Book Review: Kate Atkinson weaves pure delight in Normal Rules Don't Apply
Kate Atkinson, winner of the Writer of the year award attends the Harper's Bazaar Women of the Year Awards 2022 on November 10, 2022 in London, England.
- Normal Rules Don’t Apply
- Kate Atkinson
- Doubleday, £14.99
Perhaps because Kate Atkinson’s writing is so funny and often playful, the literary establishment seems reluctant to take her seriously. Her first novel, , won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, while won the Costa Novel Award in 2013.
Her Jackson Brodie crime novels were made into a successful TV series. I would rate her high among English novelists, and I am not alone. Hilary Mantel called her work ‘inexhaustibly ingenious’, while for Rachel Cusk she is ‘a brilliant and profoundly original writer’.
This wonderful collection of stories is loosely or intricately connected, depending on how many subtle hints you pick up.
It is pure delight from beginning to end, but the delight includes some very dark moments.
In Atkinson’s fiction, nothing is fixed or straightforward. The narration is quirky and humorous, events can be dreamlike or nightmarish in the same story, but the story remains realistic.
This is not science fiction, for all its inventiveness, nor is it magical realism. It’s just magic, conjured up by some very fine writing.
Ordinary people having extraordinary experiences is the best short description of her subject matter.
Her world is very much that of cosy middle England, the world of or Agatha Christie novels, where horrors lurk behind the façade of apparently idyllic villages.
She loves to play with literary conventions, and often second-guesses the reader by a knowing comment.
Franklin, a character who crops up in several of the stories, is taking tea with the vicar, a scene so idyllic that ‘He half expected Miss Marple to cycle past any moment’.
The opening story describes the onset of The Void on Thursday 4 May, 2028.
The world simply stopped for five minutes, and everything outdoors died. According to the Void theory, it was due to ‘a hole in the space-time continuum’, an effect of solar flares and geomagnetic storms knocking out satellite communications, while the Pope declared that it was due to demonic forces at work.
We experience it through an old man and his dog who are alerted by the eerie silence outside, and find all the sheep dead.
Meanwhile, his granddaughter Genevieve is in Waitrose, sheltering from the rain, when the power cuts out, leaving everyone in darkness.
Franklin is introduced while on a short break, discovering the racecourses of northern England.
Aged 38, he is described as ‘unmarried and invariably unlucky in love’. We learn his life story while he attends the rainy race meeting.
His father was a racing driver who died in the Austrian Grand Prix soon after his birth. His mother had been involved in a sleazy sex-scandal before her marriage.
Franklin’s step-father Ted, rescues him from a chaotic upbringing, and he graduates (just) with a degree in English Literature and the ambition to write a Great Novel.
Having failed as a video games designer, he ends up as a producer on a TV soap opera.
Thanks to a sardonic talking racehorse, he leaves the races £10,000 richer, breaking the run of bad luck that has so far been his lot.
‘Shine, Pamela, Shine’ is a stinging satire on the lives of divorced middle-class women in late middle age, who hide their desperation behind a relentlessly bright façade and a round of book club, Pilates, aquarobics, and ‘stimulating evening classes’.
The ending is truly shocking, even terrifying, but Pamela gives herself a pep talk: ‘Come on Pamela…time to shine!’ Another delightful satire is based on the Harry and Meghan story.
Kate Atkinson can be bracing as well as funny, and may not suit all tastes, but if you want something different that is also gloriously readable, give it a whirl.
