A home, a haven, something worth living for and something worth fighting for, something worth dying for, and what does it all mean -- that’s been the scope of my reading this summer.
Kate Atkinson’s brilliant Life After Life posited the notion that a woman could live several variations of a life, with varying outcomes, until she got it right. Ursula Todd is born again and again, eventually realizing more about what has been happening to her, and willing a final variation. Her goal is to save her younger brother, Teddy, who grows up to be one of the brave RAF pilots in World War II.
A God in Ruins is a companion novel is about Teddy's war and his life afterward. Neither are as idyllic as the Todd childhood home. Fox's Corner is in that English countryside dear in the imaginations of so many, regardless of how much of it ever existed. And in both of these novels, Atkinson brings it brilliantly to vivid life. While
Life After Life had strong setpieces about the Blitz,
A God in Ruins features what it was like for RAF pilots. Both books are remarkable historical fiction in bringing the past to modern readers.
Teddy's life -- marrying his childhood friend Nancy; having only one child, Viola, who seems the most ungrateful of children and the most selfish of mothers when she has two of her own; the married life Teddy and Nancy create in the kind of England that Teddy was fighting for, in the countryside of Yorkshire writing weekly nature columns and living in a small, gloriously unglamorous cottage -- is that beautiful country life that is difficult to maintain in post-war England.
Viola's story demonstrates how different life was for children of her generation. She is symbolic of the children growing up after the war in the long years of Britain’s austerity with parents who remembered the going without during the war. It doesn’t make sense to Viola and she rebels. Then she’s helpless when it comes to caring for her children. She didn’t feel loved after her mother died, despite the devoted care Teddy gave her, and she isn’t equipped to love her children or care for them properly. (Information later in the novel goes a long way toward explaining Viola.)
In Teddy's post-war life, he tries to do the right thing but it involves the loss of life. It's his war experience writ small, and recalls a conversation Teddy and Ursula had during the war. Unexpectedly on leave, Teddy shows up in London and goes to the Proms with Ursula, where they hear Beethoven. Teddy defends the killing he and the other pilots do, whether it involves civilians or not. It's a greater evil they are trying to prevent and, anyway, how can anyone question fighting the Nazis? He always tried to do the best he could, committing evil acts for the greater good.
Ursula looks beyond the war. Is there any way that mankind could truly become brothers, she wonders?
149 Squadron Wellington bomber pilot and co-pilot
At the end of the novel, a successful Viola seeks out her son Sonny, who she has not seen for 10 years. He is a guru half a world away. She tries to enter his world and takes his classes. There is that moment of zen that feels earned, and one that it would have been good to have seen for other characters.
Back in England, a very old Teddy is dying in bed, his other beloved grandchild by his side. Bertie is the character who most loves the things that Teddy loved, and the one who also seems the most stable and content even when she yearns for better. Bertie’s daydreams go back to that idyllic England. She will meet a lovely doctor on the Westminster Bridge, marry him and have twins (talk about revising one of the worst lives Ursula lived).
Even with its sad spots, Teddy's life has been a bit of a fairy tale, a small-scale Camelot. Then the fairy tale ends. Some readers will heave a sigh at the beauty and grace with which Atkinson ends her story. But not all readers will feel that way. Some will feel cheated, even though an author's note at the end of the novel says she didn't mean it that way; she meant this as a gift.
English counryside
However, a larger point can be taken from Atkinson's fairy tale. In a section while he was still at war, Teddy resolves to be kind. And that's how Atkinson aligns her story and where it may have the strongest tie to
Life After Life -- that how we live our lives matters even if we cannot control the outcome. Or what others do. Or what the whole rest of the world manages to do to each other. That even if it may not seem possible, the ideal of mankind becoming becoming brothers is an idea worth upholding. And, in the meantime, there are signs of spring to seek out each year.
The signs of coming home.
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