4.5 Stars
This
companion novel focuses on Teddy Todd, Ursula’s favourite brother from Life After Life. The reader is given vignettes from his
childhood, his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot, his post-war years when
he lives the quiet life of an English gentleman, and his old age. We are also given glimpses into the lives of Nancy,
his wife; Viola, his daughter; and Bertie and Sunny, his grandchildren.
Some people
might object to the lack of chronology because the narrative moves back and
forth through time, often in the same paragraph. I liked this time shifting; it is done
seamlessly and is a reminder of the connection of the past and the future with
the present. The omniscient narrator
often steps in and reveals what will happen in the future. Objects - like a silver hare pendant – reappear,
and events are seen from the perspective of several characters. This technique certainly adds depth.
Teddy is
the favourite sibling of his sister Ursula and it is easy to understand why. He is such a decent, dutiful, and selfless person. Teddy vows during the war that if he
survived, “he would always try to be kind, to live a good quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly.”
And that is exactly what he does.
True to his scouting code, he performs “the most laborious and humble
offices with cheerfulness and grace.” Viola
at one point discusses her father’s “stoicism . . . cheerful frugality . . .
and his persistent patience.” His other
outstanding trait is his love of nature; he finds beauty in all of the natural
world, even in a rodent like the water vole.
The war is the
pivotal event in the book: “The war had
been a great chasm and there could be no going back to the other side, to the
lives they had before, to the people they were before. It was as true for them as it was for the
whole of poor, ruined Europe.” Obviously, death is ever present. The phrase, “The dead were legion” is used at
least a half dozen times, and the numbers of dead are even summarized at the
end: “Fifty-five thousand, five hundred
and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command.
Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by
the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty
million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered
in the Holocaust.”
Teddy
certainly did not expect to survive the war.
He compares plane crews to birds:
“Teddy realized that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for
the greater good. Birds thrown against a
wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break
that wall.” This metaphor adds poignancy
to Teddy’s comment about “All the birds who were never born, all the songs that
were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.” It is not surprising that “He had been
reconciled to death during the war . . . [so] part of him never adjusted to
having a future.” The war is something
that affects him deeply; he is a god in ruins who “had believed once that he
would be formed by the architecture of war, but now, he realized, he had been
erased by it.”
There is a
shocking twist at the end of the novel.
It was certainly not one I expected, but it had me saying, “But, of
course!” In the Author’s Note, Atkinson
says that this twist is “the whole raison
d’être of the novel.” It will
certainly have the reader looking back at the novel from an entirely different
perspective; the quotes I included in the previous two paragraphs, for example,
take on an entirely new meaning. The
epigraphs also take on new meaning, especially the statement that “The purpose
of Art is to convey the truth of a
thing, not to be the truth itself.”
As a former
English teacher, I loved the many allusions to poetry. Bertie walks along the Thames and quotes
lines from Spenser’s “Prothalamion” about “the shoare of silver streaming
Themmes” and then there’s a wonderful line:
“Spenser handed over to Wordsworth who met her at Westminster Bridge.”
Bertie admits “London really was all bright and glittering in the smokeless
air.” Not everyone will recognize the
line from Wordsworth’s sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,
1802” but those who do will appreciate Atkinson’s style even more. One page has references to Robert Frost, A.
E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Emily Dickinson, and
William Shakespeare.
The one
weakness for me was the portrayal of Viola.
She is unlikeable as a daughter, wife and mother. A tragic event from her youth obviously has
affected her relationship with her father, but since the reader understands
that event from Teddy’s perspective, it is Teddy who receives more
sympathy. As an adult, she should
certainly have understood what happened.
And her behaviour towards her children, especially Sunny, is
unforgiveable. She is the opposite of
her father; she puts her own desires above the needs of her children, and her
attempts at redemption come too late. I have to admit, though, that I thoroughly
enjoyed the chapter entitled “Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace” in which Viola is
expertly skewered!
A God in Ruins recently won the 2016 Costa Book Award in
which the judges spoke of it as an utterly magnificent book. And I agree!
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