“A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we wake from dreams.“ – Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature

It wasn’t just the one lark that had been silenced by Izzie…It was the generations of birds that would have come after it and now would never be born. All those beautiful songs that would never be sung. Later in life he learned the word ‘exponential’, and later still the word ‘fractal’, but for now it was a flock that grew larger and larger as it disappeared into a future that would never be.

He felt relief when the overcrowded train finally pulled slowly away from the platform, glad to be leaving the dirty wreckage of London. There was a war on. After all and he was supposed to be fighting it. He discovered the little wrinkled apple [From Fox Corner] in his pocket and ate it in two bites. It tasted sour when he had expected it to be sweet.

Why did you have children? Bertie asked, later in their lives. ‘Was it just the biological imperative to breed?’

‘That’s why everyone has children,’ Viola said, ‘they just dress it up as something more sentimental.’

I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too…Every time a writer throws themselves at the first line of a novel they are embarking on an experiment. An adventure.

Thus opens Kate Atkinson’s companion work to her much acclaimed Life After Life . While the earlier work focused on The Blitz, Germany’s prolonged bombing of London and other English cities during World War II, this one looks at the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, first against strategic resources and later targeting civilians. As the Todd family was employed as our eyes on the earlier stages of the war, so, again, it is the Todds through whose eyes we experience war and its effects, just not the same Todds. Ursula, the star of Life After Life , is a bit player here. The focus this time is Ursula’s beloved younger brother Ted. Not merely the good-hearted, kind-natured boy of the prior book, Ted is all grown up and a pilot, flying many bombing missions over the continent. Life After Life was an adventure of imagining alternate possible outcomes from specific acts and trying each of them out, playing the same hand different ways. There is no fantasy element in this book, or at least not nearly to the same degree. But that does not mean that Atkinson has settled into a sequential narrative form. There are very non-sequential stops up and down the 20th century and even into the 21st. From 1925 when Teddy is still a kid, enduring the third degree from his writer aunt, to 1944 when he takes off on his last mission. From the immediate post war era to 1993 when he is packed off to a senior residence. From his early married life in 1951 to events in 2012.- from the Daily MailAnd, as with Life After Life , Atkinson offers us multiple viewpoints. While we primarily see events through Ted, we also see the world from the perspective of his daughter and grandchildren, from his aunt Izzie. Mysteries in one view are sometimes clarified in another. The time tracks, heard together, make a symphony. This event, in this time, impacts that result in another, which generates a further outcome in a third. Solo instruments joined to make a glorious sound.It is not just the military struggle, and its collateral affect that Atkinson examines. She has a keen eye for change. The sexual revolution in permissiveness and acceptance that accompanies war, the development of sylvan fields into cookie cutter housing tracts, the counter-culture, or at least one manifestation of it, holding up images of diverse eras side by side.Avian imagery permeates. The most poignant, for me, is when young Ted rues the loss to generations to come from his aunt having consumed a single skylark, a potent symbol for the lives extinguished in war, the lost possibilities, reminding us ofby GM Hopkins.A budgy with a clipped wing stands in for one character’s feeling of imprisonment. There are plenty of ups and downs to accompany the feathered ones. As Ted is a pilot, he heads up into the air and down again as many times. At a Beethoven concert the elevation brought on by pure beauty is palpable.- from the TelegraphAnother element that carries through is a consideration of nature, and our connection to it. Ted personifies this impulse, sensitive to beauty in the natural world since childhood. He writes a nature column for a local newspaper as an adult. Through his sad eyes we see the loss of much that was precious through the development of the post war era, and rue, with him the decline in appreciation. Ted, in his nature column, bemoans the near extinction of the water vole.Atkinson says, in the author’s note that follows the text of the novel in the copy I read, that she is writing aboutThere are, throughout the novel, as she notes,Ted’s daughter lives with her kids and their father for a time, for example, at a commune called Adam’s Acre.He returns to Fox Corner for a visit late in life, but it is now closed to him.A lot of attention is paid to marriage and relationships, particularly to coping when the match looks perfect on the surface, pre-ordained even, but lacks the passion of great love. Wedlock that seems, whether in its inception or subsequent practice, more lock than wed. And alongside that is a look at parenting. Many of the parental sorts here are no better to their progeny than the powers that be were to their young soldiers. Parents do not come off all that well overall, as was the case in Life After Life . Ted’s daughter Viola is an extremely poor excuse for a parent, selfish from birth and traumatized by a loss in her youth, she offers Ted none of the parental rewards his years of sacrifice should have earned him.Atkinson dips into poetry more than a few times, sprinkling her attention around. GM Hopkins of course, with his vision of the eternal in the natural, is an obvious choice for relating to Ted’s appreciation for and wonder at the beauty of nature. Keats, Blake, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and more. There is even a passage late in the book that joins lines from seven poems from six poets. Have your search engines warmed and ready.Atkinson, having set aside the funof Life After Life , contains herself until the end when she offers commentary on authorial prerogatives, imagining different outcomes for her characters, imagining lives that might have been, the god of her created domain.So, a lot on the mechanisms, but isworth reading? Absolutely. Ted is a very engaging character and, even though his stiff upper lip may get in the way from time to time, he is a decent sort, a good man, easy to care about. Atkinson lets us peek past some of the outer armor on some of the less appealing characters to see what made them the way they are, and leaves you thinking that if you had known that information earlier you might have been more sympathetic to this one or that. And offers a chance to consider how you might have acted faced with those circumstances. There is one particularly large reveal near the end that explains a lot about one character in particular. Yes, engaging, moving. You will learn a bit about the massive bombing of Germany that was going on during the war, and a bit about how the war affected life on the homefront. Atkinson shows us changes in English life from the war to now, changes in her people, and over the course of her narrative she changes how we see them.could easily be seen as. Most writers would be happy to have written one masterpiece. WithKate Atkinson has written a second. If you don’t read this book you may not be cast out of Eden, but you probably should be.Posted 1/8/16Published date - 5/5/2015 (hc) – 1/12/16 (TP)=============================Links to the author’s personal and FB pagesVideo of a Halifax bomber – ignition and liftoff



Kate Atkinson Tells Book Club How She Crafts Characters At All Life Stages -from NPRReaders’ group guide A wiki on Kibbo Kift , a scouting alternative group noted in the bookMy review of Todd Family #1, Life After Life