Not the End of the World

Eddie, a nerdish, neglected 12-year-old, wants

to scramble back down the evolutionary ladder. He wanted gills instead of a clogged-up nose. And scales of silver and pearl instead of his own pale-and-prone-to- dermatitis skin.

A marbled carp in the botanical gardens assures him that he is, as he hoped, more fish than human. In ‘The Cat Lover’, Heidi takes in a stray tom who grows to monstrous proportions; she is delighted when her ultrasound scan reveals a litter of kittens. Marianne, dreaming of Amalfi lemons, is killed on the M9; for six months she hovers, invisible, round her grieving husband and son, unable to do anything except watch daytime TV until a chance encounter with a pomegranate releases her into the land of the living.

Eccentric, certainly. But Kate Atkinson moves with such ease between the real and the impossible that her stories never degenerate into whimsy. She swoops and soars, lassoing myths and dreams and memories with the verve one expects from the author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She uses her writer’s power to reveal the realms just out of our reach. But the revelations are only glimpses.

Has young Arthur’s nanny turned into Artemis with ‘a pack of hounds that bayed and boiled around her silver-sandalled feet’, or are they just running to catch a plane? Has Fielding the dissolute hack caught his doppelganger in flagrante, or has he just had a drink too many? Atkinson does not like to pin anything down.

The 12 stories need to be read as a sequence. Characters pop in and out; details that seem insignificant assume new meaning in a new context. This process of interweaving and repetition helps to anchor the more fanciful tales to the ‘realistic’ ones. The sequence is framed by one story, divided in half, about Charlene and Trudi, young women who shop while the Apocalypse crashes around them. Society is collapsing under the weight of consumer choice. Charlene and Trudi wander along an avenue of honey, a street of tea, while bombs explode. When they can no longer shop, they make lists, play word games, try to remember poetry — anything rather than fall silent. Slowly, food, heat, water, all run out; at the end of the book, the girls lie in each other’s arms, telling stories. Stories are the last things to fail.

‘Nothing dies,’ Charlene whispered in Trudi’s ear. ‘All matter is transformed into other matter.’

For Atkinson, the story-teller’s art effects these transformations. Like Helen Simpson, she takes the straw of everyday existence and spins it into gold. At worst, the prose flounders in a chaos of its own inventiveness. At best — and her best is very, very good — Atkinson flings out her sentences like fireworks in the night sky. Hades overtakes Marianne on the inside lane of the M9, ‘so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms.’ Elsewhere, Boreas

swayed suspension bridges as if they were skipping ropes … The little birds were stripped from the branches and batted like shuttlecocks across Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

This is a writer who really understands the uses of imagination.