Kate Atkinson's 'God in Ruins': Engrossing tale of doomed love, interior galaxies

A God in Ruins

Kate Atkinson

Little, Brown. 480 pp. $28

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Reviewed by Tara Murtha

nolead ends 'Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" I didn't pick up Kate Atkinson's new novel, A God in Ruins, expecting to be reminded of "Do You Realize," the turn-of-the-century Flaming Lips summer jam for melancholy existentialists, but here we are. "You realize that life goes fast/It's hard to make the good things last."

A God in Ruins has been called a sequel to Atkinson's 2013 bestseller Life After Life, but the author thinks of this book as a companion. No matter. I haven't read Life after Life yet - and in A God in Ruins, I got only the right kind of lost in the characters' interior galaxies. Atkinson draws them with the precision of an astronomer and the heart of an astrologer.

The main character is an English World War II pilot named Teddy. He has glimpsed the good things, but what defines him are memories of the bad things. Maybe it's not fair to describe Teddy as a pilot. Teddy assumes and sheds many roles throughout his life: war hero, doting husband, bewildered father, amateur botanist. As a boy, he was the inspiration for Augustus, a fictional character in a children's-books series written by his Aunt Ursula.

Through these characters and their connections, Atkinson explores how we are all forced to collapse into one another's expectations and fantasies. She also tells us right up front that "fiction could be both a means of resurrection and of preservation." But something is lost when we become fictionalized characters in the minds of other people.

Teddy's daughter Viola is a best-selling author of airport paperbacks. In Viola's mind, Teddy is an irrelevant old man stuck in his ways, with the gall to hog up space in a pricey nursing home while his mind slowly sinks into black holes of dementia. She sees Teddy as a monster, although we don't find out why until it's too late, and the damage has been done.

With the ruins everywhere, we soon realize Teddy is the titular god, seen most clearly when piloting his Halifax for the Royal Air Force high above the clouds. He's haunted by the terrible things he witnessed: a young man hosed down by bullets; his buddy whispering "good luck" before drifting away into darkness; a helicopter propeller blade boomeranging through the air, cleanly lopping off the head of a young girl he once knew.

To survive the war, Teddy had to kill his expectations of an afterward - then he lived. A man who spent years navigating night raids above foreign soil couldn't navigate the afterward, where he married a woman who was hired to break codes during the war, but could not break his. Viola, the child conceived to help make him whole, didn't.

Sounds depressing. But Atkinson leverages the light of all the collapsed stars around Teddy to illuminate the complicated worlds within him in a way that reminds us that we all possess our own godly dimensions and that the characters starring in our plays exist beyond our imaginations in ways we can never know.

Many novels have been written about love's failure. Atkinson suggests that maybe love's not a failure if, like Teddy's last run to Nuremberg under a bright moon on a cloudless night, it acknowledges its own doomed mission and makes the best of it.

As the Flaming Lips sang: "You realize the sun doesn't go down/ It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round."

As her father lies dying, Viola begins defending herself to a jury in her imagination. Atkinson shifts the room, and soon we realize we are that jury, temporarily reduced to characters inside Atkinson's imagination of her character's imagination. It's an incredibly ambitious literary maneuver that works, thanks to her master craftsmanship.

As I turned the final pages, I half expected a pop-up book to bloom suddenly beneath my nose. I pictured one of those 3-D paper pop-up sculptures with movable parts, an orange moon lifting off the page, and a small plane gliding beneath it, a perfect diorama designed to fold neatly back into itself. A perfect illusion.