Kate Atkinson has followed up last year’s sparkling novel Shrines of Gaiety with this collection of 11 short stories. These stories sparkle, too, despite the feeling of impending doom that’s in every one of them.
It comes in many forms. In The Void, a sort of momentary darkness kills everyone who’s outside, “cyclists, dog-walkers, cricket teams ... Princess Anne. The Prime Minister. All gone.” In Blithe Spirit, a ghost watches over her own autopsy and discovers her cause of death, and in Spellbound a fairy tale is woven into a story about family life with sinister repercussions for all concerned. All the story strands start to come together in the second-to-last story, Gene-sis, in which Kitty, the sister of god (small “g”, not religious), is an advertising executive who finally gets a turn at creating when her idiot brother hands the god job over. Kitty starts the world again. And again. “She would have liked a grand denouement – a perfect world to end the task on – but she knew in her heart that that wasn’t about to happen. There were no happy endings, just endings.” Nevertheless, as her mother notes briskly, “You can’t stop trying. You’re a woman.”
Every story is warm and engaging, lit by humour and by appealing vignettes of family life or vivid character studies. There are a number of classic set pieces, such as the hilariously awkward family lunch that Franklin, a recurring character, endures with his girlfriend.
We meet 38-year-old bookish Franklin at the races in Dogs in Jeopardy. He’s taken a week off his job as a producer on Green Acres, a soap opera that features in a number of the stories, to do a tour of the North of England’s racecourses, “like a Lakeland poet”. Bad luck has played a major role in Franklin’s life and he finds it hard to keep a girlfriend because of his lack of commitment to the future, as in, the future of everything.
Franklin used to be a computer game designer (one of his ideas was a game aimed at the untapped market of middle-aged women where one of the quests is promoted as “Woolf! … the problems of getting to the lighthouse”). The race meeting turns lucky for Franklin when an old grey horse talks to him: “Come on son, put a hundred quid on me, you won’t regret it.”
Franklin meets Connie Kingshott in The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoise. “Cultured” and wealthy, the Kingshotts live in a mansion ruled over by the tyrannical but diminutive heart surgeon father (Franklin worries about hearts slipping from his “overly petite fingers”).
The family are pleased with themselves – “[N]o Chekhovian gloom in the Kingshott house, no longing for an Arcadian other” – and the three Kingshott sisters require Franklin to play endless games of “What If”. “If you were a musical instrument what instrument would you be?” What if you “have to choose between rescuing a cat and rescuing the cure for cancer?” Likeable Franklin is continually wrongfooted. He somehow proposes to Connie, which leads to a body in the library.
There are recognisable Atkinson people, such as the teenaged Florence, full of caustic wit and outrage, and the doughty, middle-aged Pamela, who finds herself in a miraculous position one lonely Christmas. There’s even a version of the Meghan and Harry story.
The tales are cleverly linked through setting and recurring characters, both human and animal. Odd, dark, funny. And totally moreish.
