The Review Completed...Might Need a Little Chiselling But Basically Finito, Benito...

The Body Spiritual: A Review of Not the End of the World, by Kate Atkinson

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Not the End of the World
Kate Atkinson
Little, Brown
2002
244 pages
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The title of Atkinson's collection of short stories is decidedly ironic, since for many of the characters who populate these stories it is indeed "the end of the world." Many of them die, and others undergo weird metamorphoses; these latter characters are often transported to new, otherworldly modes of existence, where they proceed nonchalantly as the immortals in our oldest myths.

One senses Atkinson wanted to effect a transposition of Ovid's masterful work bearing that same name (his Metamorphoses) into contemporary terms and settings. If you had any doubt that the ancient world is Aktinson's major source of inspiration, the epigraphs with which she opens her stories--gleaned from sources like "The Homeric Hymn to Artemis," Virgil, and Ovid himself--should set your mind at ease. But there are also epigraphs by other wild visionaries, like Christopher Smart (from "Jubilate Agno,") William Blake and Poe. One senses this author has gone to the wildest muses for inspiration, to nurture the wildest fruits of her imagination.

The classical myth of antiquity is brought back in style with this collection, given a new makeover, and thrown back into the world with enough sinew, nerve and fiery loins to satisfy tabloidia. But something else is added which appeals to us, which quickens us, in ways we'd almost forgotten. To speak more exactly, these stories often satisfy with an appeal to something spiritual we've buried deep within us for so long now--our desire for divinity which reflects us and responds to us, desire for magical metamorphoses and escapes, for gifts we are told were once freely bestowed on mortals, long ago. I am speaking of gifts like immortality or omnipotence or omniscience. We're not asking for that much here, are we? Atkinson understands completely and tries to deliver.

Sometimes she succeeds masterfully. Other times she seems to veer off and become distracted just as she is writing a potential masterpiece. It would probably be best to discuss each story briefly (spoiler alert) and try to judge how successful she's been in each case.

The opening story, "Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping," is a celebration of the love at the heart of friendship, and is set during yet another contemporary nightmare, another Rwanda or Bosnia; the author wisely never explains the who, where, when or wherefore, and this helps to render the tale universal. The "end of the world" in this scenario is pretty literal--yet another one of history's garden variety apocalypses--but the two women at the heart of this tale are still trying to go about their business, buying a mother a birthday present, taking tea, amusing themselves with conversation. They just engage in these activities while buildings, people, and illusions--like the idea that civilization is not something ephemeral as a soap bubble or a dandelion's fluffy head--are falling all around them. The story is charming in its fatalism, which is the fatalism of the two central characters, who have (like most souls eventually do on this planet) unfortunately come to an understanding of history's randomness and the individual's largely hopeless plight before implacable forces of nature and the irrationality of humankind. So what do they do? They play Scrabble as the world ends. Can you blame them? Sounds like a fine distraction to me.

But these women are charming inventions, beautiful embodiments of the ridiculous optimism at the core of all life. They fully engage the sensuousness of each other's imaginations constantly, listing all the rich beauties of life on earth which are now unobtainable, and somehow vicariously enjoying them. These conversations are often taking place in large department stores where the women are shopping, at one time only half-responding to a fire that's started in the nearby Haberdashery department. Well, if you want to call what they are doing shopping. "Mere anarchy" has indeed been "loosed on the world" and things like money are suddenly irrelevant. Foraging would be a better word, I suppose. But there are wonderful places to forage in your modern apocalypse. For example, Trudi's raincatcher is a particularly fine antique Sevres urn lifted from a museum. Why not? (Memories of Baghdad and Babylonian artifacts, anyone?) They are thoroughly jaded but somehow managing to live their lives in impossible circumstances, as so many millions of people on this planet are doing right now.

Reading this sort of well-written "fiction" can't help but make you think of reality. This is a story very much about the unimaginable horror and the imaginable joys on this planet, and their terrible marriage in our big collective snafued consciousness--a marriage which needs counseling so bad--and probably will never receive it.

"The radio station was off the air. The television station had been destroyed a long time ago. The city rain out of diesel and gin. People burned musty old paperbacks on bonfires and drank rum. There was a festive atmosphere generated by communal terror.

"There was no food for the animals in the zoo. The animal freedom militia unlocked their cages so that now there were bears rooting in dustbins and penguins swimming in the river and at night the tigers roaming the streets roared so loudly that no one could sleep. Trudi lay awake listening to the tigers roaring and the bears growling and the wolves howling and the dragons breathing fire over the blacked-out, rain-sodden streeets of the city. A family of small green lizards took up residence in her apartment."

If you think this couldn't happen to you in a matter of days (even if it's unlikely) you haven't been on this planet long enough, or haven't read enough history. The combination of charm and jaded terror at the heart of Atkinson's story is something distinctly contemporary, born of a generation that knows it is really just living the ultimate reality t.v. show now. You can't stop and speak to the camera or the cameraman or divinity. Engage your fellow actors only, please. The fourth wall is gone.

I love the "wolfkin" who appears in this tale (you'll have to read this to find out!) The story doesn't end here, but the tale does. Aktinson uses two Charlene and Trudi narratives as non-mythical bookends for this collection of largely mythical stories, for the closing tale, "Pleasureland," returns us to the two women's lives amidst apocalypse. They see us out, as we "see them out" of a very beautiful world gone ridiculously unbearable. The women never lose sight of the richness of the world that is burning around them, so in that sense they almost strike one as divinities. Perhaps Atkinson has secretly encoded yet another myth in these opening and closing tales which we have to decode. It seems possible, for her interpretations of the myths of Rome and Greece are often done with a very free hand, which is really the only way to transpose these stories into our contemporary lives.

Or perhaps the author is being true now to ancient Greek cosmology as well as Greek mythology, and showing us that the world begins in chaos, and will end in chaos. Now that I stumble upon that idea, I think I may have figured out her formalist cleverness. By George (and shade of Hesiod) I think I got it!

There is a rich tradition in European literature of such "mythic transpositions" as Atkinson is effecting here. It was actually a literary genre once. Allow me to share with you a portion of the Wikipedia entry on Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." I found this fascinating:

"The novella is constructed on a framework of references to Greek mythology, and Aschenbach's Venice seems populated by the gods. By dedicating himself to Apollo, the god of reason and the intellect, Aschenbach has denied the power of Dionysus, god of unreason and of passion. Dionysus seems to have followed Aschenbach to Venice with the intent of destroying him: the red-haired man who keeps crossing von Aschenbach's path, in the guise of different characters, is none other than Silenus, chief follower of the god of unreason. Silenus' role is disputed, since he bears no physical resemblance to the secondary characters in the book. In the Benjamin Britten opera these characters (The Traveller, the Gondolier, The Leading player and the Voice of Dionysus) are played by the same baritone singer, who also plays the Hotel Manager, The Barber and the Old Man on the Vaporetto. The trope of placing Classical deities in contemporary settings was popular at the time when Mann was writing Death in Venice: in England, at almost the same time, E.M. Forster was at work on an entire short-story collection based on this premise. The idea of the opposition of the Apollonian and Dionysian seems to have been introduced by Nietzsche, and was also a popular motif of the time."

Was the E.M. Forster work alluded to here Atkinson's literary inspiration? I have not read the Forster book referenced, or even been able to ascertaine whether he actually brought such a book to fruition, but I am curious now and want to know the answer.

The second tale in this collection is "Tunnel of Fish," the story of a fatherless, rather nerdy boy, and the mother who doesn't know what to do with him. The good news for young Eddie is that there is a secret regarding his paternity that even his mother hasn't guessed yet. Think Leda and the Swan, or Zeus coming in a shower of gold to Danae: same idea but a different god.

The tale is delivered up with deftness and subtlety, and when even the boy's mother forgets the ungainly, forgettable boy's birthday, the forces of nature conspire to deliver their own gifts (nay, omens of confirmation) to the boy on his natal day:

"Eddie had his nose pressed to the back windows of the van. The rain had cleared behind them, bathing Fife in a watery gold sun. Down in the water Eddie could see mermaids leaping out of the river like salmon, their goldfish tails catching the sun. Nereids sunbathed on Inchholm Island while a huge shoal of silverfish whirled the Roth into a vortex in obeisance to their secret god--Eddie, King of the Fish. "Thank you, loyal subjects," Eddie said, giving a regal wave to the inhabitants of his watery realm.

"Don't talk to yourself, Eddie," June said. "It's the first sign of madness."

"Transparent Fiction," the third story in the collection, introduces us to Meredith Zane, a younger, perky scion of a family whose other members we will meet in various tales scattered throughout this collection. "Transparent Fiction" doesn't really rise to the level of writing found in the stronger works in this collection, neither in terms of subtle interpretation of the myth upon which it is based, nor in originality. I won't add a spoiler here, but the story verges on genre fiction, and rather resembles an episode of The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt that the reader will probably believe she saw before--or at least she'll be sure she's seen several variants of this particular tale about the human animal's greedy craving for immortality.

"Dissonance" is a tale that seemed for this reader to be worked either too hard, or not hard enough, as the work felt desultory and random in its drift, almost as though I were reading the first chapter of a novel that had been abandoned by its author. When a character is raised from the dead in this story, it's actually a boring occurrence. I suppose some readers could imagine a scenario where the above-mentioned faults could actually be virtues in a work of fiction; I mean, I admire the decentered and desultory in fiction if the writing is working at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, but the writing here just never achieved that for me.

"Sheer Big Waste of Love" is a genuinely moving story and is again about denied (or withdrawn) paternity. This story could easily be published in an anthology of contemporary fiction, and the mythological references would probably go completely unnoticed by the vast majority of readers. And that would be fine. It's the contextual placement in this collection which gives the tale that otherworldly resonance. But it's not a sine qua non. The pathos and concinnity of this piece reminded me of several masters of the short story form, chiefly J.D. Salinger and John Cheever. Sorry to run to male authors for comparison there, but the suburban setting and tone made me think of those two first. It's a tale which honors the quiet wars that can arise from the idea of the primacy of blood-relationships, wars which many fight all their lives, and keep mostly to themselves.

"Unseen Translation" places Artemis in the midst of contemporary tabloidia. We have rock stars and their voluptuous wives, neglected children of privilege, scandals told in photographs. And we have mythic transformations. Here the mythological basis for the tale is not really woven through the tapestry in an even-handed manner; rather, it feels tacked on at the end of the story, as if to prove this tale deserved inclusion in the collection. One wonders if the author could have perhaps given in to such a temptation once she knew the theme of her collection. It's a readable tale, but it's not the sort of story for which anthologists or awards come calling.

"Evil Doppelgangers" sees the author mining the familiar literary terrain of the doppelganger, and I suppose many would argue this is a garden variety sci-fi vignette, but I enjoyed it. I think it was the way the author thoroughly captured the subculture of "the office" which made me laugh on numerous occasions. It seems to be a universal purgatory now. I imagine office workers in Hungary endure the same tiny cubicle hell workers in London or Peoria do, nowadays. Unless the author is thinking of the Gemini, or Castor and Pollux, it's hard to see how this tale derives from the ancient Greek and Roman myths which Atkinson loves to give makeovers.

"The Cat Lover" is really pure Brothers Grimm, and is a delight. I suppose the extreme ending of this tale could be offputting or result in charges of silliness being leveled at the author, but I think she is justified in the ending she writes, since she has successfully woven the spell of allegory by that point, and allegories will indeed go to strange places to put a point on a tale. I won't give any spoiler here, as it's a rather amusing piece.

"The Bodies Vest" is a strange tale of loves cut off just as they are beginning, and the metaphysical ripples such tragedies seem to radiate, like sound ringing off an ax-stroke. It's one of Atkinson's most engaging narratives, and leaves one with the feeling that one has read a novel, though one has read a scant dozen pages or so. Again, we encounter members of Atkinson's beloved Zane family, as ubiquitous as Glass family members in J.D. Salinger's fiction.

My favorite story is "Temporal Anomaly," which begins with an epigraph not from Virgil or William Blake or Ovid, but from Buffy The Vampire Slayer: "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me."

And the opening line of this story is a beautiful knife of language: "Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died."

I don't want to tell you which myth she is embodying in this story, because she's so good at springing a surprise with this one, and because the story works exactly the sort of dislocations and transpositions which are needed to convincingly transfer an ancient Greek and Roman myth into our days.

I found this tale very moving, but also the sort of story that remains with one long after one has finished reading it. Call it dream ambrosia, I suppose, food for one's neverending dream of life.

And Atkinson never really loses her sense of humor in this collection--not even when she is in her own particular Underworld watching time somehow flow around her afterlife without touching it, perhaps a living embodiment of Lethe:

"The existence of the force field was the only evidence that there might possibly be someone in charge (but who?) in the afterlife. Although you could hardly call it an afterlife. It was more like a grayish half-life, a kind of uninspiring limbo. Wasn't it the Plain of Asphodel in the Underworld where people went tediously through the motions of their lives without pleasure or pain? She wished she'd paid more attention in classical studies."

The way we experience this central character's afterlife seems oddly compatible with the pronouncements of the weirder, modern physics at times. This story should definitely find itself prey for anthologists.

"Wedding Favors" is the penultimate story in the collection and we again experience characters interpreting their lives through the modern mythology of Buffy, Angel and her cohorts. This story struck me as more of an Ellen Gilchrist sort of tale, and its inclusion in this collection seemed questionable to me. It's not one of the strongest pieces.

As I mentioned above, "Pleasureland" returns us to the charming Charlene and Trudi, whose apocalpyse is worsening (sounds oxymoronic but it's the way of the world these days!)

They find themselves permanently quarantined under penalty of death in an apartment house as Plague rides the streets once more.

This splendid closing piece is dedicated to the memory of Donald Barthelme, who would probably have enjoyed quite a few of the tales in Not the End of the World.

Atkinson ends the world quietly and with love, and I suppose one can't ask much more than that of extinction:

"Charlene and Trudi lay in each other's arms. They no longer had enough energy to move around. Instead they gazed at the stars in the skylight above the bed. One good thing about not having electricity was that the constellations and planets were now all clearly visible in the night sky. Neither Charlene nor Trudi could think of anything else that was good about not having electricity.

"One day archaelogists will find us and wonder about our lives, " Charlene said.

"Trudi didn't like the idea of being found by archaeologists. It was unsettling to think that one day, in the invisible, unreachable future, someone would dig them up and find them lying together like animals in a nest, like kittens in a cradle, and invent new lives for them. "Tell me a story," she said to Charlene.

"I could tell you the story of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades."

And here we realize who the Zane sisters really were, and how their various fates have managed to become constellated in our brain by the author of these tales!

If you read carefully, you will be able to cast sidelong glances between these stories, as Atkinson has cleverly crafted a hall of mirrors where intertextual references are a frequent occurrence. A character in one tale is delayed getting home because of a fatal accident suffered by a character we meet in another story, and so on, and so on, as we realize the interconnectedness of all our stories.

Atkinson enjoys writing her tales on metaphysical little Moebius strips like these, with no real beginning or end.

I found I enjoyed reading the lives of these divine atavisms from ancient Greece and Rome. If you are an aficionado of that world, I think you will enjoy the various descents and ascensions, deaths and rebirths, those shapes in the darkness which language can't help but insist are there in the starry spinning chaos, and which we call our lives.