Kate Atkinson’s unclassifiable novels could be seen as a succession of cartwheels: now upside down, now vertical, in endless motion, teetering on imbalance, adjusted in the nick of time. Or not. Atkinson’s element is speed. That said, it is a very British speed. Open her novels, adjust your reading. Her latest, Our Noble Selves , is the full cartwheel.
The novel follows Harry Flynn, a sometime London journalist, now – as with half the world – back from World War II. Harry had been one of the millions presumed dead; at times he presumes he might be, wonders why he isn’t, or simply thinks: why not? Women don’t seem to notice anything odd about Harry, though he has no idea why they like him so much – which is obviously part of the appeal.
Harry is the sort of man Atkinson specialises in: believable, yearnable, imbued with charm both sexual and otherwise. Perhaps he has Trevor Howard’s voice in Brief Encounter . The novel opens around the time that film arrived in cinemas. But charm, sexual or otherwise, natural or manufactured, won’t keep a man upright. And Harry likes to drink. The trouble is that it makes him blot out his memory. Drinking is, after all, the obvious root of blotto.
Harry, captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, was a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma Railway. Not that anyone will ever know, because he sees no point in speaking about those years. Returned men and women acknowledged the unspeakable through a mutual silence. There is nobility in not saying how much a human soul can endure. Yet not saying, like nobility, is an old-fashioned virtue. Perhaps it is the result of cauterised emotion? Or perhaps it is simply being British?
Five years after the end of the war, Harry is editing an anthology of poems for the entirely marvellous Festival of Britain which is to occur in 1951. Devised by the Labour government to celebrate the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Festival of Britain embodied the idea of shrugging away the war years and installing hope in a future. The aim was to find pride in the details of a specifically British life. As Harry’s boss, Gerald Barry (Atkinson uses the historical figure), says: “This is our story… Our love of country, love of freedom, love of nature, pride in craftsmanship, our reputation for tolerance and fair play. Farming, industry and science – production rather than products. Harry listens but privately thinks: All this for a summer festival? It sounded exhausting. And such faith in a brave new world.”
The poems are routinely awful, leaving Harry time for other corners of the festival: pageantry, homes and gardens, beauty parades, fashion and cooking – which proves especially eccentric. There is some absorbing office politics as well, alongside lovely glimpses of friendship, even if Harry’s private life remains dismal. Atkinson cartwheels all over the place, and such is her skill that the droll frequently turns dazzling. Now and again, though, you might feel as if you are staring at an upside-down head between two flailing arms, shouting at you: “Keep up! Keep up!”
Keeping up is both entertaining and provoking as you register the underpinnings of human life. These arrive as stills frozen out of the surface pageant, lively with details any curious reader might want to pursue. Atkinson is an historical novelist whose brain teems with the ordinary particulars of the last century; Our Noble Selves can be read simply for the sheer texture of how life felt during those grim years, when a country tried to recover from the shock of the war.
It can also be read as a vanishing-woman mystery, if that is your fancy. Harry? A murderer? Mmmm. Or it can be taken as straight history, charting the miraculous Festival of Britain in the very nation that invented pageantry – as anyone who has read Mapp and Lucia or tuned into Midsomer Murders understands without needing a word of explanation.
In an afterword, Atkinson says she originally intended to write a novel about the experience of the POWs on the Burma-Siam Railway but, tough as she is, she could not go on. The experience of real men, in a real hell, felt exploitative, and she was intending a relatively light-hearted novel. So she turned her head away and wrote something different. But she recommends J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip for those who want to know what the word harrowing might mean to people like charming Harry. She’s right. But if Farrell is too inconvenient, Our Noble Selves might strike exactly the right note in these not-quite harrowing days.
Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday ($35).
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