It’s 20 years since Kate Atkinson’s first short story collection, Not the End of the World. She has filled that time with five satisfyingly unusual detective novels; her Costa-winning masterpiece of alternative existences, Life After Life, and its companion A God in Ruins; plus books set around second world war spying (Transcription) and the 1920s criminal underworld (Shrines of Gaiety).
In this new collection, it is the end of the world – repeatedly. In the opening story, The Void, “darkness rolled over the land. At 09.12 GMT on Thursday, 4 May 2028, to be precise.” The short form has always liberated Atkinson to meddle in myth and magic, and here she melds the fabular and the mundane as the universe blinks, the sun winks out, and those in the open are levelled in a “new Pompeii”. The old man at the centre of the story survives because he’s asleep indoors; his granddaughter because she’s nipped into Waitrose to avoid the rain and is wandering the aisles holding a mini watermelon. But then it happens again, and again, until people can set their watches by “the Dark”. With its nice balance of metaphysical finality and narrative open-endedness, The Void is a strong beginning, reminding us that Atkinson has the control and charm to do with fiction whatever she fancies.
And there’s a fanciful flavour to the mixed bag of stories that follow. Atkinson said of her first collection that as she wrote the individual pieces, “thin, spider web-like connections began to form”. The stories here are linked and layered in ways that range from the illuminating to the compulsive. A character from one section will pop up in another. A fairytale bleeds into reality. Talking horses and noncommittal dogs recur; “Kitty” is sometimes the spirit of a murdered woman, sometimes the sister of God, and sometimes simply a cat.
We are in an alternative England where the princes are Kenneth and Alfie rather than William and Harry (with a “crazy paedo cousin” third in line). The central recurring character is the attractive but aimless Franklin, real name Faustus, who worries that he lacks a heart and soul (perhaps he has sold it to the author). Franklin long ago gave up on his “Great Novel” based on chaos theory, with a narrative endlessly bifurcating at every decision point. “Ad infinitum,” he tells a woman at a party. “Ad nauseam,” she replies.
Atkinson is having fun at her own expense here, but she’s still riddling away at the conundrum of possibility versus fate that drove the rebooting narrative of Life After Life. There she repeatedly truncated storylines with the words “Darkness fell” – this collection is far from the first time she has wielded the Void.
Franklin puzzles in a slightly desultory manner over these and other existential questions (“If you were a sandwich, which sandwich would you be?”). The digressive looseness of his first story only begins to make sense once we meet him again, and follow his courtship with no-nonsense Connie. In between, we are treated to an “Ur-fairytale” (Spellbound); a journey through the afterlife (Blithe Spirit); a sub-George Saunders tale of toys suffering under the totalitarian regime of their young owner (Existential Marginalisation); and the very surprising midlife of a woman trying to make the best of things, mostly through the use of enthusiastic exclamation marks. Shine, Pamela! Shine! is sweetly, sharply funny about disappointment and online dating. “Pamela hardly ever came across a man with a sense of humour and yet the internet was apparently teeming with them.”
Atkinson is known for her vivid historical writing, and the notional present in this collection is oddly 20th century. Men are “chaps”, and crowd scenes full of “knaves” and “riff raff”. Pubs or bars are “watering holes”. A teenager describes her schoolmates in the most old-fashioned way imaginable: “veterans of the selfie, pouting and posing as if their lives depended on it. A trivial pursuit.” Someone does indeed say, “More tea, vicar?” Everything smells of violets. Much of this is intentionally destabilising, and in the brilliantly freewheeling story Gene-sis, in which God’s sibling Kitty goes on a world-building spree, the antiquated air is casually justified in one metaphysical aside; but it does give the book a fusty feel.
Atkinson has always toyed with cliche and shop-worn phrases (“so many cliches, so little time”, as she puts it here). They appear as playful winks to the reader, in the habitual bracketed asides that subvert and undercut her narrative surfaces. “Judging by the sun (would you want to be? Would he be fair?), it was getting on for four o’clock,” we’re told in Gene-sis, as Kitty dreams new worlds into becoming and eyes up the V&A’s jewellery collection. “She had a bit of magpie in her. Also some Indian elephant, a morsel of bat, a scrap of sloth and a few strands of wolf …” This is a collection of scraps and strands, loosely bound together, as though Atkinson is only tinkering with the worlds she creates and curtails.
• Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
