In this follow-up to 2013's Life After Life, Kate Atkinson charts the adventures of Ursula Todd's younger brother, Teddy, through childhood, fatherhood and growing old, his life interrupted and forever colored by his service as a fighter pilot in World War II.
Teddy's early years are the essence of childhood innocence: a home in the English countryside surrounded by nature, the adoration of his beautiful mother, the Great War now a memory shared by the adults--a horror that could surely not come again. The only blight upon his childhood comes from The Adventures of Augustus, a series of humorously naive children's stories written by his aunt, Izzie, and loosely based upon his own life. From Teddy's viewpoint, "She had taken his life and twisted it and turned him into quite a different boy, a stupid boy, having stupid adventures." After stumbling through an unfocused young adulthood, Teddy finds the outbreak of World War II a relief, because it gives him a purpose, but the adventures it brings him will shatter his innocence forever. Despite his fear during the war that he will have no "after," Teddy survives. He marries and becomes a father, but doesn't find the balm he imagined would come with family life.
While A God in Ruins stands on its own, fans will be glad to see reappearances by Ursula and others from the previous novel, and Atkinson also introduces new characters: Teddy's practical, brilliant wife, Nancy, and their perpetually dissatisfied daughter, Viola. Eschewing a linear narrative, Atkinson parcels out Teddy's life in pieces, hopping neatly from his boyhood to his daughter's struggle to parent her own children to night bombings in a Halifax aircraft above Germany. The interconnectedness of life's small moments is thrown into sharp relief as segments feed from and loop back into each other.
Studded with poetry and song, Atkinson's combination of wartime and family drama evokes a lost era, while also showing how World War II helped bring that time to a close. Teddy witnesses the breakdown of class prejudice through camaraderie, the slide from prudishness to promiscuity, and the destruction of the flower-filled meadows he knew in his youth to make way for crops to feed a hungry country. Simultaneously, Atkinson illustrates the difficult transition from wartime to peacetime. Above all else, Teddy's story is one of a family braving the rapids of a relentlessly shifting world with grace, dignity and solidarity. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: The sequel to Life After Life follows the exploits of Teddy Todd as he grows up, survives World War II bombing missions and learns that postwar adulthood is perilous, too--in its own way.