In a churlish note at the end of her subtly fine new novel, “A God in Ruins,” Kate Atkinson talks about an author’s right to remain uncertain about what she has accomplished until she has actually done it. It’s “as if there is a part of the writing brain that knows what it’s doing and another part that is woefully ignorant,” she says.
Readers drawn to Ms. Atkinson’s maverick ambitions need to absorb her work in that same spirit, not entirely sure of her objectives until they have all been achieved. She builds each book so differently that a new one is best approached with a wide-open mind, even if, like “A God in Ruins,” it has links to the hugely successful, high-concept hit that preceded it.
In “Life After Life” (2013), her best and best-known book, Ms. Atkinson gave an Englishwoman named Ursula Todd a succession of alternative life stories: She’s born at the same time to the same parents in each, but everything else is mutable. Some lives end with her death in infancy, others bring her into the horrors of the Blitz. That book so brilliantly sequenced Ursula’s different lives that gimmickry just wasn’t an issue. Ms. Atkinson didn’t like having to explain what “Life After Life” was “about,” either.
But she is willing to call “A God in Ruins” the story of Ursula’s many possible lives, since Ursula figures in it. The main focus, though, is on her younger brother, Teddy, and his life, which is also inextricably connected with World War II. Teddy grows up to command Royal Air Force Halifax bombers, and while his dramatic airborne experiences combine to form the book’s centerpiece, war is not this novel’s true subject. It’s about Paradise lost and fiction’s ways of allowing us to imagine what we cannot know. This elaborate multigenerational family story is filled with ascents and descents, growing up and growing old, kindness and cruelty. It’s also a tale of an uncommonly good man who has willed himself to be one. It took a lot of evil to make Teddy so unwaveringly generous.
Ms. Atkinson does not play the same kinds of flagrant time tricks here that made “Life After Life” so dramatic. She needn’t erase one story to tell the next. But she does skip easily back and forth among decades, so that Teddy’s boyhood in the 1920s or Queen Elizabeth II’s 2012 Diamond Jubilee are both within easy reach of any other point in the book’s timeline. Teddy as a young father to his only child, Viola (who deserves a name resembling “vile”), is never far from Teddy, 60 years later, being forced into a nursing home by an adult daughter who can’t wait to unload him. “The Ancient Mariner was lucky,” thinks Viola at her most odious, which is really saying something. “His albatross was already dead before it was hung round his neck.”
Neither Viola’s story nor anyone else’s is told in strict chronological order. Ms. Atkinson’s method this time is more circular, which succeeds in making it much more enticing than a straightforward chronology. She first introduces Teddy as a man in uniform, “just one of the many,” in 1944, without explaining his circumstances. Then she cuts to the Todd family in 1925, still intact at their redoubt, Fox Corner, “an Arcadian dream” that will later exist only as an idyllic memory. In keeping with her general sense of mischief, Ms. Atkinson has changed various details about the characters from their “Life After Life” versions.
Then it’s on to “The Adventures of Augustus,” a children’s book that appropriates Teddy’s life and has been written by his Aunt Izzie, who drove an ambulance during World War I and is the family eccentric, as well as the family vamp. And from there it’s a straight leap to 1980, where Viola, at 28, is living on a commune with a lapsed aristocrat named Dominic, who fancies himself an artist and has severe, trippy mood swings. “The term ‘bipolar’ came too late for Dominic,” Ms. Atkinson writes about the man who has fathered two children, a boy named Sun and a girl named Moon, with Viola. “He was dead by then.”
All of this unfolds, and we haven’t even met Viola’s mother, Nancy, who spends the war semi-engaged to Teddy while fully engaged decrypting German codes at Bletchley Park. But Nancy, like the others here, is met glancingly at first, to the point where we misapprehend her character. Only as the book unfolds is each character more fully revealed. Ms. Atkinson’s artistry in making this happen is marvelously delicate and varied. Who can blame her for not wanting to make it thuddingly obvious by explaining exactly how and why she pulls these characters’ strings?
Structure, and its way of coalescing from the seemingly casual into the deliberate, has been a main attraction in other Atkinson books. In this one, the main attraction is Teddy, and the way his glorious, hard-won decency withstands so many tests of time. Everything about his boyhood innocence is reshaped by his wartime ordeals, which are rendered with terrifying authenticity thanks to the author’s research into real bombers’ recollections. And after the war he re-enters a world in which he can take nothing for granted: not his wife’s truthfulness, his daughter’s humanity, his grandchildren’s safety or survival skills. Everywhere he looks he sees life’s fragility, and everything he does is an act of preservation.
As for that, Ms. Atkinson has one huge trick up her sleeve, but she saves it for the book’s final moments to make it that much more devastating. She gets you to that final moment on faith and through writerly seduction. Just know that every salient detail in “A God in Ruins,” from the silver hare adorning Teddy’s pram to the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, is here for a fateful reason.
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