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.
It transpires that Franklin has a rather greater talent for the quest-based structure of the video game, on to which he maps the classic novels of Austen and Eliot in order to attract the untapped market of middle-aged women. Eventually, this lightbulb moment of creativity even frees him from work on the popular soap opera Green Acres, which similarly enthrals the same demographic. Young ladies in bonnets looking for husbands and lurid TV melodramas ablaze with infidelity and catastrophe all end up pointing towards the same audience, Atkinson seems to suggest, both with asperity and her tongue in her cheek.
Before Franklin’s final success, however, he is plagued by misfortune: his famous racing-driver father is killed on the track and his louche mother, frequently implicated in “top-drawer sleaze” scandals, is not to be relied on. When he imagines he might have found stability by marrying a sturdy netball player, in a story entitled The Indiscreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he finds himself framed for the murder of her tyrannical father by her mother and two sisters. More encouragingly, he meets a talking racehorse who advises him where to place his stake.
This last detail is not the only example of Atkinson playing fast and loose with reality: elsewhere, a fairytale queen meets a wizened witch and is thereafter both charmed and cursed; a ragtag assemblage of toys comes to life, and their merciless owner is swiftly dispatched; the creation of the universe is reimagined as if it were carried out by an advertising executive called Kitty, once her big brother has had his go (alas, it turns out “there were rules, plus a lot of tedious metadata stuff”). And in the collection’s opening story, The Void, a mysterious phenomenon occurs for five minutes a day in which all creatures out of doors are condemned to death, including Princess Anne and the (unnamed) prime minister.
Over a short distance, such exploits can struggle for much resonance, and the results are patchy; perhaps paradoxically, it is when they ally with another of Atkinson’s gifts – conjuring specific social textures from a handful of well-chosen observations, a gift woven through her Jackson Brodie novels – that they take root most firmly. We become more invested, for example, in Blithe Spirit, the story of Mandy, an MP’s assistant who is shot through the head by a disgruntled constituent, because her experience of the afterlife is juxtaposed with her earthly life – vignettes of a limbo spent inhabiting a puddle, or a cat, are given ballast by the description of her body at autopsy, “a cold wet cod on a fishmonger’s slab”, and of her passionless marriage. By the time she achieves a thoroughly Arcadian idyll of eating peaches while lying on a manicured lawn, we are entirely on her side.
Similarly, we’re happy for retired teacher Pamela, with her hectoring or useless children and her disenchanted post-divorce dates (“a man who wore his tie like a noose and possessed a badge machine, for heaven’s sake”), to be rewarded with an immaculate conception, even if she gives birth, somewhat disappointingly, to a baby rather than a kitten. Because while the culmination of her story is evidently fantastical, the reality that preceded it is all too believable.
• Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson is published by Transworld (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
