Human Croquet

Product Information

That trauma beaten, Atkinson set to in earnest, and her much-vaunted "overnight success" followed swiftly. She was spotted by an agent, landed herself a book deal and wrote Behind the Scenes in three months. "I never had a qualm about it," she remembers. "I had great confidence in that book." But if the reading public - half a million of them, in this country alone - loved her multi-generational family saga, the media scrum had other ideas. Isobel's family, such as it is, lives in a house called Arden, built after World War I on the long-lost foundations of Fairfax Manor (which, true to the family curse -- ''everything will always go wrong just when it looks as if it might He had no liquor licence, but did have tame police, and Nellie learned the trade well. When a young Irish girl, Maud, died of an opium overdose, Nellie dealt with it by suggesting a couple of army chaps take her body to the river to dispose of her. As always, Atkinson's work is character driven, the writing deliciously leisurely. I love her use of parenthesized asides; they are at times acerbically witty. She writes what I often think, or how I think. (Is there a difference?) The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho's nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency - the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs - that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.

that he and Isobel have known all along -- and rejected in favor of not knowing -- what has really become of Eliza. Nellie Coker is at the forefront of the story. She isa cut-throat nightclub owner recently released from prison who finds her hands full battling with her 6 duplicitous children, a librarian, a detective, and two missing teenage girls.Shrines of Gaiety is a witty romp of a novel that takes place in the dark underbelly of London during the Roaring 20s.

will not leave,'' who might be romantically involved with Vinny (whose ''narrow spectrum of emotions'' consists of ''irritable, irritated, irritating''), although Gordon, now returned to Thirty years later, Joanna is now Dr Joanna Hunter, a successful GP in Edinburgh with a baby, married to Neil, a local businessman. For a nanny, Joanna hires 16-year-old Reggie, whose mother has recently drowned on holiday and who is taking private tutoring for her Greek and Latin A-levels from terminally ill born-again Christian Ms MacDonald. Reggie has no experience with small children ("What was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could identify with all of that"), but the fit is a comfortable one for both her and Dr Hunter, despite Reggie's need to keep drug-dealing brother Billy away from her working life. Although, if you do fancy a visit to 1926 London, this novel definitely takes you there with its vivid, lifelul descriptions. Kate Atkinson is that rarest of beasts, a genuinely surprising novelist. In the best possible way, I have no idea what she might write next. Only that I'll certainly want to read it. It was an eye-opener for Nellie. She couldn’t fail to notice that many of the men went home at the end of the night with a dance hostess who had been a complete stranger to them a handful of hours earlier. ‘The young ladies get very good tips for that,’ Jaeger said phlegmatically. ‘Can’t blame ’em, can you?’a ''WS'' that might have been carved by William Shakespeare, who is said to have spent his lost years at Fairfax Manor. Isobel Fairfax, the heroine of ''Human Croquet,'' is an omniscient narrator who, paradoxically, often hasn't a clue about what has really happened. Like Ruby Lennox, the droll narrator of ''Behind the Scenes at the Museum,''

The book is an interesting ... melange, I am not even entirely certain how to describe. There are segment headings of past and present, which is not unusual, with the young narrator, Isobel, in the present, while the past segments tell the family tale. The 1st 3rd of the book has a bit of seeming time travel, and general oddity, but nothing to cause concern. The next 3rd, becomes odder, and the past, sadder. The final 3rd becomes downright surreal, and the limits to suspension of disbelief are reached. The over-all resolution to the story is an interesting exercise but essentially deconstructs the entire story and unravels the sympathy created for the characters by re-creating different versions of events. This would be the not so good part of the book, to me. While an interesting exercise, it is not one which really emotionally engages the reader, but perhaps that was not the author's intention - maybe she wanted to play with time and perspective in a pseudo-magical realism kind of way.

Need Help?

DISCLOSURE: I own my copy of Shrines of Gaeity by Kate Atkinson, published by Transworld, Doubleday. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. With hindsight, I wouldn't have done so many interviews," she says. "I wouldn't have indulged them - most of them were bitches." Considering that she was described in one banner headline as the writer who "rejects marriage and the family, and believes we should live in tribes ruled by women", this response might be viewed as mild. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, and One Good Turn.

As the New York Times Review Notable Book of the Year reported, it is a part fairy tale, part mystery and part coming-of-age novel about Isobel Fairfax in the 1960's British suburb of Lythe, once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English tutor, William Shakespeare. As young Isobel becomes more and more taken in and fascinated by all of the history of the Fairfax estate, the people, and her family history, she sometimes becomes involved in Shakespearian time warps. This was one of Atkinson's earlier novels, but a wonderful addition to her literary accomplishments.

Book Review: Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

If that were all it was, it wouldn’t be much. But the post-modern pisstake is merely a framework to hang a much more humane and observational humour. The story is about a girl and her mother, a book she is writing and a story she is telling. Or somethng like that – it takes a little while for the sense of it all to bed in, but then that is all part of the fun. The bulk of the words are taken up by the goings on of a group of English Lit students in Scotland. The setting is Dundee University in the 1970s. I did my own university time in New Zealand in the 1980s, but given what we know about the warped nature of space and time, that’s pretty much the same place. It all felt very familiar. The only oddity, then, was the title. Nobody seemed all that emotionally weird to me, at least no more so than normal. What conclusion are we supposed to take from that? Whilst not containing a maternal bone in her body, Nellie will do whatever she can to ensure the survival and elevation of her 6 children. There is the war hardened sniper and his own man, Niven, the reliable book keeper Edith, the Cambridge educated if vacuous, Betty and Shirley, expected to marry into the aristocracy, the unrooted Ramsay with his pretensions of being a novelist, and the young Kitty. Upon being released from a stint in Holloway Prison, Nellie is the toast of the town, but some sense weakness, making plans to grab her business empire, willing to do anything to hasten her downfall, others pose a danger to her family, and some threats come from within. But Nellie is no pushover, she might be getting older, but she has not lost her guile and cunning. The honest DCI John Frobisher wants to ensure Ma Coker faces justice, and recruits an unlikely spy, a provincial librarian and ex-battlefield nurse, Gwendolen Kelling, with her charismatic spirit of adventure, to help him. She is in London to finally live a life, and to find the runaway girls, Freda, chasing her pipe dreams of dancing and fame, and her naive and more innocent friend, Florence. Charles, an 18-year-old shop clerk, is obsessed with vanishing and time travel and parallel worlds. '''They're out there somewhere,' he says, gazing longingly at the night sky. ('If they've got any sense they'll