The fall publishing season is, as always, filled with such heavyweights that it seems like a back-handed compliment to say that the big takeaway about Kate Atkinson's new novel, Our Noble Selves, is that it's so much fun to read.
Atkinson is known for her jittery historical novels that jump around in time, as well as for her Jackson Brodie detective series. Our Noble Selves cleverly melds both forms for a purpose: It's an escapist novel that chronicles the need for escape in post-World War II Britain.
The centerpiece of Our Noble Selves, around which all the action and characters spin, is a real-life event: The Festival of Britain that took place in 1951. Intended to elevate the British people's spirits after the devastation of World War II, the chief Festival site was located on the south bank of the Thames in London. Exhibits highlighted British arts, architecture, industry, history. It also included, as these boosterish exhibitions tend to do, a lot of random stuff: beauty pageants and cookery demonstrations in which exotic foods like spaghetti and hot dogs were introduced to the British public.
In an "Author's Note," Atkinson says that: she "came across so much material that was strange and quirky, ... that sometimes the things I was making up seemed quite dull in comparison." Among the actual oddities displayed at the Festival were "a collapsible rubber bus" and a "Festival emblem composed of 604 gallstones (and all from one patient!)."
Our main character is a former reporter named Harry Flynn, who had the bad luck to be sent to Singapore in 1941 shortly before it fell to the Japanese. Harry became a POW, working on the so-called "Burma Railway" of The Bridge over the River Kwai fame. Over 100,000 Asian civilian workers and Allied POWs would die building this railway before the war's end.
Returning in 1945 to London, Harry makes a rash marriage to a zaftig war widow he meets in a pub one night: "It was not just the siren call of sex that drew him to her; she came complete with a ready-made life (house, child, dog, lawn), and he had reckoned it would be easy to slip into that life without too much effort on his part."
Harry slips just as easily out of that misbegotten marriage and falls into a job assembling a poetry anthology for the Festival of Britain drawn from dreadful doggerel submitted by the British public — another real-life detail that Atkinson has wicked fun describing here. But, Harry's life — already haunted by what we would call PTSD — takes an ominous turn when a female co-worker he's had drinks with disappears and he's set up to be the chief suspect.
The suspense plot — involving MI5, the British Security Service, and a cluster of British fascists — is engrossing enough, but the deeper pleasures of Our Noble Selves are located in the workplace; specifically, the offices where Harry and his co-workers bring the Festival of Britain to fruition. Here, Atkinson's signature gift as a historical writer is on display as she seamlessly shifts time frames, so that the past surfaces without fanfare into the present. This is a scene where Harry Flynn is viewing the actual Lion and the Unicorn Pavilion. We're told:
The Pavilion took its name from the creatures who were to be stationed at the entrance — life-size sculptures made of straw by a craftsman in Essex. ...
“[One of Harry’s co-workers] had been out to Essex to view [the sculptures’] progress and found that they had already become home to a nest of field mice. ...
Once, during the worst of his war, working in ... the Hellfire Pass ... Flynn had lucked upon a mouse and had unthinkingly popped it into his mouth and eaten it alive. He had been too hungry to care. He could still recall the sensation as he bit down on wriggling fur and delicate bones.
The Festival, in reality, was a popular success, intended to turn the war-weary British peoples' eyes to the future. Atkinson's novel is also a success, an affectionate testament to the futility of any such efforts to leave the past behind.
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