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SHORT STORIES
Normal Rules Don’t Apply
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, $32.99
Right, so normal rules don’t apply. That could be thrilling, and it is. This collection of stories by the author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Life after Life is spellbinding, and my task here is to present the flavour of the thing.
It delicately places the world on “the threshold of catastrophe”. Weaving their way in and out of each other, the 13 stories, written in what I might call “third person ironic, no particular tense”, perform a mesmerising dance that takes the reader from the insanity and inanity of the present day, to the freezing moment of the annihilation of probably everything. Hilarious, breathtaking, horrific, irresistible.
Kate Atkinson is constantly busy with sly, wry, wise, and devastating asides in her stories.Credit:
The author, always in command, is constantly busy with sly, wry, wise, and devastating asides. Density, complexity, clarity all at once, or as in a description of Scottish dancing to bagpipes in Shine, Pamela! Shine!: “childishly simple and yet fiendishly complicated at the same time.” And then there’s the tone. Heart in mouth, I never wanted this book to end, and as it happens, the end circles the exhilarated reader back to the beginning. Of course it does.
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The collection presents the world as a kind of slippery magic circle that is spinning out of control. There are witches and talking dogs and virgin births, apparently carelessly interwoven with what passes for everyday life. All is on the edge of change, with warnings issued suddenly by a little Ting! and the scent of violets, which drifts ominously through the stories. The world is many-perfumed – cow shit, tractor diesel, tilled earth, fried mince, old wardrobes, China tea, something illegal.
Every story contains at least one dog, the dominant one being a fairytale character named Holdfast, his name a kind of ironic order to readers to hang in there. And “it isn’t over until the talking dog speaks”. When I say “over”, there is really no “over” since all that is coming is The Void. You must discover the nature of The Void for yourself, since to reveal it here would probably be unfair.
It provides the title for the first story, and is the subject of the last one, What If? An English village often provides the location, and this is also performed in a TV series Green Acres that sometimes surfaces. Both are reminiscent of Midsomer Murders. Reality – or is it – breaks in “just like Agatha Christie”, as one of the characters who has worked his way through the collection comes to grief. Or does he?
The story Spellbound glides adroitly between fairytale mode and a sharp narrative of contemporary family life in an English vicarage where the vicar is a pleasant but fairly incompetent husband and father, his wife a dithery, bewildered yet realistic “confirmed atheist”, and a “humiliating abundance” of children, being five girls and a final boy, “the prince of the family”, whose name is Theo, meaning gift of God.