Kate Atkinson’s virtuoso new novel is a real contender for the Women’s Prize, argues Helen Brown.
The Telegraph - 22 Apr 2013
Recent studies suggest that between 30 and 90 per cent of people experience
déjà vu: the weird jolt to the psychological space-time continuum that makes us
feel we’ve already lived through the present moment. But for the heroine of Kate
Atkinson’s triumphant ninth novel, nominated for the Women’s Prize this week,
it’s more than just a shiver down the back – it’s a reality.
Ursula Todd is born on February 11 1910. The doctor and midwife are stuck in
the snow and the umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck. We feel the panic of
“Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign
atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the
tiny curled pearl of an ear.” Darkness falls. The page is turned. The birth
replayed. This time Dr Fellowes arrives in time to prevent tragedy – although
he’s brisk about his miracle, being the kind of man whose “patients,
particularly their exits and entrances, seemed designed to annoy him”.
There follows a storybook childhood near Beaconsfield with tennis on the lawn
and Mrs Glover’s beef collops and plum pudding for tea. Ursula is the child of
Sylvie and Hugh Todd whose Lutyens-esque home (surrounded by a Merchant Ivory
checklist of meadow, copse and bluebell wood with a stream running through it)
is called “Fox Corner”. Ever the literary trickster, Atkinson has picked a name
that echoes both A A Milne’s Pooh Corner and E M Forster’s Windy Corner as the
hub of a book that plays a virtuoso game with the nature of fiction. For in this
fox’s corner, the past is neither a foreign country nor a safe haven in which
the rawness of human pain and frailty are bandaged by the charms of a vintage
wardrobe department.
This fox corner is a place where the flesh of the human inhabitants is as
vulnerable as that of the chickens destined for Mrs Glover’s pot. The sweet peas
rambling through the borders are tended by a man who has lost half his face in
the Great War. He wears a tin mask with one eye painted on, permanently open.
In the various permutations of Ursula’s life, Atkinson’s cast fall victim to
the kinds of horrors and accidents that every parent dreads. The slip from the
roof. The paedophile in the lane. The Spanish flu, which leaves “a pale bloody
kind of froth, like cuckoo spit” bubbling from a baby’s blue nostril and a
mother grieving like a savage.
Each time Ursula is reborn, she tries to prevent the traumas of previous
lives. She’s not exactly conscious of what’s been before, but she feels looming
dread and déjà vu. This leads her mother to pack her off to a psychologist who
talks of Nietzsche and Amor fati (love of fate).
In this way, the novel takes us through the two wars. Although Atkinson gets the period atmosphere so spot on you can smell the boiled cabbage, this is not a “wartime novel”. It’s more a case of Atkinson using war to demonstrate the haphazardness of history. Different incarnations see Ursula taking tea with Eva Braun and working as an ARP warden in London. As she drags bodies from the rubble – a friend’s seemingly undamaged torso comes apart “like a cracker” when she tries to lift it – we’re again reminded of our fleshly vulnerability.
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In this way, the novel takes us through the two wars. Although Atkinson gets the period atmosphere so spot on you can smell the boiled cabbage, this is not a “wartime novel”. It’s more a case of Atkinson using war to demonstrate the haphazardness of history. Different incarnations see Ursula taking tea with Eva Braun and working as an ARP warden in London. As she drags bodies from the rubble – a friend’s seemingly undamaged torso comes apart “like a cracker” when she tries to lift it – we’re again reminded of our fleshly vulnerability.
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