A God in Ruins

A God in Ruins (2015)
by Kate Atkinson

I should probably start by saying that I didn't actually like this book much to start with. A God in Ruins follows on from Kate Atkinson's 2014 novel Life After Life, the fantastic, quirkily-told story of Ursula Todd, who gets to start her life over and over again, dying in a number of different ways but then getting another chance to do things differently (resulting in all sorts of differing consequences). A "companion piece" rather than a sequel, A God in Ruins follows the life of Ursula's much-loved little brother Teddy from childhood through his years as a World War 2 bomber pilot and into old age. The unique oops-I-died-let's-try-that-again structure of the earlier book is notably absent; instead A God in Ruins is a more straightforward retelling of a man's life. I loved Life After Life, so spent the first few chapters of this book getting increasingly frustrated that Teddy only seemed to be getting one go at life, while the plotline jumped all over the place (one chapter we're in the 1920s, the next it's fifty years later, then we're back in the middle of WW2 again...). I almost gave up on this book completely but I'm so glad I stuck with it. About a third of the way through the book, it stopped being hard work. By halfway, I was kind of enjoying it. By the time I finished it, A God in Ruins had become one of my absolute favourite books. Do not give up on this book.

The scale of A God in Ruins is enormous. Over the life of one man, it covers almost 100 years of history and four generations (Teddy's parents, Teddy himself, his daughter Viola and his grandchildren Sunny and Bertie) with a huge cast of well-developed characters. A God in Ruins doesn't follow any kind of standard chronological order - instead we skip back and forward throughout Teddy's life, as the narrative jumps randomly from one point in time to another and then back again. It's disorienting and a little frustrating to start with (just as you start to get a handle on what's happening, the story shifts to a completely different character in a different time and place) but it's masterfully done. Each fragment of the story adds another layer to each of the characters and sheds a bit more light on the relationships between them, the interactions rich in convincing and sometimes heartbreaking little details - ""Daddy!" Bertie shouted, barrelling past... "Hey", their father said, taking a step backward as if his daughter might be attacking him".
This creates an absolute masterpiece of a novel where the characters feel like real people who you know and love.

Not only does A God in Ruins introduce a fabulous set of characters and tell a fascinating story, it's also beautifully written. Teddy nurses ambitions to be a poet and sees the world in his own unique way - this lends a certain charm to his thoughts and colours everything in the book, even those passages that you wouldn't normally expect to be described so poetically. For example, in the middle of a high-adrenaline scene during a bombing raid: "At one thousand feet they could see the white horses on the crests of the waves. Fifteen, perhaps twenty foot high. Tempest-tossed, Teddy thought" or "They had been awestruck not only by the sight of the Alps by moonlight but by the depthless inky-black skies, pricked with thousands upon thousands of stars - bright seed broadcast by some dangerous god, Teddy thought, drifting dangerously close to the forsaken realm of poetry" Teddy's self-deprecating attitude towards his own literary ambitions helps these passages to ring true without seeming pretentious or out of place. It's very clever.

A Halifax bomber (less famous cousin of the Lancaster) like those flown by Teddy. Around 50% of bomber crews died. 

A God in Ruins is the story of one man's life, all of the people he meets along the way and all of the ripples he creates in the world. It's also a story about World War 2 and it's a really, really good one complete with a number of absolute edge-of-your-seat moments as Teddy's crew joins bombing raids over Europe, with planes falling from the sky all around them. Hit a few times but never down for long, Teddy is one of the very few to survive the war and the following decades of his life somehow underscore the terrible waste of so many other lives: "Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden where Cain killed Abel. All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination" All those young men dead (Teddy describes them rather brutally as birds thrown at a brick wall), who might've gone on to live long and complex lives like Teddy's - all those futures wasted. It's not a new message when it comes to war novels, but Kate Atkinson puts an original and affecting spin on it.

The title of the novel comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote "A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams" Teddy is complex and at times misunderstood, but he's ultimately a good man in the final stages of a very long life. It may be true that a gentle "passing into the immortal" is the most that any of us can hope for but I would challenge anyone to reach the end of A God in Ruins and contemplate Teddy's impending death without a tear in your eye. I'll say no more about the ending itself, except that it will surprise you and it might just break your heart.

I could not recommend this book more highly - it is absolutely brilliant (and if you haven't already done so, read Life After Life; it's fantastic too).

10/10