Not The End Of The World

Kate Atkinson's first collection of short stories is as fascinating as one would expect from the author of the award-winning Behind the Scenes of the Museum. Inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Atkinson has written 12 linked stories, their style varying from witty and malicious to melancholic. Quoting Ovid, she promises the reader that she will tell us tales of transformation and this she proceeds to do. A nanny sprouts wings and, like a Mary Poppins in reverse, carries her neglected charge away to happiness. A geeky child obsessed with cataloguing fish turns out to have been born of a union between his bikini-clad mother and the god of an underwater kingdom, a 'colossal roaring presence'. Myths provide the backdrops but Atkinson breathes into them a mint-new meaning, giving her own interpretation of the way we live now. She has something to say about consumerism, the way we are in thrall to soap opera and our pathetic worship of media stars, but she reserves her heavy ammunition for an attack on those who fail to love. In a brilliantly funny story she portrays family life and the dwindling show of affection between teenage children and their mother. Her ear for desultory, sometimes vicious family dialogue is uncanny. Later in the book she picks up the same characters and depicts them all a little older, a little more sad and lonely. Earnest, good mothers, she seems to be saying, deserve so much more than this. Her theme is frequently love: being in love, seeking, finding and sometimes losing the loved one, but fantasy is never far from the surface. From the very first story, 'Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping', the reader begins to see a transformed, skewed world. The two girls imagine themselves in Pleasureland and dreamily recite to each other a litany of enticing goodies that they might buy, while all the time the zoo animals roam free outside and museums are ransacked. Inventive, engaging and often very moving, these are truly tales for the new millennium. (Kirkus UK)