"Normal Rules Don't Apply" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

'The Void' - 2028. Barbara's a doctor. Her daughter's moved back to her to be within a school's catchment area. In a 5 minute incident all people who are outside die.

‘Dogs in Jeopardy’ - Franklin goes for a job interview. He's asked questions like "if you were a sanwich, what type would you be?" A horse tells him to bet on it. He wins £10k. Returning to his car, a dog talks to him.

'Blithe Spirit' - Mandy is a ghost. She was married to Greg and worked for a MP, Jonathon.

‘Spellbound’ - A fairy tale (where a childless queen is granted a wish and had a child, but breaks a promise) and a story (about a clergyman's family of 5 daughter and a son) are interleaved - the mother is a fairy-tale expert is is recounting the fairy tale. The princess is told that she and her mother will be released from a spell if she gives the witch a baby boy. A new au pair arrives at the family's house, asking to see the boy.

‘The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ – Franklin stumbles into a relationship with Connie, 32. She takes him to visit her family. He's asked what instrument he'd like to be.

'Shine, Pamela, Shine!' - a retired, ever-inspiring primary school teacher whose been divorced for 15 years had 2 kids. His re-married ex had 2 kids.

‘Existential Marginalization’ - Tillie's toys dread her. One day she runs into the road and is put on life support until she is "switched off". The father leaves, the mother remarries. She chooses 2 toys to take to their new home and burns the others.

'Classic Quest 17. Crime and punishment' - Franklin and Connie plan a quick marriage. One of her sisters tries to sleep with him. Her father's found stabbed dead. He's arrested.

'Puppies and rainbows' - On a break from a film ("In a time of madness"), US actress Skylar (brought up on a trailer site) visits the Greenacres set, shown around by Franklin. She dates Price Alfie. An under-age porn film of hers is found. She has to give uup the prince though she oves him.

'Gene-sis' -Kittie recreates the world. Unicorns? She tries talking dogs and horses.

'What-if' - Franklin's driving a woman - a new assistant at the studio. She tells him what happened when she turned to the witch with a boy - the witch was dead. After "The divide" (?) the Classic Quest series remained popular, especially with middle-aged women. He gets royalties.

I had an audio book, so making notes was difficult. There may well be mistakes in the above. I'm unconvinced that all the interconnections are fruitful. The stories are entertaining a paragraph at a time, but I don't think any of the pieces could survive stand-alone as they are.

Other reviews

• Alex Clark
• Justine Jordan
• karissareadsbooks (Many of the stories end on an abrupt reveal or transition. Just as we might be beginning to understand the rules of the universe, it’s too late and we’re on to the next story. The fact that characters show up again helps and I therefore trusted Atkinson to take me through and explain where we were. For me, that explanation never came in a satisfying way.)
• Blue book balloon (There is an explanation, sort of, for the coincidences and links, lending a distinctly metaphysical touch to the book. It adds its own charm but the rest of the stories still very much stand in their own terms, every one of them. My favourite would, though, I think be Existential Marginalisation)

"Started Early, Took My Dog" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

1975. Leeds. Tracy and Ken Arkwright (police) are climbing to a 15th floor flat to investigate an incident. We learn later that they find the 2 week old corpse of a prostitute mother (Carol Braithewaite) and a child, Michael. Tracy's suspicious - the child says that his dad was the murderer, and the flat had been locked from the outside, but her colleagues don't follow those leads.

In the present, Tracy, 50+, a big woman, works in security in a shopping centre. She sees a woman, Kelly, (who she knows from her past life in the police) abuse a child and buys the child (Courtney) on a whim for £3k.

Tillie, 70+, has also seen the bad mother. She's becoming forgetful. Jackson helps her. Leslie takes her in for a chat. She's childless, had a miscarriage. Julia (Jackson's ex; his son's mother) and Tillie are both in "Collier", a TV series is being filmed locally. Tillie's confused when she sees the show on TV.

Colin abuses a dog. Jackson (once a soldier, then a cop, then a gumshoe) thumps him and takes the dog. "Tessa" (ex-wife, con-artist) stole his money. His daughter's Marley. His sister was murdered decades ago. He's become interested in culture. He has found out he has a young son. He's trying to find out about the past of a New Zealand client, Hope, who was adopted. He plans an interview with Linda (who deals with adoptions) about Carol.

Linda phones Tracy about Carol Braithwaite. Tracy phones Barry, who's still in the force. Barry has a secret.

In 1974 we get Ray's PoV. He's a policeman with a wife Marge. Marge is friends with Kitty who's married an older doctor. Both women are infertile. Kitty had been a model and a muse for a writer. An abortion 5 months into an unwanted pregnancy made her infertile. Ray had a carefree affair.

Tracy wonders about killing Kelly - a loose end - then entering Kelly's place finds that she's already been killed. Tracy's a suspect. She starts driving Courtney to a cottage she's rented but crashes into a deer. Jackson picks them up. When he leaves the car she drives away. A car picks Jackson up - a Private Investigator who'd put a tracker on the dog. The PI's called Brian Jackson. Jackson interviews Marilyn Needles, the reporter from 1975. She was told not to pry. Jackson's assaulted by 2 thugs. He's told not to pry.

We learn more about Tracy. She lost her virginity to her married driving instructor when she was 20, and got her own flat.

Jackson watches a train station incident - Tillie and a thug fall under a train while Tracy and Courtney (with new IDs) catch a train. In weeks they're in DisneyLand, Paris. The other Jackson's client is Michael Braithewaite - Hope's brother!

Back in 1975, we hear about the murder of Carol from the murderer's PoV - a detective, the father of Michael. His colleague, Eastman, covered it all up, arranged the girl's adoption with Kitty and husband, who emigrated to New Zealand.

Barry kills his daughter Amy (in a permanent coma) then himself. Ray is arrested - the other Jackson got Linda to confess. Ray gave the child to childless Kitty rather than his own wife.

It's entertaining. Several characters muse over how things have changed since their day. Several characters have similar senses of humour and feelings of disappointment - Tracy "only realised when they died that [her parents] would never love her"; A boy's acne is so bad that if you knew braille you could read his face. The plot is full of coincidences and parallels (Jackson finding a permanent companion - a dog; Tracy finding a child) at the expense of [psychological] credibility. The quality of the observation and character insight cover the cracks.

Other reviews

• Justine Jordan (Kate Atkinson's novels have always been built around lost girls ... Tracy's awkward transformation into would-be parent is wryly moving, and Atkinson swerves the obvious sentimentality by channelling it all into Tilly, who has her own pity-soaked memories of maternal heartbreak. Tracy's new role is also mirrored by Jackson's adoption of a particularly winning dog)
• shereadsnovels (there were too many [characters] whom I struggled to distinguish from each other; in particular, the other police officers involved in the 1975 storyline all seemed to blend into one which made that part of the book difficult to follow. There were also some subplots that didn’t seem to go anywhere and some important questions that remained unanswered at the end. Compared with the first three books in the series, I thought this one was disappointing)
• Amy Adams (Atkinson is operating in a gray area between realism and metaphor. ... Atkinson isn't interested so much in Tracy's character as she is in Tracy's situation--the sudden change of your world, the madness that is parental love, the way the inclusion of a child into your life fundamentally changes who you are. ... it's a fascinating book, intricately plotted, with layers of meaning playing off against each other, raising the ongoing challenge of how our culture treats children. Atkinson also liberally sprinkles the pages with ruminations on poetry and how it illuminates our lives.)

"When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book.

30 years after her novelist father left and the rest of her family were savagely killed, Joanna is a married doctor in Edinburgh with a 1 y.o. child. Reggie Chase (a clever 16 y.o. girl, who lives alone) helps with childcare. She lies about her mother being alive (she died on holiday with her new lover). Her brother Billie, 19, misbehaves. She's tutored by the dying Miss McDonald.

Jackson Brodie (ex-army, rich from an inheritance) gets a hair from Nathan, 2 y.o. who's at nursery school in Yorkshire. His ex-wife is Josie. Their 12 y.o. daughter is Marly. His ex-girlfriend is Julia, who claims that Nathan isn't his.

Louise (40 - a chief inspector with son Archie, 16. She used to work with Jackson) has re-married Patrick (surgeon, with a Ph.D son). An amusement arcade owned by Joanna's husband has burnt down - not the first of his places that has burnt down. Louise investigates, discovering that Neil's struggling financially. She has to visit Joanna anyway, to tell her that the killer, Decker, is about to be released. She cares about Alison Needler too, whose husband went crazy and has gone missing.

Neil says that Joanna's gone to stay with an aunt in Yorkshire until the press stories about the killer's release calm down. Brodie misses her - she was her confidante. She's suspicious - Joanna's car and phone haven't gone, and the baby's comforter (bloodied) is found by the dog.

A train crash is caused by Miss McDonald's driving. She dies. Reggie saves the life of Brodie, who was in the train. When Brodie wakes in hospital, he has the ID of Andrew Decker. Later he recalls who he is.

2 men wreck Reggie's flat, saying they're looking for a guy called Reggie Chase. She reports her suspicions about Joanna to Louise, and tells her the name of the man whose life she saved. Reggie visits him, and helps him out of hospital by claiming she's his daughter. He wants to get back to London to meet his wife Tessa (a museum curator; they've known each other for 4 months) at the airport. He has an accident in a rented car with Reggie. Louise picks them up. Meeting Jackson again has made her have doubts about her marriage. She's investigated Joanna's aunt - she's been dead a fortnight. Joanna had recently met Decker in prison.

Reggie enlists Jackson to track down Joanna. She's being held hostage by people who Neil owes money to. She kills her imprisoners. Reggie and Jackson give her and the baby a lift home. The police track down Decker who shoots a colleague of Louise then kills himself. Nobody finds out who killed the kipnappers. Tessa turns out to be a fake who's gone off with Jackson's money. Louises is about to leave her husband.

The main characters engage in entertaining internal monologue, dropping literary allusions and asking themselves questions. They have an interest in language and figures of speech. There are many observations and fun phrases -

• "who looked as if she'd knitted herself"
• "dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing""

Other reviews

• Patrick Ness (Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. ... Lovers of the crime genre have given Atkinson a hard time for her use of coincidence, and truth be told, the first half of When Will There Be Good News? can be a little hard to swallow ... By putting coincidence so firmly in control of her plot - all the way through to its very last page, where two protagonists are revealed to have an even deeper connection - she starts to raise larger questions of destiny and fate)

"One Good Turn" by Kate Atkinson

An audio book set in Edinburgh.

Bradley (aka many other names) is the victim of road rage - a big man in a Honda shunts into his hired car. Martin, an onlooker, saves him. Martin had been an RE teacher in the Lake District until he did a CW course. Now he's written a novel a year and has a TV contract. Gloria, 59, is in range too. Her unloved husband Graham, millionaire builder, has just been checked by the fraud squad. Jackson, an ex-copper living in France, has supplied the money for his partner's play on the fringe. He sees the incident too. Archy is school age, his shoplifting interrupted by the incident.

Gloria's husband Graham has a heart-attack while with a "discipline" call-girl, Russian (she works for "Favours"), and is taken to intensive care. Gloria goes through his phone and finds he intends to get rid of her.

Jackson finds a dead woman in the sea, nearly drowning while trying to retrieve the body - a Russian blonde girl. He's interviewed by Angus's mother, Louise, 38, an inspector. Martin's house-guest, Richard Moat, is doing comedy on the Fringe. Jackson watches him perform. Afterwards Jackson's attacked in an alley by "Honda Man".

Martin has stayed with Bradley while he was in hospital. He's told to keep an eye on him, post-concussion, when he's released. They go to Bradley's hotel room. While Bradley's asleep Martin looks in his bag. In it is a box. In the box a hidden compartment and a gun. We learn that on holiday in St.Petersburg something happened to Martin. He wakes to find that his wallet and the latest draft of his work in progress has been stolen overnight. Returning home he finds police in his house - Moat's been killed in his bed by "Honda man" - mistaken identity. He'd been found by the cleaner who works for Favours.

Louise (who lives in a poorly-built house built by Hatter Homes, Graham's company) wonders if Jackson is a hoaxer or the murderer, though she fancies him. Martin too is under suspicion. Jackson goes to a Russian circus where he sees "Honda Man" attack a young Russian woman. The woman later tells Jackson to stay out of it. "Honda man" is Graham's hired thug, Terry Smith. The Russian call-girl turns up at Gloria's with a plan. She has Graham's bank account details and suggests that the two of them go to Switzerland. Smith turns up. Jackson and Martin are there too. Martin kills Terry to stop him killing Tatania and Jackson. Jackson, Gloria and Tatania make their getaways. We finally learn that a girl in Martin's St.Petersburg hotel room hit her head and died. Martin pushed the body out of the window to avoid complications.

At the end Jackson's phone call to Louise tidies up loose ends, though it's a surprise to learn that Bradley had been contracted by Gloria to kill Graham. I thought he might have been hired by Graham to kill Jackson.

The subtitle of the book is "A Jolly Murder Mystery", which describes the spirit it should be read in. Anything for a laugh. For each character we get entertaining potted bios in their own words - parents, jobs, hopes, religion, etc. None of them is phased by deaths. They all easily drift off into detailed fantasies. Their post-war parents are disappointments. Gloria's Xmas description is too long, but that could be said about most of the sections. Once the stage is reach where each revealed fact connects with more than one other, the chain reactions made the book a page-turner.

Other reviews

• Justine Jordan
• Amanda Craig (The narrative technique shuttles between characters' thoughts and perceptions, creating little mysteries that hook the reader into staying with her throughout cascades of apparently unconnected detail. ... Novels about novelists are almost always a mistake, and this one has too many rants about agents and publishers to avoid the impression of self-indulgence wantonly smashing up the careful realism of the rest.)
• bookloverssanctuary
• Kirkus review (There are running jokes and an enjoyable parade of neat resolutions, but no satisfying dénouement. Everything is connected, often amusingly or cleverly, but nothing matters much. A technically adept and pleasurable tale, but Atkinson isn’t stretching herself.)

"Not the end of the world" by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2002)

12 stories, each 20-30 pages long. They share a cast of characters whose opinions (and much less often feelings) are revealed to us via the narrator who rather makes fun of them. The final story's a continuation of the first, I think. I can't work out what most of the stories aim to achieve, or what the allusions to Greek myths are for. "The Cat Lover" for example, seems pedestrian compared to what Angela Carter (or even early Ian McEwan) would do with the idea. "Temporal Anomaly" puzzled me. It's a ghost story, where the ghost ages ("It seemed particularly unfair that she was both dead and getting older"). At the end the ghost comes alive for 6 months (a summer) then sees Hades in his chariot again. OK, but so what? After all, rewrites of Greek myths are common. Towards the end of the last story we get some explanation of the allusions. Within the stories whose plot I don't get (unless their only purpose is to match the myths, or cross-reference to the other stories), there are passages that puzzle me, not least because of the phrasing and repetition, the sudden explicit introduction of Greek, the out-of-nowhere change of topic, though they're lively -

• In the hours between curfew and dawn Charlene listened to the sirens wailing through the night and planned an article on 'Great Tips For Spring Weddings'. She fell asleep with her hand on the Sig Sauer semi-automatic she kept under her pillow and didn't wake until Eosphorus, the morning star, rose and heralded the coming of his mother, Eos, the dawn. (p.31)
• Paternity, in general, wasn't a subject that Addison had ever given much thought to until he found that he was going to be a father himself. When he celebrated his fortieth birthday Addison had neither child nor wife. When he celebrated his forty-first he had both, one inside the other. Every morning when Addison woke up he was surprised anew by these two facts (p.129)
• 'Did you know,' Missy asked Arthur, 'that they can weigh galaxies?'
  'Sie führen mich an,' Arthur said, consulting his phrase book.
  'I'm sorry?'
  'You're pulling my leg,' he laughed, pleased that he knew something that Missy didn't.
  Missy and Arthur were in possession of an extra-ordinary detailed itinerary for the German leg of Boak's tour, prepared by the band's publicist, a girl called Lulu, who, as well as providing flight times, driver details and hotel reservations, had also given two different mobile numbers on which she could be contacted (p.175-6)

Other reviews

• Helen Falconer (Guardian) (when Atkinson started writing at the age of 30, following the birth of her second child, all her literary efforts were short stories - seven years spent filing manuscripts under the bed, before entering the Woman's Own Short Story Competition and shocking herself by scooping first prize.)
• Sara Peannkuche (It is clever without being cutesy and wry without being caustic. ... Though Atkinson may experiment with mythological elements to tell a story, the myths are, in the end, just a tool to explore her central theme of the book: longing ... Main characters in one story show up as peripheral figures in other stories, and yet the reader isn't sure what connects the stories and how they overlap until the very end. And even though the twist at the end is not necessarily innovative, it is used to great advantage to effectively and satisfactorily connect the dots of Atkinson's worlds to produce a single story where nothing is coincidental and everything has a purpose)
• Carol Birch (Independent) (It's very clever, and Kate Atkinson is an erudite and interesting writer with a lovely turn of phrase. However, there are not many more than three or four good stories. ... Atkinson has a love of words and takes delight in the sheer manipulation of them, but mostly these are idea-oriented stories that sacrifice warmth and fail to stick. There is an overload of cross-referencing and the multitudinous cast are, for the most part, so unmemorable that you keep coming over names of people you know you've met before, but can't put an identity to)
• Kirkus review (unparalleled in deftness but in their depth less compelling ... Stories, on balance, that appear above all to love the sound of their own voices)

"Life after life" by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2014)

I've read The Time Traveler's Wife and How to live safely in a science fictional universe. In this book the main character (born 11 Feb 1910) dies several times, starts again, lives several overlapping lives, one of them lasting to June 1967. She's vaguely aware of these other possibilities - "That would have been a quite different life, perhaps a better one. Of course, there was no way of knowing these things" (p.160); "'But at least no one was pushed down the stairs,' Ursula said" (p.576). Molesters, Foxes and Wolves are themes. It's 611 pages long - a page-turner though I could have done without p.370-409, and some other sections.

Other reviews

• Justin Cartwright (Guardian) (This is a wonderful book, but ... The virtuoso creation of home-counties domesticity and the wide-ranging sensitivity of Atkinson's mind – ever alert to voice, to changing times, to the faltering class system, to the horrors of war, to changing styles of dress, and to housekeeping and much more, the literary allusions – really don't require the tricksy bits.)
• Helen Brown (Telegraph) (The intimate echoes of their nicknames and in-jokes pass through the walls of her parallel universes. ... This is Atkinson’s best book to date)
• Goodreads
• Rachel Hore (Independent) (The novels of Kate Atkinson habitually shuffle past and present, but Life After Life takes the shuffling to such extremes that the reader has to hold on to his hat. It's more than a storytelling device. Ursula and her therapist discuss theories of time.)
• Francine Prose (New York Times) (Atkinson’s juggling a lot at once — and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing.)
• Amanda Craig (New Stateman) (Time and memory are at the heart of much of Atkinson’s work. Though she still has a tendency to resort to excessive allusion and literary quotation, she is always funny and humane. ... This is, without doubt, Atkinson’s best novel since her prizewinning debut, 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' ... she has recast her interest in mothers and daughters and the seemingly unimportant, quotidian details of life to produce a big, bold novel that is enthralling, entertaining and experimental. It is not perfect – the second half of the book, for example, could have done with one less dead end )

"Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, 2005)

A slow start as the characters and plots are introduced, and the writing's rather pedestrian initially too. I didnt get into it until beyond page 100. The pace increases as chapters are from different PoVs, sometimes overlapping chronologically.

Because it's a whodunnit one expects all the strands to unite rather than remain in parallel, but there are themes and coincidences. Hints about older men's interest in young girls are scattered - kids parties, beauticians, etc. Fathers and daughters abound. Dogs are women's familiars. A girl on a sheet with a dog is independently seen and given 5 pounds by 2 characters who both think she'll spend it on drugs. Too young to be the missing person - her daughter maybe? One person thinks the take-away service should be monitored while character is a mystery-shopper who tests the take-away. Cakes and death come together more than once - "his face, Jackson had thought at the time, the colour of Wensleydale cheese. He offered them tea and Jackson thought - neither for the first nor for the last time - how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed. Theo had even produced cake from somewhere, saying, 'Cherry and almond, I made it the day before she died. It keeps well.'", p.162

An early obsession with telling us people's ages might be explained by Victor's profession or how the plot turns on knowing people's ages - "Sylvia, thirteen" (p.17) "Rosemary married their father Victor when she was eighteen years old - only five years older than Sylvia was now" (p.18). On p.300 we're given a list of names and ages as preparation for the revelation on p.306 that the street-girl is 25, not 17.

I don't mind red herrings but I felt a little cheated that only at p.186 are we told that Victor interfered with his daughters - earlier we hear about his porn collection, surely an opportunity for the daughters to mention his proclivities.

Other reviews

• Natasha Tripney (readysteadybook)