Not the End of the World

"I’ve been dreaming about the end of the world, a common dream that takes many forms" - Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

Charlene and Trudi are shopping. In a food hall as big as a small city there is everything anyone could possibly want to eat; teas alone have a whole street devoted to them, with every variety one could possibly want to drink. They look at the labels, savouring their exoticism, rolling the words round in their imagination, tasting their scent. As they walk down the aisles of this capitalist cornucopia, they draw up lists of things they think they need: bigger breasts, or smaller ones, thinner ankles, a cat as big as a man, a dog, perhaps a Borzoi ("what a great word"), men in uniform, a baby, a perfect wedding.

Shelf after shelf bombards them with choice. Broadcloth and butter muslin, brocade, brocatelle, buckram and Botany wool. And, as Trudi points out, that’s just the Bs.

So they stroll round, mildly put out by the absence of the shop assistants, wondering why haberdashery is such an oddly beautiful word, trying and failing to find Trudi a pair of haute couture black trousers. Their conversation is casual, inconsequential. So is the violence all around them.

A bomb goes off softly in the distance. Mobile phone masts are melting, there are earthquakes, curfews, exploding ATM machines, snipers on the streets, houses boarded up with the plague. Fires are started and bloom through the department store. Charlene and Trudi don’t seem too bothered by any of this. Trudi wonders if the shop assistants in haberdashery will wrap themselves in their fabrics and if these will unspool as they throw themselves out of the windows, but she doesn’t really care: it’s just another image flashing across a mind sated with superficiality, unable or unwilling to take it in.

Only a clumsy writer would highlight this dissonance between perception and reality, and Atkinson is one of the most adroit, imaginative and subversive of the breed. So it makes perfect sense that Charlene and Trudi, a wedding magazine journalist and a publishers’ publicist, are our apocalyptic everywomen, still wrapped up in their own world as its fabric frays all around them. When you’re looking for a wedding bonbonnière, after all, terrorism is just too tiresome. We don’t know what causes all these explosions around town, because they don’t matter, not half as much as working out which brightly optimistic cocktail to order in the last chance saloon.

This is only the first of 12 in Atkinson’s dazzling collection of short stories, but every terrorist atrocity since it was written (9/11, the Washington sniper, the Moscow massacre) wedges it deeper in the reader’s mind. It stays there too, for this is impassive surrealism at its best: not po-faced, not pretentious, but exploding with mood-making inventiveness and Atkinson’s trademark dark wit.

For a flavour of the rest of the book, try judging it by its cover. On the front is a sharply stylised Ionian-columned Greek temple; on the back, an equally solidly suburban semi. Between the two, in a series of subtly linked stories, Atkinson offers us a work in which banished ancient myths reinvade distinctly modern psyches.

An example of this is when Marianne is driving along the M9, in the rain and the gloaming light, when "Hades leant out of his chariot and punched a hole in the windscreen of her Audi" - although like Persephone, she is allowed six months away from the kingdom of death.

There’s a huge, zestful confidence about Atkinson’s mythic retooling of contemporary life, which is no more than you would expect from the woman who gave us Ruby the talking foetus in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Reaching back into myths and fables, she takes the short story to new and playful levels of inventiveness without losing any of its essential nuances. While the classically educated may delight in playing spot-the-god, the Olympians seldom stride in full view onto the page.

Sometimes they fade into invisibility, the way gods do, and there are other intricate trails to follow across the stories: a non-committed lover, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, small but delightful threads of word games webbing across even the most apparently unconnected tales. And even when they don’t, when the dreamy/mythic edge dissolves into tragi-comic realism, the caricatures are invariably drawn with hilarious accuracy.

But no sooner do Atkinson’s stories take you through the nuts and bolts of human unhappiness, of stagnant relationships and smart-ass teenage shoplifters, than you come across something like this:

"Meredith was due to fly to London on Saturday morning. On the Friday, she discovered the secret of eternal life. This was how it happened ..."

And off you go again, following Atkinson’s wonderfully unpredictable imagination, into worlds where cats do grow as big as men, and boys can talk to carp and eternal life is available, at a pinch, if you know what you’re looking for.

Finally, at the world’s end, we are back with Charlene and Trudi. They are in their flat, unable to get out because their house has been boarded up and marked with the sign of the plague. The gods, who have been messing with most of the lives we have read about, have departed the city, and all that the two women have left are stories. For when all the games are played out, all the shops are shopped-out and all our lives are almost lived-out, stories like these - of change and range, with odd echoes all the way back to ancient times - are all we have left.