 |
Dundee Disclaimer The University of Dundee portrayed in this book (and especially the Departments of English and Philosophy) bears little resemblance to real life, past or present. Neither are any of the characters portrayed based on anyone real, either living or dead." So says the disclaimer at the front of Kate Atkinson's latest novel, Emotionally Weird. It's that word "little" that sticks. Not "none", one notices with a little spike of stress hormone and a slight drying of the saliva. Little.
The long awaited campus novel - plans for which were first revealed in the University's alumni magazine GC as long ago 1996 - follows the overwhelming success of Kate's first two books, Whitbread Prize winner, Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet. Between them they have sold some 800,000 copies world wide. When she talked about the novel then, Kate said: "No you should not expect to see university people you know appearing in the book. Absolutely not." This was qualified by the slightly less comfortable: "The genesis of characters is often real people but then they change in the process of writing so they become unrecognisable." Hmm. It makes you feel, well, emotionally weird. Emotionally Weird has been a long time in the writing. Set in 1970s Dundee, when Kate herself was a student of English at the University - she graduated in English Literature in 1974 - it follows the story of Effie who "lives a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed and to whom Klingons are as real as the French and the Germans (more real than the Luxemburgers)". We asked Dr David Robb, head of today's department of English - a department which was recently named number one in the UK for the teaching of English - for his reaction to the book: "First I skimmed through it rather nervously to check that I didn't find myself appear as a character. Then I flicked through it again to see if I thought that any other people in the department in the 1970s (when I was an extremely young and new lecturer!) were in it - but couldn't see anything that might stand up in a court of law. So then I relaxed, read the book properly, and greatly enjoyed it. It strikes me as the most light-hearted of her novels so far, an entertainment in which the sheer fun of writing is uppermost. That fun will be most readily appreciated by anyone who knows Dundee and (even more) by anyone who remembers the University in those days. The novel will clearly have many more readers than that, however, and will be enjoyed by anyone who responds to Kate's lively wit." |
