Human Croquet

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Although, if you do fancy a visit to 1926 London, this novel definitely takes you there with its vivid, lifelul descriptions. The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho's nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency - the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs - that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.

We see how run down everyone is after the war, while most of the characters didn't serve at the Front, the ones left behind still feel the pain of it. And we see how the clubs bring a gaiety and a release after so much grief.

Book Review: Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

mother and onetime chambermaid from Edinburgh. (Never mind her degree in English literature.) One of the Whitbread judges even had the temerity to suggest that Atkinson had written a post-modern novel but might not know it. But Dundee, which features heavily in Atkinson's third novel, Emotionally Weird , was to become a significant city. At 21, she married a fellow student and had a child there, and around the same time embarked on a PhD. "I thought doing a doctorate and having a baby would be a good combination. Actually, having a baby isn't a good combination with anything." croquet, that's a wonderful game -- of course we need more people for that,'' says Mrs. Baxter wistfully. The game is never played in the course of the story. But that doesn't mean that everyone hasn't been following He had no liquor licence, but did have tame police, and Nellie learned the trade well. When a young Irish girl, Maud, died of an opium overdose, Nellie dealt with it by suggesting a couple of army chaps take her body to the river to dispose of her. While I expected time travel to play a more significant role in the book it seemed almost an afterthought . I usually don't enjoy that type of thing but this was fun. I did get somewhat frustrated by all the alternate realities in the final quarter of the book. The traditionalist in me wanted to know the "real" story, but that is Atkinson's point...that lies with the storyteller who "knows how it ends".

The novel is scattered with literary allusions - the Shakespearean ones being the most obvious to me - and Atkinson's writing is rich in clever wordplay. But ultimately it's one of those works which is exhausting rather than completely satisfying and I can't help but wonder if lots of it went over my head. Overall, this was not an easy book to read and I can't say that the experience was one of unalloyed pleasure. The characters have haunted me though, so that says something about the power of Atkinson's prose. It was an eye-opener for Nellie. She couldn’t fail to notice that many of the men went home at the end of the night with a dance hostess who had been a complete stranger to them a handful of hours earlier. ‘The young ladies get very good tips for that,’ Jaeger said phlegmatically. ‘Can’t blame ’em, can you?’ will not leave,'' who might be romantically involved with Vinny (whose ''narrow spectrum of emotions'' consists of ''irritable, irritated, irritating''), although Gordon, now returned to breezy account of the first few million years of the great Forest of Lythe. There, once the English began to chop down the trees, ''the unwashed children of Eve'' (the angry, bad-tempered fairies in the forest) ''loiteredShrines of Gaiety" definitely has all the usual hallmarks of a Kate Atkinson novel, and as mentioned above, her writing style, vocabulary, imagination and attention to detail is superb as usual. But the plot itself is too slow to develop, and the characters themselves are bland and non-engaging and underdeveloped, and these factors definitely hurt the novel.