The novel. The novel and the nature of telling stories is sort of what is going on in this book. The basic gist, without giving away too much is a young woman is telling a story, which may be true or may be a novel she's working on, to a woman who may be her mother or may not be. The story is about a few weeks in the winter of 1972 at a college in Dundee, Scotland. The narrator is an English major (is that what they call them over there across the pond?) who is writing a detective novel for a creative writing class, so the story breaks every now and then to have some of the awful student novel given in the text. Along with the interjection of this novel within the story, the 'real world' intrudes on the text too, with dialogue between the narrator and the woman who may or may not be her mother, and to give one last tweak to the stories within stories structure the woman who may or may not be the narrator's mother has her own story to tell. The characterisation is exceptional. There are a lot of characters but in this author’s capable hands it matters not a jot as with a few deft strokes they are visible. I love Gwendolen, she’s one smart cookie as is Ma as you find you have no choice but to admire her guile and manifold abilities. You have to get up very early in the morning to catch her out and even then she’s probably two jumps ahead of you!! What a woman!!! Here's the thing. I really enjoyed 'Case Histories,' and was looking forward to reading Human Croquet. Anticipated it. But worse than the strain of juggling academia with motherhood was the moment her PhD - on the American short story - was refused at its viva. Atkinson believes interdepartmental politics played their part, and the injustice still rankles. At the time, she retreated into herself; now, she regards it as the making of her. "Your life is made by the failures in it, not the successes," she says. "And I wouldn't have become a writer without failing my doctorate." This is in many ways a very odd book, but it was exactly my kind of odd. My family and I have always played word games and twisted phrases around on themselves, so Isobel’s narration reads rather like I think. The text is peppered with her humorous asides in which she pokes fun at herself: "He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead, ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs. I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ — more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire."

And dozens of situational vignettes where Atkinson lampoons excruciating tutorial sessions, earnest women’s lib meetings, grotty student accommodation, deathly faculty parties and so on. Bob is also reluctantly enrolled in a philosophy course which lets Atkinson have a bit of fun with propositional logic. Stuff like that. It's a dream (or halucination) we and we arent' told it's a dream until the very end of the book. It's not real. And it's a cheat.

If that were all it was, it wouldn’t be much. But the post-modern pisstake is merely a framework to hang a much more humane and observational humour. The story is about a girl and her mother, a book she is writing and a story she is telling. Or somethng like that – it takes a little while for the sense of it all to bed in, but then that is all part of the fun. The bulk of the words are taken up by the goings on of a group of English Lit students in Scotland. The setting is Dundee University in the 1970s. I did my own university time in New Zealand in the 1980s, but given what we know about the warped nature of space and time, that’s pretty much the same place. It all felt very familiar. The only oddity, then, was the title. Nobody seemed all that emotionally weird to me, at least no more so than normal. What conclusion are we supposed to take from that? I like it here, it's more restful than the present, wherever that is. I shall gather nuts and berries and make myself a nest in the hollow of a tree and become as nimble as a squirrel in my great sylvan home. Does this forest have an end, does it have distinct boundaries, where the trees stop, or does it go on forever, curling like a leafy shawl around the earth, making an infinity of the great globe?" He had tried, God help him, to chat and prattle about the weather or horse-racing, even films, but he ended up sounding like a poor amateur actor”. Isobel Fairfax, the heroine of ''Human Croquet,'' is an omniscient narrator who, paradoxically, often hasn't a clue about what has really happened. Like Ruby Lennox, the droll narrator of ''Behind the Scenes at the Museum,''

Have you ever read a comedy of manners that involves time travel? Or a Gothic novel that takes place in the 1960s? Or a coming-of-age story whose rites of passage include meeting Shakespeare, witnessing several murders, burning down a house, and turning into a tree? No, it’s more involved than that: for example, Nora’s sister turns up in Effie’s tale before Effie even knows who she is; elements of magical realism and all that. Also, Effie is taking a Creative Writing course, where her assignment is a detective novel featuring a “Madam Astarti”, and elements of that story are intertwined too. Ironically, the Astarti story is stilted and full of clichés, just as you’d expect a novice might write.’

Book Review: Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

But Bruce Katz (Goodreads great guy) is absolutely right —this book is certainly more like “A God in Ruins” than “Life After Life”…..

mother and onetime chambermaid from Edinburgh. (Never mind her degree in English literature.) One of the Whitbread judges even had the temerity to suggest that Atkinson had written a post-modern novel but might not know it.To be honest there was a section in the middle where I would have given up if I'd been the sort of person who gives up on books, this only happens when they are very,very dire. This certainly wasn't that, the writing was proficient and it was well edited and so on, but it was so gloomy and a bit depressing to be honest.

go right'' -- burned down in 1605). Shakespeare-steeped readers might suspect Atkinson of alluding to the play ''Arden of Feversham,'' about the 1551 murder of Thomas Arden, which was published in 1592 and She is the author of a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World, and of the critically acclaimed novels Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird, Case Histories, and One Good Turn. hen Kate Atkinson's first novel was named the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year in Britain, equal attention was paid to the failure of Salman Rushdie's

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Tags: Elizabethan times, Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson, literary fiction, magic realism, mystery, war-time England