Kate Atkinson's story of Teddy's war dazzles

Kate Atkinson returns with a 'companion' piece to best-seller Life After Life. Photo / Martin Hunter

Kate Atkinson's extraordinary 2013 novel, Life After Life, introduced readers to the Todd family in their Forster-esque home of Fox Corner, and managed to achieve publishing's holy grail of both literary acclaim and popular appeal. That novel's heroine, Ursula Todd, is given the chance to live her life again and again in many variations over the first half of the 20th century, the differing outcomes - usually the difference between life and death - contingent on the smallest, most insignificant-seeming choices.

Despite the potentially distancing effects of this artifice, Life After Life was a warm and absorbing family drama, played out through two world wars; its characters drawn with such care and substance that the reader was often absurdly grateful to have them plucked from a terrible fate and given a second go.

One of those characters was Ursula's much-loved younger brother, Teddy, who, in the final narrative, survives to become a bomber pilot in World War II, is reported missing, presumed dead during a raid in 1943, but is given a reprieve by the author at the 11th hour, when he reappears at the end of the war having spent two years as a prisoner of war in Germany.

A God In Ruins is the story of Teddy's war and its legacy, "a 'companion' piece rather than a sequel", according to the author. At first glance it appears to be a more straightforward novel than Life After Life, though it shares the same composition, flitting back and forth in time so a chapter from Teddy's childhood in 1925 sits alongside a fragment of his grandchildren's childhood in the 1980s, before jumping back to 1947, when Teddy and his wife, Nancy, newly married, are trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the devastation: "The war had been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the people they were before. It was as true for them as it was for the whole of poor, ruined Europe."

This wilful disruption of chronology allows Atkinson to reveal her characters in glimpses over the course of the novel while withholding vital information that creates mysteries at the heart of the story. Why, we wonder, is Teddy's only daughter, Viola, so resolutely angry and determined to punish him well into her adult life? Only much later do we discover the secret that both Viola and Teddy have kept to themselves for decades, each unaware that the other knows.

Even when it arrives, this revelation goes only part way to mitigating Viola, who is splendidly monstrous, both as mother and daughter, and the source of much of the novel's characteristic understated humour. By 2012, against all the odds, Viola has become a successful novelist, and her narrative is peppered with supporting reviews ("Almost as good as Jodi Picoult", Mumsnet). You can't help suspecting that Atkinson is having some fun here at her own expense. "She wished she had asked [Teddy] about his war when he was still compos mentis. She might have been able to use his memories as the basis of a novel. One that everyone would respect. People always took war novels seriously."

Despite the author's knowing nod to the reader here, the story of Teddy's war is the engine that drives this novel. Atkinson's research has been exhaustive, to judge by her bibliography, but she has achieved the elusive alchemy that transforms statistics and memories into immediate drama. The sections detailing Teddy's disastrous bombing raids are extraordinary feats of dramatic writing, vivid with physical sensation.

Nor does she flinch from the most grotesque atrocities of war. Teddy later recalls a Jewish friend of Nancy's sister: "There was a suggestion that Hannie was still alive when she was shovelled into the ovens at Auschwitz." This is a novel about war and the shadow it casts even over generations who have never known it, but it is also a novel about fiction. Though it may appear to lack the bold formal conceit that made Life After Life so original, don't make the mistake of thinking that Atkinson has abandoned her interest in authorial playfulness. The book ends with a breathtaking volte-face which will infuriate some readers and delight others, forcing us to reconsider how we understand fiction and the uses of the imagination.

"I think that you can only be so mulishly fictive if you genuinely care about what you are writing," she writes in a postscript, and there is no doubt this is a novel that cares deeply about its characters and the purpose of fiction in making sense of the past.

A God In Ruins, together with its predecessor, is Atkinson's finest work, and confirmation that her genre-defying writing continues to surprise and dazzle.

A God in Ruins
by Kate Atkinson
(Doubleday $37.99)

- Canvas, Observer