A God In Ruins - by Kate Atkinson

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

 

Summary:

The life of Teddy Todd - would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather - as he navigates the perils and progress of the twentieth century.

In "Life after Life"  Teddy was the brother that Ursula had prioritised and so through all her attempts at life, all the outcomes were wrong if Teddy died, so she would have to live again and again to make other decisions that ensured Teddy's survival. In this book we have the "What if?" of Teddy's survival, or I suppose, one of the many.
see my entry for Life after Life http://honhumcourcom.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/kate-atkinson-life-after-life.html

A God in Ruins is a fascinating book in that it contains more than one character who is simply unbearable. Not untrue, but insensitive and selfish and these people cause children to suffer, and that is what is hard to read about. From time to time I put the book away, and usually with a Kate Atkinson that can't be done.

Another difficult thing in this book is the non-chronological episodic narrative. One gets used to a time period (pre-war, wartime, post war, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s) and the way the characters behave at that time, and suddenly they are juxtaposed with another time period, and the different characters and behaviours. Not that these seem in any way unlikely, it is all too believable, but it is frustrating to the reader. Did it have to be written this way? I wonder.

It was discussed at book group and we all rated it highly. I know Kate Atkinson, with this novel, was genuinely paying tribute to the heroism of the RAF (and the USAF) in the war, and to all the World War II generation, and I think the old people at book group were impressed with that aspect of the book, but found the author's decision to frame the novel as a fiction within a fiction - a double-fiction - unappealing, so they rated it less highly than the critics have. So it gets 10 for cleverness, and being right-on, but less from the common reader.

But altogether, it's a brilliant book that peeks in the heads of an array of characters and makes you care about them. It looks at generations of the same family and finds traits which re-occur from generation to generation, like themes in a symphony. She also touches on the way we care for old people in nursing homes and so forth. We keep them alive, and they are bewildered, and suffer. Poor, poor old things.

I think I found a couple of grammar errors in it which annoyed me. I don't mean errors of style, I mean errors of tense, for example, neglecting to use the past perfect.

We have a new Old Boy at the book group, who also likes the sound of his own voice, but he's not as arrogant as the other one, he just likes to hold the floor. (He said he really likes P.G. Wodehouse, and who doesn't? He compared Kate Atkinson with P.G. Wodehouse, which is like comparing a soufflé with a wedding cake.) Tom was back, - he's the intelligent one - grey hair with a fringe - he pointed out that you can't compare the two - and a new smart woman of my own age, I think,  who always says interesting things. What I'm waiting for is when the Irritating and Arrogant Old Boy (still on the cruise) meets the new Old Boy. Surely they will be rivals? I can imagine many interestingly abrasive confrontations. Hehe. The next book is Dr Thorne, by Trollope.