Before I get started, I want to throw out another reminder
that The Leaning Stack of Books is having a birthday! I’m giving one lucky
reader a copy of the book I’ve enjoyed the most over the past year. What do you
have to do to participate? Just let me know the title of your favorite book from the last twelve months.
Easy! On Tuesday, October 20, I’ll let everyone know who’s going to get a fun
package in the mail.
And now onto other news! I finally – FINALLY-- finished Kate
Atkinson’s A God In Ruins. It took me longer to read this one than it did to
read Purity, and that’s saying something. But here’s the thing that will
surprise you if you’ve stayed with me as I’ve whined about this book – I really
liked it. Or, more accurately, I really liked it once I got to the ending.
This book is billed as a “companion piece” to 2013’s Life After Life, which is a novel that follows one character, Ursula, through
several versions of her life. The reader gets to see how small choices
alter and shape families and communities and world events. Atkinson received a
lot of positive press for shaking up Life After Life’s structure in an
interesting way. And once I adjusted to
the rhythm of that unusual story, I was captivated.
A God In Ruins follows Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy, but
the structure is different. The reader doesn’t follow different iterations of
Teddy’s life but instead gets to jump back and forth in time with him. We see
him as a young man, when he is a pilot in World War II. We see him as a small
child. We see him as a father, as a grandfather, and as a very
old man. What emerges is a rather ordinary
portrait of a nice guy. Often, life gives him lemons. Sometimes he makes
lemonade, and sometimes he doesn’t.
The back-and-forth-in-time narration seems to dull some of
the suspense that might occur in a story with a clear beginning, middle, and
end. There are many war scenes, and
those should be exciting. But Atkinson often writes some elegant version of this kind
of sentence in the middle of a chapter:
Teddy would reflect back on this very exciting and scary life-and-death
moment from his rocking chair in old age.
The result is that the reader feels reassured that
everything is going to work out, though it certainly makes for a less intense
reading experience.
So far this sounds like a critique, right? But here’s the
thing: this is a novel that is more than it seems. For hundreds of pages, I
wondered how this meandering look at a regular guy could possibly be a
companion to Life After Life. But because I enjoy Atkinson so much, I should
have trusted her. It IS a companion. So if you’re feeling puzzled while reading
this book, stop scratching your head. Just hang on, and trust her. TRUST. Just
be sure to make it to the very end.
I don’t have much of a memory for the details of Life After
Life, and that didn’t impact my experience with this book at all. Other
reviewers have mentioned all the crossover characters, but I wasn’t aware of
many of them. So, from my perspective, you can read A God In Ruins as a stand-alone
piece if you want. What you’ll lose, however, is the connection between the
two, and that, I think, is where the magic lies.
An aside: Atkinson writes an author’s note at the end where
she tries to justify her choices in this book. I wondered why she felt the need
to give so much explanation. However, she also gives a lens into all the
research she did about World War II bombing raids. The war scenes are
meticulously detailed, and it was interesting to learn about how she constructed
them.
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