Natasha Walter
HUMAN CROQUET by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, R79,95)
KATE ATKINSON is that rare thing, a writer who starts off her writing career with absolute certainty, hearing her own music and singing her own songs. This is only her second novel, her follow-up to Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the Whitbread Prize last year and then didn’t stop selling.
Human Croquet, now also featuring on bestseller lists, repeats the strengths of that first novel. Particularly, it shows off Atkinson’s ability to shine a light on the dusty secrets of the suburban family. She’s the Mike Leigh of novel-writing, with a dash more mystery and depth.
The heroine of this novel, Isobel Fairfax, epitomises the book’s confidence. She is a big, ugly girl of 16, who knows she can tell a story: ”I am the alpha and omega of narrators,” she tells us modestly. She revels in her own body: ”I’m as large as England. My hands are as big as the Lakes, my belly the size of Dartmoor and my breasts rise up like the Peaks. My hair flows into the Humber estuary and causes it to flood and my nose is a white cliff at Dover. I’m a big girl, in other words.” Atkinson reminds us that women can write noisy, attention-grabbing novels.
The most interesting thing that Atkinson does is to take that artistic no-man’s- land, British suburbia, and pour into it all the love and despair, madness and desire, that you usually see associated with other landscapes – hot South American villages, perhaps, or wild Yorkshire moors.
She creates a suburbia crossed with Wuthering Heights, and it’s a great new location. Everything here is a bit bigger and louder than you expect: the greenfly are ”locusts”, the cake ”bubbles monstrously” in the oven, marmalade is the colour of ”melted lions”, draughts are ”major weather fronts”.
Isobel sees the bats fly and hears the wolves howl. She is surrounded by the sad, magical scent of her dead mother. And she even plunges backwards through time, suddenly finding herself in a field in 1918, or entering an Elizabethan inn, or picking up a leaf in a primeval forest when she should be getting on the school bus. I love this crossing of genres, the surprise of finding yourself pushed from Coronation Street to The Faerie Queene. In this big, baggy novel, Atkinson confidently fuses everyday life and fantasy.
Alongside the surrealism of suburbia, Atkinson also captures its realism. She records the eccentricity of the suburban milieu with formidable verve. Isobel and her brother, Charles, are brought up by their aunt Vinny after their father and mother disappear. The very British madness Atkinson reveals in their home life will be familiar to readers of Behind the Scenes at the Museum; the shouts and murmurs of families going slowly crazy in their dinky houses.
Atkinson’s keen eye for the darkness of family life is buoyed up by her ability to describe physical detail. Isobel and Charles find that their mother’s memory is kept alive by certain little objects that turn up out of the blue – a squashed shoe here, an old powder compact there. Those objects are described with an almost alarming power: ”A high-heeled brown suede shoe with a strange piece of matted fur stuck to it, like a piece of dead cat. The inside of the shoe’s spotted with mould and a rhinestone glistens from within the little nest of dead fur. The smell of sadness … is suddenly overwhelming.”
Atkinson doesn’t compromise. She gives feminine experience the grandeur and scope that masculine experience more traditionally has. She shows us the drama embedded in the domestic. She tells us the secrets of women; that they abandon their children and take lovers, that they are raped and beaten, that they are disappointed and that they desire.
Atkinson’s easy movements backwards and forwards through time, and her final retelling of the same day three times over, with three very different consequences, give us a narrative that is both experimental and very readable. More, its cyclical structure says something about the lives of her heroines. She suggests that women’s experiences are moulded by a constant struggle with men, and that this struggle echoes down the years.
With just two novels, Atkinson has added new colour to the British literary landscape. Where she stumbles is in the carelessness of her prose. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, its slapdash style grates. But maybe Atkinson couldn’t write any other way; maybe if she tightened her language all her noisy, colourful confidence would disappear. And that would be a loss.