Kate Atkinson’s new novel shouldn’t work. Somehow it does
Part murder mystery, part postwar history, the British writer’s latest is a dizzying literary juggling act that somehow comes together brilliantly.
Kate Atkinson’s unclassifiable novels could be seen as a succession of cartwheels: now upside down, now vertical, in endless motion, teetering on imbalance, adjusted in the nick of time. Or not. Atkinson’s element is speed. That said, it is a very British speed. Open her novels, adjust your reading. Her latest, Our Noble Selves, is the full cartwheel.
The novel follows Harry Flynn, a sometime London journalist, now – as with half the world – back from World War II. Harry had been one of the millions presumed dead; at times he presumes he might be, wonders why he isn’t, or simply thinks: why not? Women don’t seem to notice anything odd about Harry, though he has no idea why they like him so much – which is obviously part of the appeal.
Harry is the sort of man Atkinson specialises in: believable, yearnable, imbued with charm both sexual and otherwise. Perhaps he has Trevor Howard’s voice in Brief Encounter. The novel opens around the time that film arrived in cinemas. But charm, sexual or otherwise, natural or manufactured, won’t keep a man upright. And Harry likes to drink. The trouble is that it makes him blot out his memory. Drinking is, after all, the obvious root of blotto.
Harry, captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, was a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma Railway. Not that anyone will ever know, because he sees no point in speaking about those years. Returned men and women acknowledged the unspeakable through a mutual silence. There is nobility in not saying how much a human soul can endure. Yet not saying, like nobility, is an old-fashioned virtue. Perhaps it is the result of cauterised emotion? Or perhaps it is simply being British?
