Kate Atkinson likes to make stories that, long or short, disrupt time and consequences; she deployed the device of a constantly restarting narrative clock to particularly dizzying effect in the novel Life After Life, in which the protagonist, Ursula Todd, sees her trajectory from genteel Edwardian child to a would-be assassin of Hitler splinter into a myriad possibilities. It was the novel’s toughness – the brutal sudden deaths unleashed by the 1918 flu pandemic, or Ursula’s marriage to a violent abuser – that prevented it from dissipating into whimsy and created a more fluid, generative sense of what chance and choice might signify in fictional terms.
Foregrounding the artifice that underlies all imaginative worlds is not, however, to be attempted lightly. It’s a lesson that Franklin, a recurring character in these 11 linked stories written over several years, finds when he embarks on his own Great Novel, a series of “What if?” scenarios governed by chaos theory that quickly collapses into its own chaotic indeterminacy.
