Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
Sayers, Valerie
FAMILY TROUBLES Human Croquet Kate Atkinson Valerie Sayers Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a com-ic novel bubbling with ebul-lient language, won the 1995 Whitbread Prize in...
...her father, once dashing, is now a shadowy figure sinking in a swamp of sadness...
...Her adolescent fascination with sexuality has led her to a heightened awareness of rape (there is a deeply troubling scene with teen-age boys taking after her, but Isobel, Daphne-like, conveniently turns into a tree...
...Isobel is drawn to the plump, maternal figure next door, Mrs...
...Her "aunt from hell," Vinny, who likes all recipes that begin, "Take a large cod and boil whole," has raised Isobel and her brother with equal disdain for their emotional stability and for the truth...
...Near brushes with incest (a major motif) mark the longest, and perhaps the most manipulative, of the narrative reaches...
...Her new novel, Human Croquet, wraps some of that novel's concerns- especially the clutches of past generations-in a new narrative skin...
...Audrey, the incest victim, becomes one of the first women priests in the Church of England and does "a small amount of good...
...her grandparents have been comfortable suburban grocers in the "grim North" of England, but even this bourgeois business is lost in Isobel's lifetime...
...her brother Charles repels young women but keeps his mother's memory alive...
...In the Eliza sections, Atkinson climbs all the way out on a fictional limb...
...It is Isobel's sixteenth birthday...
...Genial throughout, the story becomes positively expansive as it works its way toward resolution...
...Her images of sexually mature women fall pretty neatly under the rubrics of Madonna, whore, and stepmother...
...Like the first novel, Human Croquet alternates past and present...
...Her tale becomes increasingly outrageous as the past progresses (or regresses...
...Atkinson never really loses her footing, though-the novel is beguiling no matter how outrageous its plot becomes-and as the layers of Eliza's disappearance story are peeled away the truth is not only shocking but deeply satisfying...
...Throughout the course of the novel, Isobel falls into time warps (she takes them in stride, and they are not terribly bumpy going for the reader either, though they sometimes feel a bit random...
...Though the novel opens in the very beginning ("with the word and the word is life"), the present action of the story commences on April Fool's Day, 1960...
...In short, it distinctly resembles a fairy tale...
...She and her brother have been raised to believe that her mother deserted them when they were small...
...It's a wacky metaphor worthy of Kate Atkinson's generous ambition for this novel...
...the tone is jaunty...
...Baxter to remind her of the horrors that might accompany the most domesticated scenes...
...The branch bobs precariously with the most removed history, Eliza's own infancy, which goes far beyond a reader's expectations of myth...
...Other literary allusions (to classics, to mysteries, to science fiction, and especially to Shakespeare) abound...
...Baxter, who is continually covered in bruises she explains in a way that feels fictionally familiar: She has walked into doors, she has bumped herself again...
...Baxter's daughter Audrey is Isobel's friend and, Isobel gradually comes to suspect, the victim of incest with her father, the cruel villain of the story...
...Those other family members do not provide Isobel much solace...
...The emotional stakes, then, are high...
...She spends much of her time dodging stepmother Debbie, who believes that the furniture is rearranging itself and that the members of the family have been replaced by sinister doubles...
...Isobel has witnessed plenty of sexual violence to inform her view of a young woman's place in midcentury England-she has touched her murdered mother's body, though she has repressed the memory, and she has Audrey and Mrs...
...It is fitting that Isobel should travel through history, for she has been brought up without knowledge of the most crucial character in her own history, her mother Eliza, who is beautiful and bewitching in the fairy-tale manner...
...Eliza's story is told in the "Past" sections of the novel, in a narrative that is far more stylized and ironic than Isobel's...
...FAMILY TROUBLES Human Croquet Kate Atkinson Valerie Sayers Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a com-ic novel bubbling with ebul-lient language, won the 1995 Whitbread Prize in England and critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic...
...It opens with woodcutters and fairies, primeval forests, a lady dressed in green disappearing into a dark wood...
...Isobel is at her scathing adolescent best on the subject of her stepmother...
...At times Isobel Fairfax, the sixteen-year-old narrator of the "Present" sections of the book, sounds like a chirpy Edgar Allen Poe surveying the madness around her...
...Baxter has recalled nostalgically...
...Her father vanished the day after her mother's disappearance but has since reappeared, claiming amnesia, and bringing home with him from New Zealand a hapless new wife named Debbie...
...We are made aware, finally, of Eliza's attempt to find "redemption in this awful world...
...Isobel's journey is also revealed in layers, and the climax of her story is also outrageous...
...Motherless, Isobel is consumed with defining motherhood, especially as it is connected to desire and the domestic violence all around her...
...The forest is dark and deep...
...Isobel is the descendant of a distinguished family whose social standing is on a steady downward slide...
...Like the best fairy tales, Human Croquet is appalling and disturbing even as it is reassuring...
...Mrs...
...the juxtaposition is unsettling and familiar (perhaps we heard this story in childhood...
...Atkinson's language-sometimes giddy, sometimes understated to accommodate the black comedy, occasionally frankly emotional ("I need my mother, I need my mother")-is a joy...
...The last pages of the novel give us, finally, the rules to "Human Croquet," a game Mrs...
...After witnessing the ghastly sexual order humans can impose, Isobel leaves her readers with a delicate paean to the forest, to nature's unruly and mysterious order...
...our fairy-tale narrator first reveals that Eliza is a loving Madonna figure to her children and later that she has been a prostitute whose heart seems sometimes made of gold and sometimes of brass...
Vol. 124 • May 1997 • No. 9
