ’ (Tr 112) and ‘At Dunkirk the Beach was filling up with troops’ (Tr 275). The narrator juxtaposes the grand historical facts with Juliet’s more ordinary concerns: ‘The Finns had just capitulated to the Soviets, and Hitler and Mussolini had recently met to discuss their “friendship”, but real war, the one where you might be killed, still seemed a long way off. Juliet was currently more concerned with the introduction of meat rationing’ (Tr 63). The front and home seem like two different worlds: humour derives from the change in style with the abruptness of the last sentence that lays the stress on materiality and individuals’ immediate concerns and the incongruity between the large-​scale decisions and their short-​term effects on ordinary individuals.35 Narrative technique makes the reader sympathise with Juliet but dramatic irony later reveals that the two meet in Juliet who is both an ordinary individual and a spy. The characters of the fifth columnists, be they upper-​class members of the Right Club that Juliet infiltrates as Iris or working-​class

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informants met by Godfrey Toby in the Dolphin Square flat, remain secondary. However, the novel does draw attention to the fact that a part of the British population had pro-​Nazi sympathies. While a number of fifth columnists are repeatedly defined as ‘ordinary people’ (Tr 50, 63, 82), the novel also insists on the titled members of the Right Club, their wealth and their power (Tr 124, 126). In this respect, Transcription participates in a more general attempt in the historical novel to ‘reconsider historical consensus’ (Brooker 169) in the same way as Kazuo Ishiguro did in The Remains of the Day (1989) when he touched on upper-​class Britain’s entanglement with fascism through the character of Lord Darlington. Lies, pretence and secrecy are key thematic elements in the novel. Juliet suspects nearly everyone in MI5 of being double, starting with Perry Gibbons whose style, she observes, indicates ‘a different Perry’ (Tr 61) and who is compared to ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ (Tr 82). Her suspicions extend to other agents like Godfrey Toby whom she observes deliberately leaving an envelope behind him (Tr 62, 142–​143) and Mrs Ambrose whom she also suspects of double crossing: ‘Not for the first time, Juliet found herself wondering if Mrs Ambrose really was against the Nazis’ (Tr 116). Indeed, nearly all characters play a part or more. That secrecy is the topic of the novel is blatant as the characters are all keeping information from each other. In Calinescu’s words, ‘Secrecy (the word comes from the Latin verb secerno, “to set aside”) is usually defined as conscious concealment of meaning, that is, as information deliberately set aside, withheld, or disguised, and thus—​whatever the purpose of the concealment may be—​kept out of the circuit of social/​personal communication’ (Calinescu 443). What is not obvious is that Transcription’s narrative (and not just the theme of the narrative) also hinges on secrecy, on the untold, on information intentionally withheld. Victoria Stewart notes that in reconfiguring or challenging widely recognisable images of the war, authors [of contemporary fictional representations of the Second World War] will often build a narrative that centres on the revelation of a secret. The force of this, for the reader, ... might emerge through techniques of delay and revelation structuring the narrative itself. (Stewart 2011, 16–​17)

Reviewers of Transcription have thus pointed to the ‘surprising’ (Kemp) or ‘astonishing’ (Norris) dénouement of the novel. Contrary

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to McEwan’s Atonement and Sweet Tooth where the twist ending is due to the unforeseen revelation of the identity of the narrator in the world of the diegesis, the surprise ending in Transcription is only made possible through the form of the narrative with which Atkinson introduces a particular type of unreliable narration. Indeed, in Transcription and contrary to most of Atkinson’s novels, the narrative is restricted to one perspective, taking after Henry James in What Maisie Knew (1897) that famously restricts itself to the depiction of a little girl’s perception of her situation ‘only through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her attention; only as it might pass by her and appeal to her’ (James ‘Preface’ 1897, 7). The unobtrusive external narrative voice in Transcription unwaveringly uses Juliet as focaliser: the whole narrative is aligned with Juliet’s understanding of the people she meets, the situation she lives in and her ways of dealing with them. Even the brackets mostly provide additional comments supposedly originating from Juliet. When free indirect style is used, the emphatic use of metaphors (Tr 124) –​to which we have been alerted early on (Tr 18) –​reminds the reader that the events are told through Juliet’s perspective. There appears at times a form of discordance, after Dorrit Cohn’s ‘discordant narrators’: ‘those whom we trust for the facts but not for their interpretation’ (Abbott 77). Indeed, in the parts set in 1940, the eighteen-​year-​old Juliet does not draw the conclusion that is meant to be obvious for the reader, which is that Perry Gibbons is gay. The narrative offers a mix between what Gérard Genette (1980) calls ‘internal focalisation’, when ‘the narrator says only what a given character knows’, and ‘external focalisation’, when ‘the narrator says less than the character knows’. Indeed, the implied narrator in Atkinson’s Transcription says only what Juliet knows about the world around her. The narrative gives no entry into any other character’s thoughts but Juliet’s, which invites the reader to side with the protagonist as Juliet suspects all the other characters of double dealing. But the narrator does not report all Juliet knows; that Juliet is not a straightforward character appears in the way she repeatedly lies or is said to be often lying or acting: in the early pages of the novel (1950) ‘a little bit of acting went a long way with Prendergast’ (Tr 13); ‘actually it happened to be true’ (Tr 14, italics mine); ‘it had been a lie, of course’ (Tr 16); the report of her recruitment interview with Merton concludes with: ‘Later she learned that Miles Merton … knew everything about her …

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including every truth and half-​truth she had told him’ (Tr 37). As Atkinson put it in interviews, her heroine is ‘a pathological liar’ and an ‘untrustworthy heroine’ (Sikka). The reader is alerted to the fact that the narrative keeps events untold when we learn a posteriori that Juliet still has the diamond earrings (Tr 172) which she had said to be in her handbag when it was stolen (Tr 158) –​which is a lie itself. Similarly, the posterior revelation of theft, ‘a small sock needle, liberated from the glass coffin’ (Tr 240, italics mine) may alert the reader to other things that happened but remained untold. If Transcription is a ‘thoroughly duplicitous narrative’ (Clark 2018), this is thanks to the idiosyncratic use of third-​person narration and of paralipsis, defined as ‘the omission of an important action or thought of the focal hero, which neither the hero nor the narrator can be ignorant of but which the narrator chooses to conceal from the reader’ (Genette 1980, 196). As indicated by Jeanette King, one of the major aspects of historical fiction since the 1970s linked to second-​wave feminism is that ‘it reinserts women into history not just as victims but as agents’ (King 173). Atkinson gives a realist re-​imagining in the sense that she does not glorify the heroine’s part: many references are made to the fact that girls are considered as maids, handy for making tea (Tr 45, 53) and there is an acute awareness of the different roles ascribed to men and women. A ballroom in a Pall Mall house is thus described as: ‘the kind of room where men signed treaties that damned both victor and loser, or where girls in disguise mislaid their glass slippers’ (Tr 123). Despite her status as a heroine in Atkinson’s novel and her wish to be mistress of her destiny, Juliet turns out to be a victim, a pawn in the ‘game’ played by men, ‘her war (and her peace too, she supposed) had been shaped by the men she knew’ (Tr 203) as she is manipulated to the last. Unlike postmodern novels that refer to real-​life people to expose the thinness of the line between fact and fiction, Atkinson uses real-​ life names in a traditional referential way. Precise geographical description of London or references to places like the Dorchester and real-​life figures like Lew Stone (Tr 95) build a realist framework that also serves to normalise the so far untold experience of women like Juliet. At times, however, Atkinson openly signals the ‘inauthenticity’ of the fictional world through ‘improbable’ scenes such as the one when Juliet escapes from Mrs Scaife’s bedroom by

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climbing down a Virginia creeper. Intertextuality is another means by which Atkinson reminds the reader of the fictionality of the characters. While since the advent of realism in the eighteenth century, early novelists ‘named their characters in such a way that they were to be regarded as particular individuals in the contemporary social environment’ (Watt 19), Atkinson picks names that refer to fictional characters and makes sure the reader is aware of it: ‘My name’s Clarissa, by the way.’ ‘Juliet.’ ‘Oh, bad luck. I bet everyone is always asking you where Romeo is. I myself was named for a bloody awful novel.’ ‘And do you have a sister called Pamela?’ Juliet asked curiously. ‘I do!’ Clarissa roared with laughter. (Tr 38)

The first three chapters all begin with a name, followed in the third instance by a brief reflection on names and what they tell or represent (Tr 27). Later on in the novel, Juliet in 1950 reflects on the influential men in her life, concluding her list with ‘She thought they sounded like characters in a novel by Henry James’ (Tr 203). Juliet’s perception of people and situations is filtered through fictional characters. For instance, when she meets Godfrey Toby, she is disappointed that he is not ‘a kind of Bulldog Drummond’ (Tr 45), referring to the hero in a popular spy series by Sapper in the 1930s, but is ‘Pooterish’ (Tr 45), after Charles Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody (1889). Juliet also derives from his voice that he could look like Robert Donat, the actor who played the leading male role in Alfred Hitchcock’s spy film The 39 Steps (1935). These help characterise the young Juliet as both imaginative and naive, her experience then limited to her reading. Puzzled by Perry Gibbons, the eighteen-​ year-​old Juliet tries to cast him in turn as Rochester, Heathcliff and Bluebeard (Tr 119) or wonders if the plot of Goldilocks might apply (Tr 154). The narrative also multiplies allusion to fiction to remind the reader of the constructed nature of what s/​he is reading. The fifth columnists are thus alluded to as ‘this cast of perfidy’ (Tr 50, italics mine), suggesting drama and fiction, and meetings at Mrs Scaife’s as ‘a cloak and dagger operation’ (Tr 86), which evokes both espionage and a type of play. Epigraphs, however, are not taken from other novels but from factual documents (Churchill’s war memoirs, the foyer of the BBC house). If the fictionality of the

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characters and events is put forward, there is no gesture towards making history look inauthentic and, in this respect, Transcription definitely illustrates the move of the contemporary novel beyond postmodernism. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription can all be read as diverse illustrations of the contemporary engagement with historical fiction in that they confront the reader with a representation of the past that is referential but also somehow invites him or her to reflect upon its very representation. Traditional historical narration is challenged in every one of them, not the fictional experiences of the past that they strive to narrate. Contrary to the recurring charge of escapism, Atkinson’s re-​imaginings of the past also seem to be vehicles for contemporary issues: Life After Life and Transcription are about women (presented as victims or empowered) and the limits set on them because of their gender, while A God in Ruins wonders about responsibility, memory, its transmission and oblivion.

Notes 1 They reckon that actual neo-​Victorian ‘texts (literary, filmic, audio/​ visual) must in some respect be self-​ consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 4, emphasis in original). 2 Roger Luckurst (1999) notes that ‘contemporary texts continuously circle back to the 1940s’ quoting Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs and Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House. According to de Groot, the two world wars are ‘the most significant historical events considered by literary novelists since the 1990s’ (de Groot 2010, 102). Bentley offers a list (Bentley 2014, 138, note 2). 3 See her 2018 BBC World Service interview or ‘author note’ to Life After Life. 4 Even though Atkinson did some research for Behind the Scenes at the Museum too (BBC World Book Club 2018), the editions do not include a list of sources. 5 As mentioned before, following ‘Tis sixty years since’ as the subtitle to Scott’s Waverley, sixty years in the past is often considered as the time limit for a novel to be considered historical. For the historical novel Society, ‘fifty or more years in the past’ is the temporal criteria (see

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Johnson). As for Margaret Atwood, she defines historical fiction as fiction ‘set before the time at which the novel-​writer came to consciousness’ (Atwood 1998, 1510). 6 American writer Jonathan Dee sees Atkinson’s representation of World War II as nostalgic: ‘She doesn’t romanticize the war; some of the Blitz scenes in ‘Life After Life’ are harrowingly gory. But the celebration of the fundamental British mythology about ordinary citizens banding together to repel Hitler (to say it’s part of British mythology isn’t to say it’s untrue) can read, especially by a writer who is too young to know her subject firsthand, like a kind of nationalist nostalgia, a turning away from the difficult, ambiguous flux of the present’ (Dee). This however sounds like an unfounded criticism considering the Brodie novels that deal with contemporary issues (see previous chapter). 7 The idea that women had ‘good wars’ before being relegated to the background again is developed in the mini TV series The Bletchley Circle (ITV 2012–​2014). As pointed out by Victoria Stewart, this mini-​ series rests on the ‘idea that war offered opportunities to women that were then withdrawn in peacetime’ as it shows former Bletchley women dissatisfied when they are again ‘consigned to either much more mundane occupations or to joyless domesticity’ (Stewart 2015, 417). 8 Similarly, see how the sense of nostalgia is mocked in Behind the Scenes at the Museum with the family mythologising ‘the old king’ (BSM 81–​82). 9 This is one example of Sylvie’s complexity: while she is pictured as having a traditional view of women’s lives, her contempt for her school friend who is ‘a society suffragette’ suggests respect or admiration for the active suffragettes on hunger strike. 10 In his own words, ‘Most of the history of war is military and political. The home front is a small subsection, and of this, nursing is a negligible fraction. Surely, historians have neglected their duty’ (McEwan 2006). 11 ‘Historical novels are often judged in this way, reviewed according to their evidentiary weight and realist purpose’ (De Groot 2019, 170). 12 Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) reverses chronology when telling the life of Dr Friendly but does not qualify as historical fiction. 13 See Domínguez García (2019) for a detailed study of these episodes. 14 Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Elizabeth Hardcastle, winner of the Best First Novel prize in the 2018 Costa Book Awards, is close enough to the temporal anomalies described in Borges’s story as the main character lives the same day over again under a different identity every day for a week (when his memory is erased). Hypertext fiction or e-​literature in the 1990s was the realisation of Borges’ non-​linear narration now involving choices by the reader. For instance, in 2018

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Jared Pechacek published instalments of a fairy tale with the next move chosen by readers (see Pechacek). The impact of hypertext fiction however remains limited notably because, when reading, readers do not want to be in charge of the plot (see Mangen, Anne and Adriaan van der Weel). Paul Auster in 4321 (2017) uses a conceit that is close to Atkinson’s in Life After Life as he offers four versions of the same life but they are not articulated on the forking-​path pattern even though Ilana Shiloh considers Auster’s novel to be a forking-​path narrative, on the basis of its ‘four parallel segments of the protagonist’s personal history’ (§8).

15 A notable exception is French director Alain Resnais who managed to adapt to the screen Alan Ayckbourn’s play Intimate Exchanges in Smoking /​ No Smoking (1993), keeping the playwright’s options introduced with ‘or else he or she says...’ 16 Guignery and Drag note ‘a renewed popularity of fragmentation in works of fiction that deny completeness, linearity and coherence in favor of incompletion, disruption and gaps’ (xi). For an overview of fragmentation in literature, see Guignery and Drag’s introduction. 17 Modernist novelists ‘developed novelistic forms that were fragmented, deployed multiple viewpoints, emphasized the subjective nature of experience, disrupted narrative chronology’ (Gasiorek qtd in Guignery and Drag xv). On the other hand, ‘Postmodernism has given up Modernist attempts to restore wholeness to a fragmented world and has accepted the contingency of experience’ (Alan Wilde qtd in Guignery and Drag xvii). 18 Micir dismisses the killing-​Hitler plot as ‘such a utopian counterfactual fiction that it seems preposterous, almost parodic’ (Micir 533). This however needs to be qualified. Parody can indeed be detected in the hyperbolic language through which Ursula sees herself but it applies to this heroic role, not to her aim. Her aim is motivated by her own dead, the deaths of family and friends experienced in previous lives. 19 The phrase appears in the sentence ‘Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar’. 20 Eva Braun’s thoughts are not given access to. As for men, Dr Fellows (GR 93) and Hugh in ‘The End of the Beginning’ are rare exceptions. 21 Hugh’s sister, Izzie, volunteers and works as an ambulance driver during World War I but she is not a focaliser in Life After Life that remains with the women at Fox Corner. Izzie’s war experience however resurfaces in A God in Ruins. 22 See A Woman in Berlin, quoted by Atkinson in her list of sources. The issue of the bombing of German civilians, a dark side to British war history, is later picked up in A God in Ruins.

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23 Carol Shields used the phrase ‘companion novels’ for her own Small Ceremonies (1976) and The Box Garden (1977) when they were later printed together as Duet (Shields 2003). To refer to his second trilogy, The Book of Dust, in relation to His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman coined the word ‘equel’ in order to stress the absence of hierarchy between the two: ‘The Book of Dust is an equel … It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it. It’s a different story, but there are settings that readers of His Dark Materials will recognise, and characters they’ve met before’ (Pullman). 24 See Paul Ricœur for ‘the paradoxical idea that forgetting can be so closely tied to memory that it can be considered one of the conditions for it’ (Ricœur 2004, 426). 25 For a study of collective and personal memory and forgetting in Life After Life, see Arias (2015). 26 See Marc Augé and Paul Ricœur. 27 The narrators Paul Dawson has in mind emanate from writers who, like Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith but unlike Kate Atkinson, take a stand in public life: ‘The narrative authority of contemporary omniscience, as it circulates in public discourse, needs to be approached as an interrelation between the narrative voice of a work of fiction and this extrafictional voice’ (Dawson 2009, 150). 28 For instance, ‘But that was in the future’ (GR 378). For other instances see A God in Ruins (GR 395, 405). 29 See Vickroy (19) for a summary of this criticism. 30 Only a few ‘footnotes’ are set during World War I and II in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. 31 The first female protagonist appears in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983) (Seed 2010, 242). 32 In Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (2012), the focaliser is also a woman employed by the Secret Service, Serena Frome. 33 In ‘Precipice Encurled’ (published in Sugar and Other Stories) and ‘The Conjugial Angel’ (one of the two novellas in Angels and Insects) where she tells the story of Arthur Hallam’s fiancée who was sidelined by her brother’s grief Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (see Byatt 2000, 103–​104). 34 Guy Liddel (1892–​ 1958), deputy director of counter-​ espionage, is mentioned talking with Merton (53). consciously farcical, as 35 For Diemert, ‘Transcription is at times self-​ events in the tea room show’ (Diemert 1998).

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5 Of endings in Kate Atkinson’s novels

This final chapter investigates Atkinson’s engagement with conventions regarding endings and closure as an entry into her aesthetics of hybridity. It is based on the premise that endings matter to the reader because they contribute to giving shape to the way we interpret our lives: ‘Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems’ (Kermode 7). Peter Brooks confirms: ‘Narrative is one of the ways in which we speak, one of the large categories in which we think. Plot is its thread of design and its active shaping force, the product of our refusal to allow temporality to be meaningless, our stubborn insistence on making meaning in the world and in our lives’ (Brooks 323). Therefore, as observed by Peter Rabinowitz, ‘there is a general tendency in most reading to apply rules of coherence in such a way that disjunctures are smoothed over so that texts are turned into unified wholes—​that is, in a way that allows us to read so that we get the satisfaction of closure’ (Rabinowitz 310–​311).1 Independently from the reader’s needs and quest which can be assuaged through reading, novels as such only reach their final shape –​what Torgovnick refers to as ‘the shape of fictions’ (Torgovnick 5) –​once the end has been reached: ‘novels do have forms and meaning, and endings are crucial in achieving them’ (Torgovnick 4). Indeed, as noticed by Rabinowitz, ‘[last sentences] do often serve to scaffold our retrospective interpretation of the book’ (Rabinowitz 303). Finally, because the end is an unavoidable landmark and has thus been considered as the locus of convention,

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it is a site where the author can both assert his/​her difference and set up his/​her order of things following his/​her worldview. The question of endings is often associated with closure. Indeed, as H. Porter Abbott puts it most simply and clearly, ‘When a narrative resolves a conflict, it achieves closure, and this usually comes at the end of the narrative’ (Abbott 56). As we shall see later, this is often not the case in Atkinson’s fiction. Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards masternarratives’ (Lyotard xxix), narratives of progress, enlightenment and human liberation (McHale 68) goes hand in hand with a distrust of closure. The notion thus came under ‘postmodern suspicion’ because of ‘both its arbitrariness and its foreclosing interpretative power’ (Hutcheon 2002, 66). For their part, deconstructionist critics consider closure impossible: ‘Deconstruction has … challenged the assumption that a good work should work or does have a single, determinable, organically unified meaning’ (Joseph Hillis Miller 1987, 186).2 In fact, endings and closure are not synonymous as the latter may or may not characterise the ending which merely designates the contents of the final section of the text. Indeed, while the ending of a novel refers to the final pages of a text, closure, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith explains, conveys ‘the sense of stable conclusiveness, finality or “clinch” ’ (Herrnstein Smith 2) and Marjorie Garber notes: ‘it seems to imply a wrapping up, a completing of the circuit’ (Garber 271). In Noël Carroll’s words, ‘The notion of closure refers to the sense of finality with which a piece of music, a poem, or a story concludes. It is the impression that exactly the point where the work does end is just the right point. … Closure yields a feeling of completeness’ (Carroll 2007, 2). For Catherine Belsey, closure is characteristic of classic realism and means ‘disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the reestablishment of order’ (Belsey 70). Closure thus seems to equate to the ‘closed ending’ as opposed to the open ending associated with modernism and promoted by E.M. Forster: ‘Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out’ (Forster 149). But for Torgovnick, open-​ended works can still convey closure as long as the ending is in keeping with the rest of the work. For her, ‘The test is the honesty and the appropriateness of the ending’s relationship to beginning and middle, not the degree of finality or resolution

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achieved by the ending’ (Torgovnick 6). Closure works on several levels: at the level of the story, with respect to the overall structure and at the level of the final textual section.3 Closure is felt at its strongest when all three combine: when the physical end of the text bearing signs of closure offers an ending that satisfies the internal coherence of the text. Finally, for deconstructionists, the ending itself is near impossible to locate: ‘The tying/​untying, the turning-​point, is diffused throughout the whole action’ (Joseph Hillis Miller 1978, 4). There are however formal signs that indicate a break or a change, for instance of rhythm, tense, viewpoint or voice in the narration (see Larroux 32–​34 and Wenzel 142–​144). David Lodge reminds us that the ending of a novel often works in two stages: ‘Perhaps we should distinguish between the end of the novel’s story –​the resolution or deliberate non-​resolution of the narrative questions it has raised in the minds of its readers –​and the last page or two of the text, which often act as a kind of epilogue or postscript, a gentle deceleration of the discourse as it draws to a halt’ (Lodge 2011, 224). This is an interesting distinction, mostly valid for the nineteenth-​century novel but that is occasionally appropriated by the contemporary novel (see for instance A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Ian McEwan’s Atonement), including Atkinson’s fiction. It is true that the ending may be somewhat difficult to locate in Atkinson’s fiction and in the contemporary novel in general because of a complex and sometimes fragmented structure which implies a different approach to closure. As noted by Peter Brooks, Our most sophisticated literature understands endings to be artificial, arbitrary, minor rather than major chords, casual and textual rather than cosmic and definitive. … This tenuous, fictive, arbitrary status of ends clearly speaks to and speaks of an altered situation of plot, which no longer wishes to be seen as end-​determined, moving toward full predication of the narrative sentence, claiming a final plenitude of meaning. (Brooks 314)

The perception of the ending as the locus for closure, meaning disclosure, rests on views of a traditional narrative arc and of reading pleasure based on the ‘ejaculatory mode’,4 i.e. in which the whole tale is geared towards closure. Earl Ingersoll calls this the masculine paradigm in his study of endings in relation to gender. In opposition

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to this, Ingersoll points to ‘self-​conscious attempts to depart or even to subvert the conventional masculine paradigm’ (Ingersoll 18). Such is the case, for instance, in the endings to John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, David Lodge’s Changing Places and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, as well as in endings that completely ignore the paradigm when they break free from the narrative linear model through fragmentation as in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and A.S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects. Some of Ingersoll’s remarks are useful in order to understand how Atkinson plays with the notion of closure. Indeed, if Life After Life completely sidesteps the masculine plot through its fragmented structure, Atkinson’s other novels tend to play with traditional endings. The contemporary novel, as practised by Atkinson, is marked by its attachment to storytelling. Yet, narrative, including notably its ending as we have seen, is under suspicion and laden with questioning and self-​ reflexivity. The following two excerpts are telling in this respect: Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-​up revelation. Life, though –​standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night –​flies at us in bright splinters. (David Shields 2010, 73) She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on. (CH 65)

In the first excerpt, David Shields points to the illusion contained in traditional fiction that pretends that life is coherent, notably through its structure ending in a ‘neatly wrapped-​up revelation’. Kate Atkinson in the second excerpt taken from Case Histories says the same through Michelle, a character distraught by the chaos of her life. While Shields continues his rationale by saying that in its ‘reality hunger’ (to take up the title of Shields’s book), the novel must give up on fiction, the illusory dimension of fiction and its sense of closure is acknowledged in Atkinson’s novel without being forsaken, which is paradigmatic of the contemporary novel. If realism remains predominant, the contemporary novel has nevertheless

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taken in the lessons of postmodernism so that ‘these texts are still playful, still complex over issues of textuality and closure’ (Eaglestone 2013, 23). We do not know precisely which novels Atkinson’s character has been reading but the description echoes the usual remarks about traditional nineteenth-​century novels artificially arranging closure. The excerpt from Atkinson’s novel also highlights the self-​consciousness the contemporary British novel evinces towards the question of endings, a self-​consciousness that has led novelists to look for alternatives and ways to circumvent traditional endings. One of the most telling examples of this self-​ conscious approach to narrative endings and challenge to tradition appears in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), which offers no less than three endings: first, a parodic epilogue-​ like ending appears in Chapter 44 before the narrative continues until the narrator, refusing to ‘fix[-​]‌the fight, letting that want he himself favours win … to show one’s readers what one thinks of the world around one’ (Fowles 390), decides to offer the reader a choice between two endings in the final chapters. But for Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), the novel with two endings does not reproduce the reality: If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-​ and-​ Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings’. (Barnes 1984, 89)

The question of endings and closure has become visibly problematical in contemporary British fiction.5 This is rendered through postmodern ambiguity that ‘exploits and yet simultaneously calls into question notions of closure, totalization, and universality that are part of those challenged grand narratives’ (Hutcheon 2002, 67). Atkinson’s endings are cases in point of this ambivalence. Her narratives self-​consciously de-​naturalise closure to make way for a poetics of unrest or instability in which comfort is eventually partly denied to the reader.

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The view commonly held seems to be that Atkinson’s novels convey a strong sense of closure because everything seems to fall into place at the end. For instance, Nick Rennison thus describes the first three novels: ‘Complicated narratives dart back and forth in time … until Atkinson ties together all the loose ends and illuminates the meaning of the hints, clues and allusions she has strewn through the text’ (Rennison 12). This same point is still being made several novels later, when her fiction is said be ‘enacting a plot that’s not only ingeniously constructed but, in the end, fully resolved’ (Dee). It is true that the ending in Atkinson’s novels seems to be the place where everything seemingly falls into place and makes sense but the sense of closure achieved may be contradicted at another level, notably through her manipulation of ‘retrospective patterning’. ‘Retrospective patterning’ as defined by Barbara Herrnstein Smith is the process by which we, as readers, adjust our perception of the text as we are reading: ‘As we read, structural principles, both formal and thematic, are gradually deployed and perceived; and as these principles makes themselves known, we are engaged in a steady process of readjustment and retrospective patterning’ (Herrnstein Smith 10) and it is only at the end that an overall pattern emerges (Herrnstein Smith 13). Torgovnick stresses the fact that this constant adjustment mimics the ones we make in our daily lives and explains why we value endings (Torgovnick 5). As we can see, retrospective patterning is an intuitive phenomenon that is actually forcefully encouraged when reading Atkinson’s novels in which we are constantly asked to revise our understanding of the text, and reinterpret what we have read. For instance, when the revelation is out (not necessarily the one that was expected), the clues to the secrets buried in the texts (such as Ruby’s sister’s death in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Isobel’s coma in Human Croquet) are only retrospectively recognised and understood. However, we shall see that they do not always assemble because the teleological view is a construction: as an angry and disappointed Viola acknowledges in A God in Ruins, ‘they weren’t on a journey and there was no final destination where everything would suddenly fall transcendentally into place, the mysteries revealed’ (GR 456). Because Atkinson’s narratives are often multiple and/​or fragmented through several focalisers, the conclusion comes in waves as it is divided into several

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moments of closure which may compete so that the process does not necessarily stabilise in a final pattern. If it does, it is revealed as a construction so that closure no longer is fully reassuring. Because of its narrative construction, Life After Life is another variation on Atkinson’s hybridisation of closure and instability. Described as ‘the ultimate novelist’s fantasy: producing a never-​ ending story in which any past, any future, even any present, is possible’ (Lyall), Life After Life is actually suffused with endings as the narrative repeatedly ends with Ursula’s death. Yet, the usual equation between death and closure is somewhat defeated since the narrative picks up again. If we consider the end in terms of Austen’s ‘tell-​tale compression of the pages’ (Austen 203), the last but one section does not close on Ursula’s death but sees her reunited with Teddy and Nancy, having survived the Second World War. The sense of closure achieved here is however challenged in at least two ways. Indeed, the cycle continues uninterrupted as the very last section yet again returns to the day of Ursula’s birth, and brings the previous section completely off focus as it centres on a character barely mentioned before: Mrs Haddock, the midwife, who cannot help Sylvie deliver her baby as she is snowed in but is replaced by the doctor (LL 21). Moreover, Life After Life forms a diptych (Bernard 81) with A God in Ruins, which expands on Teddy’s life. This expansion is eventually revealed as fictional, stating that Teddy’s plane was actually shot down: any reading of Life After Life as ‘a multiple-​draft narrative’ (Bordwell 184) culminating in a happy ending with the reunion of the protagonists is thus retrospectively cancelled. Examining Atkinson’s hybrid endings to her other novels, we shall first see that in a number of them, especially the early ones, Atkinson actually sets up what I would call ‘hyperclosure’: the signs of closure multiply towards the end but closure is so excessive that it implodes, revealing a form of instability (i.e. it definitely defies realism as the reader is forced to realise that this closure is imposed). Secondly, we shall examine Atkinson’s appropriation of the surprise ending in the novels that offer a twist at the end. Finally, looking at the Brodie sequence, Atkinson’s treatment of endings is put in relation to the genre she works with as she weaves poetic justice into it.

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‘Hyperclosure’ in the early novels As Sinead McDermott puts it, ‘Atkinson’s fictions can be said to move between a knowing irony and a less cynical desire for recovery and completion’ (McDermott 68), a tension that is visible in hyperclosure in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Emotionally Weird or in aporetic endings in Human Croquet. While some of the ends remain loose, the whole enterprise of closing is over-​ emphasised as a cover for underlying discontinuity: her endings display (postmodernist) contradiction. Atkinson’s fiction bristles with characters and stories, all visibly complete with ends and explanatory resolutions. For instance, the first footnote in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, brought about by a dress button and a picture that introduce Alice and her children, closes in a very orderly way with ‘The fate of the following buttons was as follows-​’ (BSM 38) and goes on to give a very brief and factual summary of the futures of Alice’s children. There is a sense of finality in the declarative sentences of the omniscient narrator that takes a shortcut that seems to deflect narrative curiosity as it somehow starts with the end, informing the reader of how the characters died shortly after having introduced them. Most of the ensuing footnotes return to these characters and are dedicated to exploring in detail what happened to each child and their own offspring if any. Moreover, the validity of these stories and conclusions is later challenged, notably when, despite the omniscient narration, they turn out to probably originate from Ruby (BSM 382). In Atkinson’s early novels, closure seems to be achieved through disclosure of events and answers. Indeed, the early novels revolve around a clear quest for identity, a mystery that is eventually solved: Ruby is traumatised by her twin sister’s death, Isobel’s fanciful tale is explained by the fact she was in a coma, Effie wonders about her ancestry of which she knows next to nothing. However, the disclosure in each of the novels comes well before the actual end of the novel, which makes the resolution fade or diminishes it, as it is, if not subsumed, at least put in perspective in the narrative instead of benefiting from the weight conveyed by the mere physical end of the text. Indeed, Atkinson multiplies ‘closural allusions’, which suggests the existence of various endings that are far from

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definitive and shows, as Julie Sanders noticed about Human Croquet, that ‘the achievement of closure is merely a temporal trick of illusion’ (Sanders 2001, 6). Hyperclosure thus destroys closure. When we get to the end of Atkinson’s early books, the sense of closure is often at first reinforced by what could read as an epilogue, in the last pages that tend to embrace all the characters and bear several signs of closure. This marked sense of closure is all the more noticeable as these novels read as fictional autobiographies, even Bildungromane, and no definite closure is expected from Bildungsromane (Jost 100) that merely leave the protagonist now apt to lead his adult life. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, the final chapter called ‘Redemption’, set in 1992, bears a title which evokes the end, or more exactly the period after the end. Indeed, if we read Behind the Scenes at the Museum as a Bildungsroman, the final chapter is situated well after Ruby’s growing-​ up years as the character is now forty. The main point of this section is Bunty’s death, as if Ruby’s progress in Behind the Scenes at the Museum actually came to an end with her mother’s death, the last trial to get over before becoming an adult.6 Reconciliation, a closural motif, has already been established through a prolepsis in the earlier chapter set in 1970 (BSM 360–​361). This presentation of events through a jumbled chronology is key for establishing closure while deflating its power or importance because it is deprived of end-​weight. By the last chapter, Bunty is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and Ruby is back in York to look for a home for her with her cousin Adrian’s help; Patricia comes back. The reader pieces together the fact that Nurse Tessa Blake, looking after Bunty in hospital, is the illegitimate daughter of her cousin Edmund and a young Doreen who later became Auntie Doreen, their father’s mistress who looked after them during a childhood holiday. If it ties threads together, this remarkable interconnection between the characters attests to Ruby’s need for a meaningful pattern as much as it reads as extra evidence of fictionality (as Ruby has taken a detached omniscient voice in the footnotes to invent/​flesh out stories of her ancestors whose history remains unsure). The final chapter features the closural motif of death as it covers Bunty’s stroke, wake, funeral party, followed by Ruby and Patricia going back to take a look at their former home ‘Above the Shop’,

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the museum gardens and other places they visited as children and, finally, the cemetery. Like the characters’ return to places mentioned earlier in the narrative, the funeral party is the occasion to bring up many characters met earlier, drawing a pattern of repetition and symmetry (see Wenzel 142) that clearly conveys the sense of an ending. Set about twenty years after the latest chapter in Ruby’s life, this part acts as an epilogue since it lists the characters and what happened to them in the space of time (BSM 376–​377). The closural tone is heightened by more repetition and symmetry as the last but one section returns to members of the family evoked in the footnotes (BSM 381). However, as George Eliot wrote when opening the final chapter of Middlemarch, ‘every limit is a beginning as well as an ending’ (Eliot [1871–​72] 1985, 890). The last pages of Behind the Scenes at the Museum are thus turned towards a future that intends to make amends for the past as Patricia leaves to look for the child she gave up for adoption7 and Ruby plans a cycle of poems on the family tree, ‘a form of restitution’, which for McDermot is a sign that the novel ‘concludes optimistically’ (McDermott 77): ‘There will be room for everyone –​Ada and Albert, Alice and Rachel ... Minnie Havis and Mrs Sievewright, for they all have a place amongst our branches and who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction? In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense’ (BSM 382). The first remark to be made here is that there is yet again a closural dimension to this return at the end of the last but one paragraph to the past sections of the novel that encompasses diverse characters belonging to different generations. The second remark is that closure acts at the level of the narrator’s discourse with the repetition of a sentence from the beginning of the novel, ‘who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction?’ (BSM 10). Atkinson multiplies closural signs and allusions as she appropriates the traditional epilogue. Indeed, whereas the latter continues to pretend the characters are real people with a life beyond the plot, the last sentence attributed to Ruby (but which sounds like Atkinson’s credo) –​‘words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense’ (BSM 382) –​which Fiona Tolan reads as the sign of a ‘newfound belief in the real’ (Tolan 2009, 287), seems to me to reaffirm the constructedness and fictionality of what we

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have read. It posits the need for making sense but acknowledges that this can only be achieved through narrative. Similarly, Atkinson’s second novel, Human Croquet displays hyperclosure as it multiplies moments of closure but in this case reality remains unstable and a conclusion unreachable, leading to an aporetic ending. Indeed, various stories or ‘versions of reality’ (HC 348) compete for the reader’s belief. For instance, as Isobel, the narrator, battles with the unexplained disappearance of her mother Eliza, several accounts of Eliza’s life and disappearance are offered (in some ‘past’ sections). Each version, a full, believable, complete and completed story in itself, is followed and challenged by a different one. The closure achieved in each rendering is challenged and revealed as artificial. Another example is provided by Isobel’s brother Charles and his red hair. When the child is born (premature) with red hair, this colour arouses suspicion amongst his father’s family: ‘ “Red hair!” Vinny said gleefully to Gordon. “I wonder where he got that from?” ’ (HC 96), suggesting illegitimacy. The suspicion that Charles is an illegitimate child is confirmed in a different version, when Eliza has sex with a red-​haired boy in an air-​ raid shelter before she meets Gordon (HC 334). These two versions are in fact authored by Isobel, who attempts to establish causality and coherence. Later on, when Gordon and his second wife, Debbie, have a baby, it is red-​haired too. ‘ “Fancy that,” Debbie says, “she’s got Charles’s hair. Someone in your family must have been red-​headed, I wonder who?” ’ (HC 354). This fits in with the colour of hair of the legendary Lady Fairfax as told by Isobel but contradicts the earlier stories that support Charles’s illegitimacy. In the end, there is no absolute certainty and closure: stories keep on competing with each other. Alternatively, the heroine is caught in time warps when she lives three very different versions of the same day that always ends in the same way. At complete odds with Ingersoll’s masculine paradigm in which everything is geared towards one major disclosure, Human Croquet displays an accumulation of successive moments of closure. At the end of her third Christmas Eve ending in her friend Malcolm Lovat’s death comes the explanation that rationalises everything that went before: ‘Slowly, slowly, everything begins to fall back into shape, like a kaleidoscope at rest, a jigsaw finished. ... The cosmic journey I took was the world of the comatose’ (HC 309).

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The awakening is a topos that announces the end (see Hamon 517), the concluding point when things fall into place for Isobel and the reader. Yet, there is no ‘tell-​tale compression of the pages’ (Austen 203), in Jane Austen’s words, to indicate that the end is near and to support this moment of closure as being the actual end to the text. Indeed, there are still eighty pages to read, no less than four chapters each set at a different moment in time, a poem and the rules of the game Human Croquet... The narrative thus embarks on another story told by a ‘Scheherazade’ who ‘knows everything’, who ‘must be the storyteller from the end of the world’ (HC 309): it returns to the past for a new version of Eliza’s life and death (HC 313–​341). Not only does this story challenge the sense of closure reached before but it deflects it also within the story. Indeed, as soon as the story has reached an ending, the sense of closure conveyed is challenged by a negation of the premises of the story (Eliza is not really a de Breville). This is followed by a chapter in the ‘present’ that picks up and ties the threads to explain Isobel’s strange world: an old tree fell on her and led to her coma. This part corrects, rectifies and puts to order the facts previously told: for instance, Hilary and Richard are still alive; Mr Rice, the lodger, has not left but Malcolm has; Mr Baxter is dead by his own hand. There is an atmosphere of closural reconciliation in this part: Isobel feels warmer towards both her stepmother Debbie and her aunt Vinny; Debbie, who thought she was sterile, gives birth to a baby girl. Even if this part is similar to the last explanatory chapter in a detective novel, it also retains ambiguity. The hotch-​potch narrative and time warps are rationally explained as being Isobel’s dreams and nightmares when she was in a coma, all the knots are tied –​superficially at least –​ and Atkinson gives her readers the satisfaction of completion. This chapter thus seems to separate what was imagined from the real. Yet, Isobel reopens the stories to imagine another narrative that also ends in Mr Baxter’s death, one that satisfies her sense of justice (HC 351). Even as all the knots have been tied and Isobel declares herself happy to be ‘free of the madness of the imagination’ (HC 355), she finds William Shakespeare lying on her bed (HC 356) in the role of the (grubby) prince (almost bald, with greasy hair and dirty fingernails) to kiss her and seemingly concludes her narrative with ‘Only the imagination can embrace the impossible –​the golden

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mountain, the fire-​breathing dragon, the happy ending’ (HC 356). This assertion of the supremacy of the imagination proleptically justifies the next chapter in which Lady Fairfax herself narrates her own sad story with a happy ending. This is just one more closural moment before the last part, entitled ‘future’ and divided into three parts. In the first epilogue-​like section, ‘Streets of Trees’, Atkinson presents a summary of her characters’ subsequent lives, ‘which some critics felt to be an unnecessarily concrete conclusion to a narrative that powerfully celebrates the power of unfixing’ (Clark 2003, 19).8 It could be argued on the contrary that this last part adds to the overall instability of the narrative both in contrast with the rest of the narrative and in itself. Indeed, this last part is deprived of the humorous and lively tone that runs through the rest of the novel. Deprived of their fairy-​tale associations,9 the characters seem hit by hard-​edged reality. As a contradiction to the set pattern of fairy stories, there is something completely random in the fates given to the characters, the cruelty of which is enhanced by the laconic style in which the information is given. For instance: ‘Six months pregnant, Carmen died, along with Bash, in a car crash in 1962’ (HC 371). Whole lives are covered in one sentence, as in ‘Hilary became a solicitor, married a doctor, had two children, divorced the doctor, married a journalist, had another child (born with a slight mental handicap), became a barrister, divorced the journalist, became human. Became my friend’ (HC 372). Yet, ambiguity rules. On the one hand, there is a movement towards the real and the no-​nonsensical. The paratactical structure and repetition of verb and object seem to enhance the factual aimless nature of the life depicted here, deprived of an ending that would give it a shape and a meaning. The character loses the formidable fantasised characteristics she had been endowed with to become ‘human’, as in ‘real’. On the other hand, elements still point towards revised fairy-​tale closure. Parataxis is a stylistic feature of the fairy tale and progress, a feature of the genre, is offered: here, as before, female rivalry is replaced by friendship. Moreover, the narrator comments on her summary with ‘To the gods, looking down on earth, our lives might seem this simple’ (HC 372), implying its inexactitude due to unnarrated complexity. This chapter also mentions the discovery of the skeleton of a woman in Boscrambe woods (HC 374), which settles Eliza’s fate but is challenged by the narrator’s denial

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of the fact, in a refusal to put an end to her story. This ambivalence in this section illustrates the narrator’s ambiguous attitude towards closure, striving towards it as it remains elusive. While the last pages at the end of Behind the Scenes at the Museum correspond to a return to the time of writing (see Hamon 513), the narrator of Human Croquet goes beyond this. The panoramic view typical of epilogues as they embrace several characters from a distance is exaggerated as the narrator of Human Croquet zooms out, reversing the movement operated in the part called ‘beginning’ that ‘offers a breakneck-​paced history of the world’ (Sanders 2001, 69). Closure is signified by the circular structure regularly used by Atkinson –​even in her collection of short stories Not the End of the World with its frame stories –​as words echo a sentence from the very first part of the novel with the addition of self-​conscious reference to the end, here doubled with the intertextual allusion to Hamlet’s last words that evoke both the character’s approaching death and the end of the play: In the beginning was the word, but at the end there is only silence. I am the storyteller at the end of time. I know how it ends. It ends like this. (HC 378)

With this last sentence, the end of the narration coincides with the end of narrating (cf. Hamon 515). In fact, the last sentence is falsely performative: the blank page representing emptiness and nothingness on which we read ‘it ends like this’ is followed by an extract from the poem ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, then by the rules of the game of Human Croquet that both contradict the title ‘future’ given to this part, before the word ‘End’ actually appears on the last page. The narrative frame to Human Croquet is marked by ambiguity combining linearity, since there is a move forward in time, with circularity, as we go back to the same narrative level, voice and style. Rather than setting off the main narrative, this frame makes the middle part appear insignificant and dwarfs the lives of the individuals through its thematic content that evokes the physical beginning and end of the world. The poem or ballad ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ invites retrospective patterning as its story echoes the ones told in Human Croquet: for instance, Thomas encounters the Queen of Elfland, dressed in green ‘on a milk-​white steed’, just like Lady Fairfax, and Thomas stays

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away with the Queen for seven years before going back, just like Gordon. The actual extract quoted at the end of the novel contains the title of one of the parts set in the past: ‘That bonny bonny road’ is supposed to be ‘the road to fair Elfland’ but in Human Croquet, it leads to Eliza’s story from her birth as a de Breville to being Mr Baxter’s victim. The narrative of Eliza’s story disconcertingly contradicts the happiness suggested by the title.10 Finally, closure is again emphasised when the novel eventually quotes the rules of Human Croquet, a game which has been alluded to several times in the course of the novel and which gives the novel its title. The end really goes back to the beginning, since the title is really what the reader starts out with. After a final illustration, the word ‘end’ written in capital letters formally appears on the very last page of the book. The main storyline of Emotionally Weird is also supposedly motivated by disclosure, that of Effie’s origins as announced early on. Atkinson plays with the reader’s expectations as Nora’s narrative, which is meant to give all the answers, is quite sparse so that the reader’s attention is engaged by Effie’s tale. The strong metafictional dimension of Emotionally Weird extends to the end of the narrative with self-​reflexive remarks that lay bare the device: ‘Is everything to be tidied up and explained in this part of the story?’ (EW 388) and one of the final sections opens with ‘It is all endings now’ (EW 397). Like the other two, Emotionally Weird multiplies the closural signs and allusions but the end of this novel is particularly marked by excess as the final part entitled ‘Last Words’ is a list of stereotypical closing sections of the various creative texts belonging to different genres that were mentioned in Effie’s narrative, before the motto about death and eternity is quoted, itself a text given a new lease of life through the character of Terri who uses it in the USA. At the end of the early novels, Atkinson accumulates accentuated signs of closure: circularity, the figure of the writer or storyteller, the return to the time of writing, to which she adds self-​consciousness. Rather than delaying the concluding moment, which is a normal enough feature of fiction,11 Atkinson multiplies moments of closure in a process of hyperclosure which negates closure at the same time as it adds another stage.

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Revisiting the ‘surprise ending’ Nearly all Atkinson’s novels are novels with a twist in the sense that they all rest on a final revelation that seems to upset the balance reached so far. Some in particular offer a ‘surprise ending’, which is the ‘notion of concealing from the reader until the end a fact that would have entirely changed the story’ (Gerlach 54), which partakes of what Ingersoll calls the masculine paradigm. The result is that what came before is undermined or, more interestingly, as John Gerlach says of Edith Wharton’s ‘Roman Fever’, that the ending ‘clarifies and reshapes our understanding of the entire story’ (Gerlach 58). Instead of being a moment of deceleration and quiet, the end of the novel with a twist exacerbates the process of retrospective patterning, which according to Eyal Segal looking at detective fiction means disclosure of the solution and a strong closure: ‘the strong closural effect of the twisted ending stems from the intensity of the retrospective patterning that it forces upon the reader’ (Segal 171). Segal however acknowledges that the surprise ending can have exactly the opposite effect if the gap revealed remains unfilled by a new solution. This section examines the uses and effect of the ‘surprise ending’ in Atkinson’s novels. First of all, the revelation may be a false lead as we have just seen in Behind the Scenes at the Museum and in Human Croquet whose narratives continue afterwards. Alternatively, the surprise may remain in the margins of the story as in One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?, in the sense that it takes place after the dénouement. In these novels the very last paragraph or section returns to an apparently minor character who reveals an element that completely bypassed the reader. In One Good Turn (2006), stories are all interwoven and all the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place to reach closure. The novel displays its circular pattern as it ends with the minor character it started with, three days earlier. This section appears at first like superfluous information: the fates of the other characters have been settled. Yet, the last few paragraphs explain what the character was doing in Edinburgh in the first place and throws a new light on Graham Hatter’s wife, the neglected housewife who had in fact hired a killer to kill her husband. One of the closing chapters in When Will There

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Be Good News? also features a minor character, Billy (Reggie’s brother), who challenges the closure previously reached as we learn that Jo Hunter bought a gun from him (WWGN 473), the one that Dexter kills himself with: she gave him the gun to kill himself. As they trigger retrospective patterning, these last-​minute disclosures also add to the complexity of the world depicted as they suggest that nobody is innocent and they create a sense of unease caused by the reminding of everything that goes unnoticed. Atkinson also somehow deflects the principle of the surprise ending in the same novel: the last but one chapter reveals that Jackson is the one who found the young Joanna in the field following the attack on her family but this unexpected piece of information, while it adds to the overall portrait of the detective, changes nothing in the plot and its resolution. Atkinson makes a different use of the surprise ending in A God in Ruins and Transcription in which the revelation is the centrepiece, yet differs from tradition. In A God in Ruins, Viola (note the near paranomasia with ‘vile’), Teddy’s daughter, is particularly unpleasant, ungrateful and selfish, be it with Teddy or with her children. An explanation is eventually given for Viola’s generally horrid behaviour with Teddy (she thinks he has killed her mother) but the disclosure fails insofar as her behaviour remains unjustified. When it comes, the revelation is completely unexpected. Indeed, at the end of A God in Ruins, the narrator announces that the protagonist’s life ended during the war and that the narrative of his life which constitutes the bulk of the novel is false. This is similar in theme and in form to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which the final section reveals that Robbie and Cecilia were never reunited as they both died during the war and the encounter with Briony previously narrated never took place. The situation differs however insofar as the narrator in Atonement is involved in the story: Briony is actually trying to repair through her narrative the wrongs she did as a child to her sister and her lover. In A God in Ruins, there is no attempt at disculpating oneself, no retrospective patterning, no readjusting to be done as the whole life is erased. Instead of bringing about closure, the surprise ending, i.e. the revelation of Teddy’s early death, completely deprives the reader of the sense of closure as he or she may feel cheated by the trick that has been played.

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Death, an instance of ‘natural termination’ (Gerlach 9), is a topos to signify the end. In A God in Ruins, the device is exaggerated as two deaths are superimposed when the narrative of Teddy’s death in the care home is interwoven with that of his actual last moments on board F-​Fox (GR 520–​524). Having revealed that the character died in the war, the narrative then picks up in a chapter set in 1947. As Ursula and Nancy mourn Teddy’s death, this chapter seems to have a closural value. Moreover, in the course of the conversation, Nancy fancies Teddy coming back as a skylark, which is unlike the mathematician that she is but sets up a circular pattern as it reminds the reader of the beginning of the novel (GR 13–​20). A God in Ruins in fact continues this circular pattern with a return to Teddy’s childhood. The novel ends with another fictional representation of Teddy in The Adventures of Augustus, which also returns to an early chapter as it offers a variation on Mrs Shawcross’s enthusiasm for the Kibbo Kift youth movement (GR 41) now embodied by Mrs Garrett, ‘a stalwart of Peace Pledge Union’ (GR 357). The very final words are uttered by the child Teddy as Ursula is reading The Adventures to him: the request ‘But please stop reading now’ (GR 538) has a metafictional value with a superficial confusion of ontological levels. As mentioned earlier, the traditional novel is classically divided between the ending and the epilogue, the second being a time of deceleration adding superfluous information. Atkinson challenges this as she multiplies endings and upsets chronology in Transcription. There is first the arrest of Mrs Scaife, a member of the Right Club (T 170) that is presented as the climax of Juliet’s adventures as a spy. This section ends on a cliff-​hanging sentence ‘ “Hum-​drum” was the very last word that could be used to describe the horror of what happened next’ (Tr 173). The next section in 1940 reveals Dolly’s murder and its circumstances, which appears like another dénouement as it explains some of Juliet’s remarks in 1950. This is followed by what bears the characteristics of an epilogue (a series of paragraphs that list what happened to the main characters after 1940) (Tr 300–​304) but this mock epilogue is set before the actual dénouement in 1950. In this novel too, Atkinson plays off moments of closure which distract the reader from the actual disclosure that is yet to come.

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Because of the deception practised on the reader thanks to the focalisation of the narrative through an unreliable narrator, Transcription culminates in a surprise ending that invites him/​her to reconsider everything he/​she has read until then. However, it is important to note that this dénouement takes place before the final pages of Transcription that, with the opening pages set in 1981, form a frame to the narratives. At that point, Atkinson seemingly takes up the traditional two-​time conclusion (when the dénouement is followed by deceleration in the last pages) to which she adds the closing topos of death, seemingly therefore reinforcing again the sense of closure. Yet, this surprise ending does not lead to closure: because of what happened in between and what we now know (Juliet was a spy summoned back to England), the initial situation, her being hit by a car, appears suspect rather than merely accidental. The question remains open, setting up instability.

Closure and poetic justice in the Brodie sequence The genre of detective fiction called forth in the Jackson Brodie sequence brings about a type of narrative which can be summed up, following Franco Moretti, as ‘nothing but a means to an end’ (Martin 166). ‘The crucial business of detective fiction (specifically) consists of the solving of crime and the restoration of normality and the rule of law’ (Messent 2012, 12). Closure is thus expected at the end of detective fiction, be it in classical or hard-​boiled variants,12 but part of the defamiliarisation process of the genre at work in the Brodie novels13 rests on Atkinson’s occasional metafictional remarks14 and her repeated challenges to the reader’s expectations regarding both crime solving and the restoration of the rule of law. While there is an overall consensus on the importance of closure in detective fiction, Theodore Martin states that closure or the appearance of it is not always satisfying, before pointing out that ‘various high modernist and postmodernist rewritings of detective fiction are marked by one central transformation: even the patina of closure disappears’ (Martin 167). Postmodernist detective fiction, practised for instance by Alain Robbe-​Grillet and Thomas Pynchon, is indeed marked by ‘irresolution’ (Martin 168). Atkinson, however, does not go down that road but plays with the notion of

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closure: our contention is that, coupled with the combination of chance, coincidence and realism examined earlier,15 Atkinson’s revision of closure in her crime fiction establishes an aesthetics of unrest and instability. Case Histories offers an example of hyperclosure that manages to multiply effects of closure while keeping certain threads loose. By the end of the novel, Jackson has solved the cases, has a new girlfriend, is wealthy thanks to an unexpected inheritance and is on his way to realising his dream of living in a house in the south of France but this is tampered with by the fragmented nature of the narrative and of closure. Case Histories, like all the Brodie novels, operates by Roland Barthes’s hermeneutic code, arousing questions in readers. However, these questions can be dismissed, or, because of Atkinson’s use of focalisers to narrate the story, answered at different levels. Typical of Atkinson’s ambiguity regarding closure is the encounter when, towards the end of Case Histories, Jackson on his flight to France recognises Nicola Spencer, the woman whose husband paid him to tail her at the beginning of the novel. There is thus a pattern of circularity but the question of Nicola’s infidelity is dropped without being answered: ‘she was unfinished business’ (CH 369). Indeed, not everything is subordinated to the plot and its resolution and there are a few (minor) loose threads. Similarly, there is no knowing what happens to Caroline/​Michelle as she leaves, with or without the reverend (CH 374). The reader may identify Lily-​Rose as Michelle’s daughter (as Jackson does), but nothing comes of it: Jackson does not bring them together, which dismisses even the perspective of reconciliation and conveys the sense of a fragmented world. Moreover, whatever overall sense of closure and stability is achieved at the end of a Brodie novel is challenged as the next novel in the sequence does not pick up on loose threads but undoes the closure achieved and restarts narrative desire (see Belsey 37). At the same time as she seems to give a tight closure to her novels, Atkinson goes beyond their endings by reintroducing secondary characters from previous texts. For instance, in Started Early, Took My Dog, the reader may recognise Howard Mason, Joanna Hunter’s father whose family is murdered in When Will There Be Good News?, as Kitty Gillepsie/​Winfield’s pervert lover (190–​195). This is not underlined as Kitty, the focaliser, seems to have no knowledge of

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the story. Teenager Reggie from When Will There Be Good News? reappears as a young police detective in Big Sky, along with Tatiana from One Good Turn. Does the reoccurrence of these minor or secondary characters participate of realism since it fleshes out the characters and marks the passing of time, or is the realist illusion broken by this unlikely coincidence? It is entirely up to the reader to notice (and enjoy) the reoccurrence and to decide of its value. A strong sense of closure is generally achieved in detective fiction because it is ‘single-​minded’, focusing on a single problem (Segal 168). Atkinson’s Brodie novels, as we know, are different and the multiplication of threads and characters may lead to a succession of moments of closure (or not). For instance, in Started Early, Took My Dog, the mystery to the 1970s murder of Carol Braithwaite is solved, which means that the culprits are punished and her children reunited. Next to this multi-​stranded thread, there is the story of actress Tilly/​Mathilda that ends in death while Tracy’s flight with the child she has bought remains up in the air, unconcluded. Closure in crime fiction does not necessarily mean that the investigation has been successful. For instance, in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the solution to the murders is given by the murderer himself but the police have failed. Similarly, in Susan Hill’s more recent Simon Serrailler novels, The Various Haunts of Men (2004) and The Pure in Heart (2005), the heroine is killed in the first novel and the young boy who has been kidnapped is not rescued in the second one; in Tana French’s In the Woods (2007), the mystery of the disappearance of the children remains unsolved. Overall, Atkinson’s Brodie novels do not offer the supposed reassurance of traditional detective fiction for various reasons: deviation in the character of the detective, in place, in style, in outcome etc. Closure may exist at the level of the reader but not within the diegesis, not for the characters (see Segal 167) or not for all of them. In a section of Big Sky entitled ‘just the facts M’am’, a godlike narrator goes around most of the characters and says what happened. Except that it is only ONE version of what happened and the reader has been given another one. There is no overall restoration of order in the sense that when Jackson finds the solution to a mystery, he often shares it only with the persons concerned. Even though the protagonist is motivated by notions like truth and justice, he works at an individual level. For instance, in Case Histories, he gives Theo

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(not the police) the name of his daughter’s killer, he finds out who killed Olivia but does not say so to the Land sisters. Finally, some questions remain unanswered for the characters but not for the reader, who is given answers or is able to piece them together as in a jigsaw puzzle to have the whole picture but this picture is not available to the characters, including Jackson whose knowledge remains limited. Internal focalisation enables the reader alternatively to experience the ignorance of a character or the knowledge of another. The use of focalisers sometimes enables the reader only to know what happens overall, for instance regarding the death of killer Andrew Dexter in When Will There Be Good News?. The Brodie sequence offers a (diegetic) world of instability under the pretence of the comfort of (nearly) all-​knowing fiction. Started Early, Took My Dog shows endings as temporary changeable points in a life when we are given a brief summary of what happened to a number of the characters involved in the 1975 drama, characters who have all reappeared in the narrative set in the early twenty-​first century. Started Early, Took My Dog bears the recognisable signs of closure of retribution, death and separation: former police officer Barry attempts to bring to justice his superiors before putting an end to the life of his daughter in a coma and killing himself; Jackson parts with Julia and Nathan. While the answers to the main questions are given at the end of Started Early, Took My Dog, this novel is a rare case when some questions remain completely unanswered, even for the reader, such as the dog’s origin and Courtney’s identity. In fact, this novel definitely ends on a triple open note as Brodie ponders about the birthmark the shape of Africa before hesitating over answering Louise’s phone call, while the last segment on the page is Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘hope’. The Guardian reviewer praises Case Histories as ‘satisfying’ ‘in its defiant refusal to let the dark side win the day merely for the sake of looking gritty and “real” ’ (O’Grady). Indeed, the Brodie sequence seems to be structured by a form of poetic justice. The notion was propounded by Thomas Rymer in The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d (1678) where he suggested characters should be rewarded according to their virtues: ‘something must stick by observing that constant order, that harmony and beauty of Providence, that necessary relation and chain, whereby the causes and the effects, the vertues and rewards, the vices and their

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punishments are proportion’d and link’d together’ (Rymer 75). Dictionaries of literary terms explain that poetic justice ensures the prevalence of morality –​retributed by material rewards –​and they clearly establish that the ending is the privileged locus for the distribution of just deserts: in M.H. Abrams’ words, poetic justice is ‘the distribution, at the end of a literary work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or vice of the various characters’ (Abrams 230), and for Chris Baldick, ‘the morally reassuring allocation of happy and unhappy fates to the virtuous and the vicious characters respectively, usually at the end of a narrative or dramatic work’ (Baldick 197). Atkinson’s world in the Brodie sequence is dark, ranging from incest in Case Histories to sex-​trafficking networks in Big Sky, and innocents like Marcus, Louise’s young Detective Constable in When Will There Be Good News?, do get killed (WWGN 440). Atkinson ‘is interested in the complexities of retribution and justice’ (Norquay 2012, 135) and her fictional world is inflected by a form of poetic justice that however occasionally departs from institutional morality. In Norquay’s words, Atkinson ‘explores the possibility that the most “moral” resolutions for the victimised are at odds with the force of law and order’ (Norquay 2012, 135). Indeed, in One Good Turn, Gloria Hatter, the neglected housewife, and Tatiana, the Russian dominatrix, escape unscathed with the money to start life afresh (just like Crystal at the end of Big Sky), while Terence and Graham (the villains) are killed and their killers are not caught or punished. In When Will There Be Good News?, despite having killed two men and brought about the death of a third one, Joanna Hunter, whose family was decimated when she was seven, resumes her life with her child. At the end of Started Early, Took My Dog, Tracy also escapes scot-​free under a new name with the child that she has bought. Ray Strickland is (wrongly) charged with the murder of Carol Braithwaite. As this list of endings shows, Atkinson gives a happy ending to her detective fiction in the form of retributive justice. While villains are punished through death or prison, their killers (who are often originally their victims) do not go to jail thanks to Jackson’s intercession as he burns down the crime scene for Joanna Hunter in When Will There Be Good News? and lies to the police for the girls in Big Sky. Criminals are punished but the good ones, even if

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they have committed a crime due to their horrible circumstances or experience, get away with it. Truth does matter to Jackson; however, it occasionally gets overridden by a personal sense of justice. Contrary to the classical detective story (Segal 168), the Brodie stories are more ‘ethical’ than ‘epistemological’. Atkinson’s use of hyperclosure, poetic justice and the surprise ending revisited all rest on literary convention but force discontinuity and ultimately disrupt the reading experience. There is a comedic dimension to the accumulation of closural signs but the main function of the hyperclosure to be found in most of her texts is to exaggerate the process of closure to the point that the traditional (masculine) understanding is dismissed in favour of a self-​conscious abundance that bears its own unrest. With their combination of closure and instability, endings in Atkinson’s fiction are a locus for her poetics of hybridity and their variety is representative of her multifaceted work. In keeping with her fiction, her endings offer a conflation of tradition and innovation and challenge expectations: while the closure achieved at the end of the stories collected in Not the End of The World is challenged as the stories turn out to be all linked, endings multiply in Life After Life when Ursula dies in various situations but they are negated as she lives another life in the next chapter. Atkinson’s feminist stand appears in her use of poetic justice in the Brodie sequence and her re-​vision of the ‘happily ever after’ in Human Croquet, which serve to inflect the destiny of her women characters to enable them to have independent lives. Her approaches to closure contribute to assert the representation of the past as re-​imaginings and acknowledge the uncertainty of what we know about the past. Atkinson’s novels thus manage the rare feast of conveying closure while questioning it or questioning its form, a sign of the writer’s idiosyncratic and wide-​ ranging talent that has earned her popular and critical acclaim.

Notes 1 ‘Once done reading a text, readers usually try to tie it up in some way’ (Rabinowitz 304). 2 See also Abbott (210). 3 See also Hamon (495) and Wenzel’s translation of Krings’s categories (140–​141).

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4 In Canadian writer Carol Shields’s words, ‘The old idea of the novel, the conclusion, the tying up and everything does not work very well with women’s lives. It’s what some feminists call the ejaculatory way of telling a story. Women’s lives are more of an up and down, up and down, around, in a circle’ (Carol Shields 2000) and ‘women’s writing has already begun to dismantle the rigidities of genre … and to replace that oppressive narrative arc we’ve lived with so long, the line of rising action –​tumescence, detumescence –​what some feminists call the ejaculatory mode of storytelling’ (Shields 2003, ‘Narrative Hunger’, 35). 5 See for instance Higdon on closure in Graham Swift’s Waterland or Richardson’s Chapter 7 in A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-​First Century. 6 The death of a parent as the false sign for the beginning of the character’s life is a recurrent element in Atkinson’s fiction. In Behind the Scenes at the Museum, ‘I had thought that when she dies it would be like having a weight removed and I would rise up and be free of her’ (BSM 375). In ‘Inner Balance’, ‘June’s waiting for her parents to die so she can grow up and stop behaving badly’ (n.p.), reappearing in Viola’s relationship to Teddy in A God in Ruins. 7 The question remains suspended: Ruby ironically tells us about the state of their great-​ grandmother’s clock when Patricia eventually gets back to Australia (BSM 381), not the outcome of her search for her child. 8 For instance: ‘The hallucinatory aspects of Human Croquet begin to overwhelm the sensibilities of the narrative toward the end, when Isobel’s omniscience ranges disturbingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) into the future’ (Weber, italics mine). 9 For fairy tales as intertexts, see Chapter 1 of this book. 10 Another short extract from the same poem gives its title to another chapter set in the past: ‘The plagues that are in hell/​Light on the fruit of this countrie’. The fruit is thus not to be touched, this road not to be taken. ‘The fruit of this countrie’ serves as heading for the chapter telling of Gordon’s encounter and life with Eliza, from happiness to misery under the disapproving eye of his mother and family. 11 As Catherine Belsey explains, in what she calls classic narratives, ‘The movement of narrative is thus both towards disclosure –​the end of the story –​and towards concealment –​prolonging itself by delaying the end of the story through a series of “reticences” as Barthes calls them, snares for the reader, partial answers to the questions raised, equivocations’ (Belsey 1996, 106).

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12 ‘Criminal and anti-​social activity occurs only (normally) for the immediate problem(s) to be resolved, with little or nothing having been done to alter the dominant social reality and whatever the faults there evident’ (Messent 23). 13 See Chapter 3. 14 For instance, ‘Everywhere you looked there was unfinished business and unanswered questions’ (WWGN 476); in Big Sky, the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle to refer to mystery-​solving is used by Reggie, now a young detective: ‘We’ll find all the pieces. … They’ll be under a carpet or down the back of a sofa. But we’ll finish it’ (BS 71). 15 See Chapter 3.

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Bibliography

Selected works of Kate Atkinson ‘Affairs of the Heart.’ Crimespotting: Edinburgh Crime Collection. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009. A God in Ruins. 2015. London: Doubleday, 2016. Abandonment. Edinburgh: Traverse Theatre/​London: Nick Hern Books, 2000. Author’s notes on Life After Life. www.katea​tkin​son.co.uk/​dnld/​resour​ces/​ Life​Afte​rLif​eNot​es_​8​48fc​161a​7df.pdf. Accessed 21 May 2020. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. 1995. London: Black Swan, 1996. Big Sky. London: Doubleday, 2019. Case Histories. 2004. London: Doubleday, 2006. Emotionally Weird. 2000. London: Black Swan, 2001. Festive Spirits: Three Short Stories. Transworld Publishers, 2019. Foreword. The Watsons, by Jane Austen. London: Hesperus, 2007. Foreword. William the Good, by Richmal Crompton. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 2016. Human Croquet. 1997. London: Black Swan, 1998. ‘Inner Balance.’ 1998. The Barcelona Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction 32 (September–​October 2002). Introduction. Pricksongs and Descants, by Robert Coover. London: Penguin, 2011. Introduction. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. London: White’s, 2010. Life After Life. London: Doubleday, 2013. Not the End of the World. London: Doubleday, 2002. One Good Turn. 2006. London: Doubleday, 2007. Started Early, Took My Dog. 2010. London: Doubleday, 2011. Transcription. London: Doubleday, 2018. When Will There Be Good News? 2008. London: Doubleday, 2009.

Interviews and reviews ‘Kate Atkinson, Carrie the Musical, Arab Fiction, Venice Biennale.’ Front Row 6 May 2015.

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‘Kate Atkinson: Life After Life.’ BBC World Book Club 6 October 2018. ‘Open Book: Kate Atkinson, classic and modern Western novels’ BBC 15 March 2013. Allardice, Lisa. ‘Kate Atkinson: “I Live to Entertain, I Don’t Live to Teach or to Preach or to Be Political.” ’ Interview. Guardian 15 June 2019. Atkinson, Kate. ‘Behind the Scenes...’ The Observer 13 July 2000. Atkinson, Kate. ‘Kate Atkinson Tells Why Her Latest Jackson Brodie Novel Might Just Be Her Last –​for a While, at Least.’ Interview. The Scotsman 17 August 2010. Atkinson, Kate. Waterstones Interview. Big Sky. London: Doubleday, 2019, 361–​367. Billington, Michael. ‘Review: Abandonment.’ The Guardian 7 July 2000. Brown, Mark. ‘Kate Atkinson Calls Authors Reviewing Their Peers a “Callous Art”.’ The Guardian 7 October 2018. Bunce, Kim. ‘Emotionally Weird? Moi?’ Interview with Kate Atkinson. The Observer 12 March 2000. Cain, Matt. ‘It’s a Matter of Life and Death, with Dizzying Possibilities.’ Rev. of A God in Ruins. The Independent 2 May 2015. Carey, Jacqueline. ‘Women in Trouble.’ Rev. of Case Histories. The New York Times 5 December 2004, section 7, p. 65. Clark, Alex. ‘The Fragility of Goodness.’ The Guardian 10 March 2001. Clark, Alex. ‘Life After Life by Kate Atkinson –​review.’ The Guardian 6 March 2013. Clark, Alex. ‘Kate Atkinson’s Transcription is a Nimble and Convincing Tale of Espionage.’ New Statesman 5 September 2018. Corrigan, Maureen. ‘Kate Atkinson’s New Spy Novel Toys with Our Expectations’. Review of Transcription. The Washington Post 26 September 2018. Craig, Amanda. ‘Time and Again.’ New Statesman 15–​21 March 2013. Dee, Jonathan, ‘Kate Atkinson’s Spy Novel Makes the Genre New.’ The New Yorker 17 September 2018. Gardam, Jane. ‘The Silences of Childhood.’ Rev. of Human Croquet. Spectator 8 March 1997. Hadley, Tessa. ‘Lost Daughters.’ Rev. of Case Histories. London Review of Books 23 September 2004, 27. Hore, Rachel. ‘Review: Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson.’ The Independent 9 March 2013. Hughes, Sarah. ‘Kate Atkinson on bringing back Jackson Brodie.’ I 29 June 2019. Jordan, Justine. ‘Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson.’ Rev. of Started Early, Took My Dog. The Guardian 14 August 2010. Kaufmann, Joanne. ‘The Mysteries of Kate Atkinson.’ Wall Street Journal 20 July 2019. Kemp, Douglas. Review of Life After Life. HNR Issue 64 (May 2013), 487. Lakeland, Paul. ‘Born-​again Fiction.’ Rev of Life After Life. Commonweal 141.6 (2014), 24–​25. Lennon, J. Robert. ‘Little Grey Cells.’ Rev. of Big Sky. London Review of Books 5 March 2020.

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Lyall, Sarah. ‘Kate Atkinson’s “Groundhog Day” Fiction.’ Rev. of Life After Life. NY Times 22 March 2013. Mantel, Hilary. ‘Shop!’ Rev. of Behind the Scenes. London Review of Books 4 April 1996, 23–​24. Mars-​Jones, Adam. ‘Darkness and So and So On.’ Rev. of Life After Life. London Review of Books 6 June 2013. Merritt, Stéphanie. ‘A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson Review –​Her Finest Work.’ The Guardian 10 May 2015. Merritt, Stéphanie. ‘Secrets and Lies in the Line of Duty.’ Rev. of Transcription. The Guardian 4 September 2018. Merritt, Stéphanie. ‘Jackson Brodie’s back.’ Rev. of Big Sky. The Guardian 11 June 2019. Messent, Peter. The Crime Fiction Handbook. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2012. Norris, Pamela. ‘Death on Repeat: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.’ The Literary Review (March 2013), 56–​57. Norris, Pamela. ‘Double Life after Double Life: Transcription by Kate Atkinson.’ The Literary Review (September 2018). O’Donoghue, Heather. ‘Brodie Notes.’ Rev. of Case Histories. The Times Literary Supplement 10 September 2004, 20. O’Grady, Carrie. ‘Finding Closure.’ Rev. of Case Histories. The Guardian 2 October 2004. Oakes, Philip. Rev. Of Case Histories. Literary Review (September 2004), 60. Patrick, Bethane. ‘The Many Hats of Kate Atkinson.’ Time 1 October 2018, 50. Rodd, Candice. ‘Family Disaster Zones.’ Rev. of Human Croquet. The Times Literary Supplement 3 July 1997. Scurr, Ruth. ‘Character Assassination?’ Rev. of Life After Life. The Times Literary Supplement (March 2013). Sikka, Madhulika. Interview with Kate Atkinson. Politics and Prose Bookstore. 26 September 2018. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​UKGT​ KTwu​Ekw. Accessed 21 June 2020. Smith, Ali in ‘Best Books of 2018: Hilary Mantel, Yuval Noah Harari and More Pick their Favourites.’ Guardian 3 December 2018. Steffens, Daneet. ‘Kate Atkinson Loves a Good Secret. Lies, Spies, and Revelations in Atkinson’s World of Espionage.’ CrimeReads 27 September 2018. https://​cri​mere​ads.com/​kate-​atkin​son-​loves-​a-​good-​ sec​ret/​. Accessed 21 June 2020. The Guardian Book Club (on Behind the Scenes at the Museum) with John Mullan. 20 January 2009. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​audio/​2008/​ oct/​30/​1. Accessed 21 June 2020. The Guardian Books Podcast. ‘Kate Atkinson on Her New Novel, Transcription.’ www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​audio/​2018/​sep/​11/​kate-​ atkin​son-​on-​her-​new-​novel-​transc​ript​ion-​books-​podc​ast. Accessed 13 September 2018. The Penguin Podcast. ‘Kate Atkinson’ with Robert E. Grant. 14 October 2015. www.peng​uin.co.uk/​artic​les/​2015/​kate-​atkin​son.html. Accessed 20 July 2020.

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Tolan, Fiona. ‘Kate Atkinson.’ Writers Talk. Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists. Ed. Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2008, 1–​17. Urquhart, James. ‘Murder Most Fun.’ Rev. of One Good Turn. The Financial Times 28 July 2006. Webb, Kate. ‘Kate Atkinson’s New Novel Transcription Asks Us How Carefully We Are Paying Attention.’ The Spectator 22 September 2018. Weber, Katharine. ‘The Best of All Parallel Worlds?’ Rev. of Human Croquet. The New York Times 6 July 1997. Wilson, Sue. ‘Something Rich and Strange.’ Rev. of Abandonment. The Independent 8 August 2000.

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O’Cinneide, Muireann. ‘Kate Atkinson.’ Encyclopedia of the British Short Story. Ed. Andrew Maunder. Facts on File. 2nd ed. New York: Infobase Learning, 2013, 21–​22. Parker, Emma. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. London: Continuum, 2002. Parker, Emma. ‘Re-​ envisioning Feminist Fiction.’ British Fiction Since 1945. Ed. David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 79–​94. Pigeon, Renée. ‘ “The Arcadian Past” in Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog.’ Clues 36.2 (2018), 60–​70. Rennison, Nick. ‘Kate Atkinson.’ Contemporary British Novelists. London: Routledge, 2005, 12–​14. Sanders, Julie. ‘Kate Atkinson in the House of Arden.’ Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-​Century Women Novelists and Appropriation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, 67–​83. Smith, Kevin Paul. ‘Chapter Architextual/​ Chronotopic Intertextuality and Magic Realism in Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet.’ The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 57–​86. Smith, Jules. ‘Kate Atkinson.’ Contemporary Writers, 2002. Stewart, Victoria. ‘The Second World War in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Revisiting the Home Front.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing 9.3 (2015), 416–​432. Tolan, Fiona. ‘“Everyone Has Left Something Here”: The Storyteller-​ Historian in Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50 (2009), 275–​292. Trivellini, Samanta. ‘Myths of Violence and Female Storytelling in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet.’ Annali Di Ca’ Foscari: Serie Occidentale 50 (2016), 341–​359. Voyles, Katherine. ‘The Long Short Story: Detective Fiction in the Age of Netflix.’ Clues: A Journal of Detection 36.2 (2018), 91–​101. Walder, Dennis. ‘“There Is No First Reading”: (Re-​)Reading Nineteenth Century Realist Novels and Their Critics.’ Synthesis 3 (2011), 55–​68. Young, Emma. Contemporary Feminism and Women’s Short Stories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

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Index

Literary works can be found under authors’ names. ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Andersen, Hans Christian 62 anti-​realist 118, 177 Aristotle 149, 171 Atkinson, Kate A God in Ruins 1, 2, 4, 23, 24, 28, 29, 142–​147, 160–​171, 178, 180n.21, 180n.22, 181n.28, 187, 188, 198–​199, 206n.6 Abandonment 2, 28, 76–​85 Behind the Scenes at the Museum 1–​27 passim, 30n.6, 34–​42, 42–​54, 56, 67, 72, 74n.4, 76, 78, 81, 83, 121, 140, 170, 178n.4, 179n.8, 181n.30, 187, 189–​192, 195, 197, 206n.6 Big Sky 2, 12, 17, 18, 23, 27, 31n.11, 98, 105–​134, 202, 204, 207n.14 Case Histories 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 21, 25, 26, 28, 98–​133 passim, 136n.10, 201, 202, 203, 204 Emotionally Weird 2, 14, 16, 23, 27, 28, 34–​35, 37, 39, 42, 67–​72, 73n.1, 97n.13, 98, 128, 189, 196

Human Croquet 2, 3, 6, 14, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27–​28, 34–​42, 54–​67, 70, 72, 73n.1, 74n.8, 77, 97n.13, 121, 128, 140, 155, 159, 187, 189, 190, 192–​196, 197, 205, 206n.8 Life After Life 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 24, 26, 28, 29, 33n.20, 46, 138–​160 passim, 161–​ 163, 165, 171, 173, 178, 178n.3, 179n.6, 179n.14, 181n.25, 185, 188, 205 Not the End of the World 2, 14, 23, 19, 28, 76, 86–​96, 195, 205 One Good Turn 2, 4, 23, 25, 98, 104–​134 passim, 136n.8, 136n.10, 202, 204 Started Early, Took My Dog 2, 12, 19, 21, 23, 26, 27, 98, 104–​134 passim, 136n.8, 137n.15, 201, 202, 203, 204 Transcription 2, 4, 6, 13, 18, 24, 29, 46, 142, 143, 144, 146–​148, 159, 171–​178, 181n.35, 198, 199–​200

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922

Index When Will There Be Good News? 2, 25–​26, 104–​120 passim, 122–​123, 126, 130–​134, 136n.10, 197–​198, 201–​204 Atwood, Margaret 61, 82, 179 Austen, Jane 3, 17, 65, 188, 193 Auster, Paul 100, 129–​130, 180n.14 autobiography 39, 42–​44, 47, 49, 50–​53, 72, 73, 190 awards 1, 2, 4, 10, 97n.7, 138, 179 see also prizes Ayckbourn, Alan 180n.15 Bahktin, Mikail 6 Baker, Jo Longbourn 82, 147 Balzac, Honoré de 116, 129, 137n.17 Banville, John 100, 101, 108, 136n.14 Barker, Pat 3, 142, 147 Barnes, Julian 9, 31, 100, 101, 140, 141, 185, 186 Barth, John 5, 12, 30n.8, 54, 59 Barthes, Roland 54, 59, 201, 206n.11 Berlin 25, 146, 156, 160, 161 Bildungsroman 35–​43, 47, 55, 72, 190 Bletchley 24, 145, 179n.7 Blitz 12, 149, 156–​158, 160, 161, 163 Bordwell, David 151–​153, 158 see also multiple-​draft narrative Boxall, Peter 8, 22, 138, 142, 143 brackets 15, 18, 69, 175 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 57 Brooks, Peter 59, 100, 182, 184 Byatt, Antonia Susan 3, 15, 31, 67, 74n.7, 75n.14, 96n.3, 97n.11, 172, 181n.33, 185 Possession 78, 81, 85, 100, 140, 148, 184

229

Cambridge 98, 103, 108, 120, 136n.10 Cambridge spies 173 Carey, Peter True History of the Kelly Gang 138 Carroll, Lewis 11, 45, 69 Carter, Angela 11, 24, 55, 61 chance 28, 101, 102, 128–​134, 150, 151, 201 Chandler, Raymond 70, 99, 102, 104, 106, 124 character recurrence 88, 90, 91, 94, 105, 114, 115, 116 secondary 45, 172, 201–​202 child abuse 17, 27, 117 childhood 12, 35, 40, 41, 51, 58, 88, 122 see also child abuse Christie, Agatha 99, 103, 202 chronology 9, 13, 15, 22, 41, 148, 150, 153, 163, 179n.12, 180n.17, 190, 199 Churchill, Winston 11, 158, 159, 173, 177 class 46, 82, 84, 86, 126, 146, 147, 171–​174 passim closure 29, 64–​67, 91, 123, 182–​205 see also end; ending; hyperclosure coincidence 11, 28, 29, 72, 102, 128–​134 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 93, 115, 169 comedy 12, 17, 19, 20, 47, 62, 72, 77, 130, 132 companion novel 2, 29, 160, 162, 181n.23 Conan Doyle, Arthur 125 contemporary fiction 7, 10, 11, 16, 20, 39, 65, 73, 81, 125, 138–​148, 165, 166, 178, 184, 185, 186

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230

Index

Coover, Robert 3, 11, 61, 67, 75n.14, 153 crime fiction 28, 86, 98–​137, 201, 202 Crompton, Richmal 3 Davis, Lydia 87 defamiliarisation 7, 28, 99, 200 dénouement 174, 197, 199, 200 detective fiction 6, 21, 25, 29, 31n.10, 71, 98–​137 passim, 172, 193, 197–​198, 200–​205 Dexter, Colin 103, 113 Dickens, Charles 12, 17, 32n.15, 32n.16, 32n.17, 35, 68, 117, 127, 132, 170 disclosure 153, 168, 169, 189, 192, 196, 197, 198, 199, 206n.11 discontinuity 13, 29, 144, 149, 164, 189 domestic fiction 25–​26 Donoghue, Emma 53, 74n.7 Du Maurier, Daphné Rebecca 11, 32n.14, 127 Eliot, George 10, 12, 17, 32n.13, 167, 170 Middlemarch 70, 191 Eliot, T.S. 6, 11 end 169 see also ending ending 29, 37, 71, 91, 94, 97, 175, 182–​205 see also closure; happy ending; surprise ending; retrospective patterning epilogue 92, 113, 184, 186, 191, 194, 195, 199 ‘exhaustive storytelling’ 40 expansion 87, 88, 160, 161, 168, 183, 188 expansiveness 2, 12, 28, 30, 78, 86–​96, 101 excess 7, 11, 25, 42, 67, 72, 101, 166, 188, 196

fairy tales 11, 18, 24, 28, 38, 39, 42, 54–​67, 72, 74n.7, 75n.11, 194 family 19, 26, 34, 38, 44, 58, 68, 76, 106, 114, 120, 122, 159, 161, 164, 170, 192 fantasy 6, 31n.10, 38, 42, 43, 44, 59, 67, 71, 72, 142, 149, 155 feminism 3, 22–​27, 35–​37, 42, 43, 46, 54–​63, 72, 78, 95, 117, 147, 156, 176, 205, 206n.4 first-​person narration 38–​39, 42, 50, 51, 67, 109 First World War see war focaliser see focalisation focalisation 15, 18, 88, 109–​112, 114, 117, 122, 127, 132, 133, 146, 148, 156, 159, 172–​173, 165, 175, 180n.21, 181n.32, 187, 200, 201, 203 forgetting 50, 162, 164, 181n.24 forking-​path narrative 14, 28, 148–​160, 179n.14 Forster, E.M. 17, 145, 183 Howard End 145, 146 Fowles, John French Lieutenant’s Woman, The 78, 148, 168, 185, 186 fragmentation 7, 13–​16, 29, 41, 43, 73n.2, 88, 96, 112, 148, 154–​155, 162, 164, 165, 180n.16, 185 Frame, Janet 87 free indirect style 15, 89, 110, 155, 157, 175 Freud, Sigmund 18, 20, 40, 59, 63 Gardam, Jane 161 gender 60, 82, 145, 159, 178, 184 roles 27, 55, 60, 63, 64 Genette, Gérard 59, 69, 97n.10, 167, 175, 176 genre fiction 3, 4, 6, 101, 102, 125 ghost 28, 40, 76–​80, 82, 85, 86, 145

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132

Index Grimm Brothers 24, 55, 58, 60, 74n.7, 75n.11 Grotesque 38, 42, 47 Haddon, Mark The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time 53, 101 happy ending 56, 58–​59, 63–​67, 71, 75n.11, 169 see also ending Harris, Jane Observations, The 82, 147 haunting 52, 55, 73n.2, 77–​79 Healey, Emma Elizabeth is Missing 19, 53, 101 Hill, Susan 101, 108, 113, 202 historical novel 6, 10, 11, 14, 21–​22, 24, 28, 31n.10, 32n.19, 46, 66, 118, 138–​179 historiographic metafiction 22, 45, 50, 100, 139–​140, 143, 147 home 25–​26, 47, 77, 78, 79, 80, 116, 119–​122, 128, 173 houses see home humour 7, 11, 12, 16–​21, 27, 30, 41, 42, 48, 56, 58, 62–​63, 76, 115, 126, 128, 145, 173 Hutcheon, Linda 9, 29, 30n.8, 38, 59, 60, 147, 183, 186 see also historiographic metafiction hybridity 1–​33, 35, 41, 72, 76, 89, 96, 98, 135, 143, 182, 205 hyperclosure 29, 188, 189–​196, 201, 205 hypertext fiction 169, 179n.14 ‘hysterical realism’ 13, 166 identity, quest for 9, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 49, 54, 57, 63, 67, 189 illusion 38, 68, 108, 116, 125, 168, 185, 190, 202 immersion 41, 79, 80, 85, 86, 143, 148, 157, 165

231

instability 29, 38, 50, 51, 52, 186, 188, 194, 200, 201, 203, 205 intertextuality 6, 10, 11, 18, 28, 34, 38, 39, 45, 55, 56, 57, 70, 73, 195 in Brodie sequence 101, 102, 122, 124, 126, 127 in historical novels 143, 149, 158, 177 in Not the End of the World 89, 95, 96, 97n.13 irony 51, 55, 92, 173, 189 Ishiguro, Kazuo 31, 100, 174 James, Henry 70, 86, 129, 175, 177 Jameson, Fredric 141–​142 Joyce, James 90 ‘lieux de mémoire’ 49, 164 location 70, 86, 170 Lodge, David 12, 17, 30n.8, 38, 39, 62, 99, 129–​130, 184 Changing Places 185 Lynn, Vera 158 magical realism 56, 74n.8 Mantel, Hilary 4, 12, 16, 31n.10, 32n.16, 48, 141, 147 Wolf Hall 138, 139, 148 marriage 3, 36, 37, 49, 54, 66, 84, 103, 108, 117–​118 materiality 8, 9, 11, 70, 156, 173 McEwan, Ian 179n.10 Atonement 138, 139, 140, 146, 147, 169 Sweet Tooth 169, 181n.32 memory 7, 21, 30, 40, 41, 42–​54 passim, 55, 79, 81, 95, 110, 143–​144, 157, 160–​164, 181n.24, 181n.25 memories 29, 41, 50, 73n.2, 113, 118, 157, 160, 162 metafiction 11, 28, 69, 102, 122–​135 see also historiographic metafiction

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232

Index

metamodernism 8, 20 metanarrative 9, 14, 45, 69, 72, 99 mise en abyme 45, 82, 91, 92, 96, 124, 125 modernism 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, 21, 30, 99, 117, 133, 149, 155, 180n.17, 183, 200 mother 26, 40, 41, 47–​48, 55, 57, 58–​59, 60–​61, 64, 66, 67, 71, 74n.10, 76, 85, 95, 107, 109, 121–​122, 136n.12, 159, 160, 190, 192, 198 motherhood 48, 117–​118, 122 multiple-​draft narratives 152, 153, 188 Munro, Alice 87, 90, 97n.11 narrative curiosity 113, 189 narrator deficient 53 expansive 166 incompetent 50, 53 omniscient 1, 44, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 112, 165–​167, 189, 190 unreliable 52–​53, 55, 74n.9, 175, 200 neo-​Victorian 22, 28, 76–​86, 135, 141, 178n.1 non-​linearity 7, 9, 14–​15, 31n.12, 113, 148, 149, 152–​153, 165, 179n.14 Nora, Pierre 44, 49, 50, 53, 164 see also ‘lieux de mémoire’ nostalgia 80, 118–​121, 144, 145, 179n.6 novel sequence 114–​116 objects 46, 49–​50, 164, 169 see also materiality oblivion 50, 83, 85, 160–​165, 178 see also forgetting omniscience 51, 52, 110, 165–​167 Ovid Metamorphoses 92, 95, 96, 97n.13

paralipsis 176 parody 125, 180n.18 Perrault, Charles 24, 55, 57, 58, 61 photography 81–​83 see also pictures pictures 44–​45, 81–​83, 85, 141, 163, 189 places 108, 156, 176 see also location; setting poetic justice 29, 188, 200–​205 post-​postmodernism 8, 20, 22 postmemory 143 prizes 4, 31, 86, 138, 139 see also awards Priestley, J.B. An Inspector Calls 126 prolepses 15, 167, 190 Pullman, Philip 181n.23 ‘pyrotechnic storytelling’ 167 re-​vision 7, 23–​25, 27, 42, 55, 56, 59–​61, 65–​67, 82, 205 real-​life figures 147, 176 see also Cambridge spies realism 2, 8, 9–​13, 24, 25, 27, 38, 42, 47, 70, 71, 76, 77, 99, 102, 108–​118, 124, 130, 135, 142–​144, 148, 149, 150, 155–​156, 170, 176–​177, 179n.11, 183, 185, 188, 201, 202 see also ‘hysterical realism’; magical realism reception 2, 30n.6, 67, 87, 98, 125, 136n.13 repetition 49, 52, 60, 71, 72, 73n.2, 83–​84, 91, 132, 144, 149, 154, 157, 158, 162, 191, 194 Resnais, Alain 180n.15 retrospective patterning 187, 195, 197, 198 rewriting 7, 19, 22, 24, 55, 56, 61, 63, 64, 66, 74n.7, 94, 143, 200

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332

Index Rich, Adrienne see re-​vision Ricœur, Paul 164, 181n.24

233

third-​person narration 12, 50, 57, 110, 133, 155, 173, 176 Todorov, Tzvetan 100, 106, 112, 122, 136 trauma 14, 17, 20, 26, 40–​41, 52–​54, 58, 66, 72, 73, 103, 111, 114, 119, 122, 131, 189 Turton, Stuart Seven Deaths of Elizabeth Hardcastle, The 179n.14

Second World War see war secrecy 29, 171–​178 self-​discovery 35–​42, 68, 72 sequel 8, 49, 90, 114–​115, 160–​162 setting 13, 25, 68, 77, 90, 97n.9, 114, 130, 136n.10, 155 Shakespeare, William 64, 65, 75n.13, 193 Shields, Carol 3, 30n.5, 181n.23, 206n.4 Stone Diaries, The 43, 50 Shields, David 11, 13, 185 Shklovsky, Viktor 7, 59, 69, 99, 135n.1 short story cycle 14, 88–​96 spy fiction 6, 24, 29, 31n.10, 171, 172, 173, 177, 199 stepmother 56, 57, 60–​61, 193 Stoppard, Tom Arcadia 78, 81 storytelling 12, 37, 39, 42, 59, 68, 70, 73, 85, 93, 185, 206n.4 see also ‘exhaustive storytelling’; ‘pyrotechnic storytelling’ stream of consciousness 155, 157 stream-​of-​consciousness technique 109–​111, 127, 156 Strout, Elizabeth 90 suffragettes 146, 179n.9 surprise 113, 134, 168–​169 surprise ending 29, 93, 175, 188, 197–​200, 205 Swift, Graham 9, 142 Ever After 81, 140 Light of Day, The 100 Waterland 140, 206n.5

war 8, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 19, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49, 54, 119–​120, 138–​178, 188, 198, 199 Waters, Sarah 79, 142, 147, 150 Waugh, Patricia 11 White, Hayden 139, 163 willing suspension of disbelief 38, 70, 115, 169 Winterson, Jeannette 11, 42, 47, 74n.7 women 3, 19, 23–​27, 33n.20, 35, 46, 47, 48, 55, 63, 66–​67, 74n.4, 82, 83, 85, 86, 95, 117, 118, 122, 144–​149 passim, 156, 159, 160, 176, 178, 197n.7, 179n.9, 205, 206n.4 women writers 11, 38, 42, 55, 99 Woolf, Virginia 12, 15, 37, 145, 155–​156 Mrs Dalloway 127 Orlando 149, 155 Wyler, William Mrs Miniver 119–​120

tense 35, 184 past 40 present 1, 51, 53, 148 temporality see time

Yeats, W.B. 119 York 1, 10, 38, 39, 45, 51, 78, 170, 190 Yorkshire 104, 108, 121, 163, 165

Van Dine, S.S. 102, 124, 126, 128, 137n.15 verisimilitude 8, 11, 72, 129–​130, 134, 147

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