Normal Rules Don’t Apply

By Kate Atkinson
Short Stories/Transworld/Hardcover/$37.08/Amazon SG (amzn.to/49VSr5z)
4 stars

English author Kate Atkinson has toyed with the idea of infinite possibilities in her 2013 novel Life After Life, in which central character Ursula Todd is put through a groundhog day grinder of endless alternate life trajectories, from being stillborn to being brutally murdered by her abusive husband.

Here, Atkinson rehashes this computer game trick with a lighter – and more conceptual – touch. Her latest offering is a cycle of interlinked short stories situated in York with the end of the world nigh – except everything keeps rebooting, each time with a new set of unexpected rules.

The collection starts biblically, with the rhythm of a fairytale. She gives the Book of John a spin: “In the beginning was the Void. Then came the Word, and with the Word the World began. Then one day, to everyone’s surprise, the Void returned, and darkness rolled over the land.”

It is May 4, 2028 and Genevieve is shopping in Waitrose when the lights go out. At first, she has the “Damascene thought that she had been struck blind”, then realises that it was the universe that had blinked.

When the lights come on, every person and animal outdoors is dead. The community adapts, and begins timing the occurrence – bees, for some reason, are unaffected and become a nuisance. But what if one’s watch stops working?

From these grim beginnings, Atkinson quickly yanks readers into apparently unrelated and increasingly outrageous perspectives, each playing out in a self-contained way and ending with a gut punch of ironic humour.

Atkinson is uninterested in serious commentary, and is not averse to breaking storytelling rules. She has learnt the rules to break them, whether introducing a literal deus ex machina or gamely resorting to the facetious “it’s twins – that’s how they did it” to resolve narrative knots.

Her focus is on revealing the magical gossamer threads she has applied to bind the genre-hopping tales together in creative ways, serving them up on the charger plate of her confident literary voice and amiable British humour (often ensconced in wry brackets).

There is Francis, a handsome but unlucky gambler whose tribulations goad readers through the mess; Mandy, who cannot remember how she died; a barren queen in an Eastern European forest, making a Faustian pact with a witch; a shelf of toys and a marketing executive whose real occupation is a spoil sport to reveal here.

In these stories, the animals talk. “Kitty” is sometimes a cat and sometimes a woman. The characters are obsessed with the same television soap. A distinctive thought by Francis – “existential marginalisation” – becomes the title to one of the stories.

And of course, towards the end of the short story cycle, a meta-reason for the endless weirdness is given. Atkinson finds an adequately absurd edifice to contain these short stories she has written over many years to present a fundamentally unserious but no less artful composite.

This would all be a glib trick if not for her gorgeous writing and talent for quick portraits, immersing even her tangential characters in pathos with just a few phrases to give them fictional weight.

Sometimes, the word play is confined to the text – an inside joke independent of plot, the authorial voice mocking us into chugging along: “Judging by the sun (Would you want to be? Would he be fair?”) ...”

This is a fractal story told through the fracturing of rules by a mature writer, summed up best by a character who says: “There were no happy endings, just endings. And then more endings. And that was if you were lucky and there was no final ending.”

If you like this, read: Everything Feels Like The End Of The World by Else Fitzgerald (Allen & Unwin, 2022, $36.07, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3R4JqhW). A more serious collection of short speculative fiction exploring different versions of apocalyptic Australia, from a solar shield engineer sharing memories of a lover with an AI companion to two archivists deciding what to save in a fast-flooding world.