First, let me begin by saying that I quite liked Kate Atkinson's second novel, HUMAN CROQUET. But when I started the book, I was not sure what I was getting into. I had read little to nothing about the book save for the fact that it is good and one should read it. Great. So I was unprepared for the genre-defying story that followed. Mystery, ghost story, time traveling story, teenage girl diary story, crime story, chronicle of life in both the 1500s and the 1960s, a story about the plight of women and feminism, with a few moments of Kafka-esque human-creature metamorphoses,... well, it seems to be all these in turns. And the turns get along just fine thanks to Atkinson's writing and continuity of character.
Sixteen year old Isobel and her little brother Charles are stuck in a tiny English town (the beckoning yet forbidding forest at the edge of this town acts as a silent character and witness) in a dour house with their impotent and mopy father, their perky but hallucinating step-mother, and their chain-smoking grumpy aunt. But more than these who are close to them, it is their absent mother, disappeared for many years, whose presence they feel most keenly.
Despite the unexpected shifting of reality and the shifting of time, the book never feels like science fiction, but the study of an interior condition of the human soul. Many souls. The most harrowing passages in the book are about the violence directed at women by men who exercise their arbitrary patriarchal authority with ferocious glee…it is a world where the emotional evisceration of a woman by her husband is almost as bad or even worse than the random, casual backhand a husband gives his wife’s face. Yes, it is our world in this book, a true world, a real world… despite the fantastical elements running throughout the story.
As the time travel and shifting reality ratchets up to a crescendo toward the end of the novel, I felt as anxious and unmoored as Isobel must have felt. But the story does come to a sort of conclusion… except, when I was done and looked back on aspects of the story I realized that the explanation we are given cannot be true. So we are left with some ambiguities, but they are lovely ambiguities, just like the uncertainty we feel every day of our own real lives.
Recommend? Yes. It is a story by a marvelous storyteller.
PS—The title refers to a party game in which people act as hoops, balls, and players of a lawn croquet game. Although the game is never played in the story, it is referred to several times in wistful tones as something that groups of people do in better times, when they are happy. One could reason that the game of human croquet plays out even when no suspects it is.
http://www.kateatkinson.co.uk/
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