Not the End of the World

I'm not normally a short story fan, preferring something "meatier", but I gobbled up this collection like a treat. I've re-discovered Kate Atkinson with her last two wonderful "mystery" novels, "Case Histories" and "One Good Turn" and am now going back to her earlier work. This collection is sharp, surprising, very witty, intelligent and thought-provoking.

The more I think about Not the End of the World, the more the book seems to mean to me. Generally, the progress works the other way around. It says a lot about Atkinson as a writer how powerfully the book manages to keep a hold on my mind. Atkinson creates a layered confection of characters both real and mythic. They live in a time just bordering the apocalypse. The world in which they live is often shallow and full of troubles, but is beautiful in contrast to the great pit of nothing waiting past the implied boundary. It is not an uplifting book, and when I finished it I was left with a feeling of bleakness. This is time out of time, and it is more frightening than hopeful. While I do not expect a book to give up its secrets too easily, it did sometimes feel as though Atkinson were being deliberately obscure. Several of the stories had the feel of letters that you find in the street, or a conversation half heard around the corner. She was not generous with the doors into to the developing project of the book. As a reader, there were times when I would have appreciated just a wee bit more transparency. This is the first Atkinson that I have read. It will not be the last.

Not the End of the World is an anthology of loosely related pieces. These stories all drift around the common theme of the End of the World. Whether it is on a global scale, or simply changing one's path through life, these World Ending events are never addressed directly. Like so many people, the characters in "Not the End of the World," rarely meet their fate directly. Then again, events that often appear to be the End of the World are not really the end of the world at all.In keeping with the theme of not facing an event directly, what is most intriguing about these pieces is not the central plot, but rather the peripheral occurrences. For example, in the first piece "Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping," the plot is summed up by the first sentence, "'I want,' Charlene said to Trudi, 'to buy my mother a birthday present.'" In the end, Charlene finds a present; however, that is not what is fascinating about the story. What is fascinating are the details in the periphery hinting that the end of the world is nigh. It is a world where men see how drunk they can get before the curfew, bombs explode in the distance and the city runs out of diesel and gin. But these details do not directly relate to the selection of a birthday present. In the subsequent pieces, the intriguing peripheral aspects come in the form of defining a larger picture. How are these vignettes related? On the surface, these pieces are related through the relationships between the characters of each story. There is though a deeper relationship, just waiting for reader to tease it out. Despite the lack of a emphasis on plot, this collection is continuously fascinating. What "Not the End of the World," has to say about life is not something that can be easily expressed. Like any good magician, Kate Atkinson does not reveal how she performs her tricks.

A thoroughly fabulous collection of short stories, the book opens with the very intriguing, ironic tale of two women who seem to be carrying on life as usual while in the middle of apocalyptic chaos. The rest of the stories in the book similarly are a mix of the completely mundane and usual and the mythical and extraordinary. Like the Greek myths updated for our time. On one hand the stories are about single mothers, college students, divorcees, troubled teens, hookers, orphans, nannies, office workers, best friends, and hapless husbands. But on the other they are stories of Eos, Artemis, Selene, mermaids, Nereids, Ra, Hades, and Helios. Kate Atkinson magically weaves these themes together in such a way that you are never bored and can never pinpoint the separation of fantasy from reality.

I'm willing to bet that Kate Atkinson didn't color inside the lines when she was a little girl. She's a born subversive, and her charming, alarming, crazy quilt fiction catches the reader off-balance. "Normal" categories get messed with: Realism morphs without warning into fantasy; past, present and future are melded and skewed; people are never quite what they seem. These qualities shone in her first and most brilliant book, BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM (the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995), as well as in two other novels (HUMAN CROQUET and EMOTIONALLY WEIRD), and they are equally evident in NOT THE END OF THE WORLD, a collection of 12 stories.The narratives are neither clearly connected nor totally distinct (Atkinson doesn't do anything conventionally). Occasionally she recycles characters: The sullen adolescents whom she evokes with absolutely perfect pitch in "Dissonance" reappear, a few years older but still obnoxious, in "Wedding Favors." More frequently, though, a featured player in one story becomes a peripheral character in another; members of the Zane family, a large American clan, thread their way in and out of several tales, as do a self-absorbed celebrity mom and a nanny who is a worthy successor to Mary Poppins. Detecting these links is wonderfully diverting for the reader --- kind of like a Chinese puzzle --- and it also has the effect of unifying the collection. Atkinson's people all seem to inhabit more or less the same eccentric universe, which is Scotland (she lives in Edinburgh) and at the same time another place: more mysterious, less nameable.Usually I prefer my "magical" and my "realism" well separated, like carrots and peas on a dinner plate. But Atkinson is so adept and her narrative voice so persuasive that after a while I began to enjoy the sudden shifts from ordinary life to fairy tale, from anxiety to horror, from a bad day to the end of the world. Perhaps her inspiration here is the cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (to which the characters in several stories are hopelessly addicted), an odd hybrid of teen TV fare and spookier, more complex life-and-death drama. Take "Temporal Anomaly," wherein a lawyer named Marianne has an unusual out-of-body experience, or the amazing consequences when a woman without a boyfriend adopts a stray in "The Cat Lover." Often, the realistic side of her stories involves broken families and deserted children. In "Tunnel of Fish," "Sheer Big Waste of Love" and "Unseen Translation," we encounter three small, wise, almost painfully controlled boys who are among Atkinson's most touching inventions.What I didn't like was the epigraphs that precede each story. They're wildly eclectic, ranging from Buffy to Emily Dickinson to classical sources (including untranslated Greek!), but does the book really need another layer of possible meaning? They struck me as irritating rather than enlightening, like program notes that over-explain instead of letting the work speak for itself. And because s