Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
Posted in Other fiction at 12:00 on 22 August 2024
Doubleday, 1997, 347 p.
This was Atkinson’s second novel and it exhibits many of the traits which would come to dominate her fiction. The family dynamic here is reminiscent of the one in Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and of the Todds in Life After Life and A God in Ruins. In this one our heroine Isobel finds herself slipping backwards and forwards in time and there is here the first adumbration of the thought found in the Todd books that it would be a boon if somehow we could live our lives over again in order to get them right. There is a Scottish flavour; neighbour Mrs Baxter – I was irresistibly reminded of the old soup adverts, especially since her daughter is named Audrey – lards the text with Scots aphorisms, though the prominence here of trees and forests is more of a preoccupation of English fiction. The house Isobel lives in is even called Arden.
We begin with a literary allusion, “Call me Isobel.” Implicitly to compare herself to Herman Melville is quite a statement by Atkinson of confidence in her abilities. But the book as a whole is dense with allusion or references – and also repetition, but repetition with a purpose, not merely saying the same thing over again in slightly different ways. For example, “The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.” There is also a reversal of Tolstoy’s Karenina Principle in, “I suppose all unhappy families resemble one another (but all happy families are happy in their own way of course)” along with the addition of “But then, do happy families exist, or happy endings come to that, outside of fiction?”
After a starting chapter headlined ‘Beginning’ there are several sections each of ‘Present’ and ‘Past’ narratives outlining Isobel’s story, her family’s and Arden’s, before we end with ‘Future’. ‘Beginning’ is a history of the land on which Arden stands ‘Present’ is narrated by Isobel in first person; ‘Past’ is in the third person.
In the ‘Present,’ Isobel (Fairfax) is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl mooning after the desirable Malcolm Lovat who, to Isobel’s chagrin, sees her as a friend. Her father, Gordon, vanished for seven years after mother Elizabeth was said to have absconded ‘with a fancy man’ but the circumstances are barely ever mentioned by their grandmother, the Widow, and the getting on for elderly spinster aunt, Vinny, in both of whose care they have been left. Both Isobel and her brother Charles try to make the most of things. When Gordon returns it is with a new wife.
The three primal motivations in literature, love, sex and death are well to the fore here. Gordon met Elizabeth by rescuing her from a bombed house during the Blitz, “My hero,” and was thereafter besotted by her feminine dazzle (the widow and Vinny are not so easily taken in.) There are incidents of murder and reported incest and Isobel imagines her part in Malcolm’s death over and over again but is unable to prevent it each time. A rational gloss to these experiences and her apparent time travelling is provided as symptoms of possible fly agaric poisoning.
While Human Croquet is exceedingly well written and intricately plotted – as well as diverse – a tangled web of relationships is revealed during the novel, to not all of which is Isobel privy; possibly too many connections between the characters to be fully convincing. (This is a trait I also noticed recently in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.)
The game of Human Croquet, rules and a picture of which act as a three page appendix, is one of the pastimes Isobel has read of from an illustrated book of Home Entertainments. It involves a blindfolded person being aurally guided through hoops formed by two people making an arch between them.
In Human Croquet, the novel, Isobel has no such guide and has to make it on her own. As we all do.
Pedant’s corner:- hot-bed (does it need that hyphen? – ‘hotbed’,) Charles’ (many times Charles’s,) “help me Boab” (at least twice. This Scottish phrase is actually not an invocation to someone called Bob to provide assistance but rather an expression of disbelief or disconcertment, and is written ‘help ma boab’,) Keats’ (Keats’s,) beseeched (an apparently acceptable alternative to ‘besought’.) “‘Who understand them?’” (understands,) “CO2 + 2H 2A + light energy – (CH 2) + H2O) + H2A” (supposedly the equation for photosynthesis. It isn’t. And in any case CO2, H2O and H2A, OHOHO) Zeus’ (Zeus’s,) Ysggadril (Yggdrasil,) “the cries of the baby upsets my” (upset my,) “they bid their mother one last terrible farewell” (they bade their mother,) “less discretely” (not less separately [discretely,] but rather less inconspicuously, ‘less discreetly’,) aureoles (x 2, areolas; or areolae,) “to staunch the throbbing” (stanch,) “would he chose for a consort” (would he choose,) “smoothes the sheets” (smooths,) Glebelands’ (Glebelands’s,) de’el (usually spelled ‘de’il’, or deil,) “the amoeba and bacteria” (if it’s supposed to be plural then ‘amoebae’ – or even amœbae.)
Tags: A God in Ruins, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, Literary Fiction