Human Croquet

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In Soho, London, Nellie Coker is queen of all she surveys - successful owner of a string of nightclubs, she’s a ruthless character - knows what she wants, and also gets what she wants! She’s extremely shrewd, has a good business head, and is determined and ambitious enough to want the best education that money can buy for her six children - her nightclubs provide the means for those ambitions.

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." Here's the thing. I really enjoyed 'Case Histories,' and was looking forward to reading Human Croquet. Anticipated it. In places the writing is wonderfully noir, and there are sections which are pure farce. (The best parts are where Kate Atkinson is noir and funny at the same time.) I especially loved the section in which Isabel, thesixteen year old heroine attends a party at which Malcolm the object of her affections is present. There are several different versions of this party, each one more horrific than its predecessor. Thirty years later, Joanna is now Dr Joanna Hunter, a successful GP in Edinburgh with a baby, married to Neil, a local businessman. For a nanny, Joanna hires 16-year-old Reggie, whose mother has recently drowned on holiday and who is taking private tutoring for her Greek and Latin A-levels from terminally ill born-again Christian Ms MacDonald. Reggie has no experience with small children ("What was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could identify with all of that"), but the fit is a comfortable one for both her and Dr Hunter, despite Reggie's need to keep drug-dealing brother Billy away from her working life. The hallucinatory aspects of ''Human Croquet'' begin to overwhelm the sensibilities of the narrative toward the end, when Isobel's omniscience ranges disturbingly (and perhaps unnecessarily) into the future. Not every reader will

As always, Atkinson's work is character driven, the writing deliciously leisurely. I love her use of parenthesized asides; they are at times acerbically witty. She writes what I often think, or how I think. (Is there a difference?) Why has a crowd of well dressed toffs and some early shift workers gathered outside Holloway Prison so early one morning in 1926? It’s for ‘her’ - the her in question being Ma (Nellie/Ellen) Coker, the Queen of Clubs, the shrines of post war gaiety as she’s released from a six month stint inside. Watching Ma leave and the crowd disperse is DCI John Frobisher and he has a plan and Gwendolen Kelling, a librarian from York finds herself in the midst of it all. Isobel has a brother named Charles, who is fascinated by topics generally regarded as science fiction. His particular interests center on alien abductions. This may be due in part to the disappearance of Charles and Isobel's mother, Eliza, when they were young. They also lost their father, Gordon, for a seven-year period immediately following the disappearance of their mother.

Crime never sleeps — it was quite easy to be killed on the streets of London either by accident or design”.I warn you: this one takes a while to get going. Which is not such a surprise once you realize there are approximately 15 main characters. There's at least 5 plots, probably more like 8 or 10, which sounds unmanageable but it's surprisingly breezy. Reading it felt a lot like an extremely well plotted prestige tv series, where you spend the first two episodes planting a lot of seeds and learning who everyone is, then you get to just watch it go from there. later ''with a different wife altogether.'' Small children at the time, Isobel and her older brother, Charles, were left with Gordon's sour old mother, a k a the Widow, now deceased; her death was another traumatic Beneath their costumes people could be anyone, their intentions anything. It was a frightening idea.

It isn’t a bad book, and I liked Emotionally Weird a little more after I’d reflected on it myself; it was clever if nothing else. But I think it would have been much better if it had been shorter. 'Nuff said?’

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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. The latter chapters provide additional historical accounts of the Fairfax family, and in a final chapter, Isobel reveals what happened to all of the principle characters. Through all of the delightful twists and turns, Isobel delivers a deeper message about the nature of imagination. is an elusive task. Atkinson has a deft ability to convey that quality of simultaneous knowing and not knowing that is fundamental to human thought. In this way, both her novels feature a Muriel Sparkish motif of the narrative voice alternately Of course, the world in which Nellie Coker exists is a very dangerous one, there’s always someone wanting to take the very lucrative crown, and so it is, that Nellie’s empire comes under threat from various sources, including enemies at the gates and also within the walls! All the world and time is Atkinson’s stage, and this is certainly an ambitious and clever novel that offers alternative readings of not only scenes, but characters’ interpretations of events. What the reader accepts is up to her or him, but nothing is predictable.

As the 1960s unfolded, Atkinson submitted readily to the work ethos of the single-sex Queen Anne Grammar School in York, where her parents ran a medical- and surgical-supplies shop. By the time she left home for Dundee University and an English degree, she was ready to break away, but clueless as to what she might find. "I knew nothing about life," she says, "I didn't even know where Dundee was." No, though at times the dialogue between them is. Nora is a reluctant storyteller, but sometimes interrupts Effie to tell her what’s “wrong” with her tale – too many characters (which is true), an improbable turn of events or a character killed off (which Nora says you can’t do in a comic novel) - and Effie obliges by changing her story to suit.’ 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. I loved the setting, as Atkinson captures the feeling of 1920s London. From the gritty streets to the posh clubs to the dirty underbelly of the elite, I was transported. In addition, there are drugs, mob wars, the sex trade, the chase of fame and fortune, and murder to contend with.

That trauma beaten, Atkinson set to in earnest, and her much-vaunted "overnight success" followed swiftly. She was spotted by an agent, landed herself a book deal and wrote Behind the Scenes in three months. "I never had a qualm about it," she remembers. "I had great confidence in that book." But if the reading public - half a million of them, in this country alone - loved her multi-generational family saga, the media scrum had other ideas. The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho's nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency - the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs - that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again. Gwendolen Kelling survived WWI….she worked as a nurse. She came to London to help John Frobisher look for the missing girls — and worked in the local library.