What a splendid novel, an extremely thought-provoking treatise on life and death, war and the Fall.
The Todd family, and in particular, Teddy, feature prominently in this book. Born to a well-to-do family of bankers and artists, Teddy is his mothers favorite. An inquisitive, sensitive yet extremely competent boy, he grows up to become a pilot in the RAF during WWII, participating in the strategic bombing offensive. Like many pilots, as the war carried on, he reconciled himself to the very real possibility that there was no life after, that death was a certainty. When the war did end and he was in fact alive and well and capable of carrying on, that life had a sense of unreality or of something that shouldn’t have been.
The book goes backwards and forwards in time, with different narrators and different perspectives adding dimension. Teddy, his wife Nancy, their daughter Viola and then later Viola’s children Sunny and Bertie, even some of the other Todds and Shawcrosses (Nancy’s family) take a turn. It felt so cinematic, getting all the different perspectives, the information being parsed out. My least favorite, though, was Viola; being inside her head was a real test of will. “Keep calm and carry on reading her strident whiny rants because they can’t last forever” was my mantra.
Lovely prose and living breathing characters made this a real joy to read.
Ever-helpful, Dominic offered his guru wisdom, “Man everything’s temporary’.
Unmoveable mountains and the wheeling stars in the heavens, not to mention the face of God, passed through the farmer’s mind, but he was not prone to disputation.
This is the first Kate Atkinson book I’ve ever read and I am looking forward to exploring the companion piece to this, her last novel Life After Life. Taking suggestions on other books in her ouvre :^)
