Book Review

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson. £7.99

Kate Atkinson, one of our most inventive and emotionally poised novelists, writes with humour and sometimes near-unbearable poignancy about Teddy Todd, a young pilot in World War 2, flying Lancaster bombers over Germany. As always in her work, Kate ranges freely across time, building up a picture of the irresistibly adorable Teddy in all his courage and innocence. Though the author was not born until after the war, her research is impeccable, and from the last surviving bombers preserved carefully in museums or in hangers on a few British airfields, she builds a hands-on experience that is impossible to duck. The writing is laconic and packs an extraordinary punch. There is, to start with, the individual character of each aeroplane, and when the men crew up for a night sortie across Germany, the heart is already in the mouth for them as Teddy, the skipper, does his final check. ‘OK, rear gunner? OK navigator? OK co-pilot?’ Never at any point can the reader be sure these men are coming back.

For those of us who lived in the south of England in the war years and saw the bomber squadrons fly out in the last of the evening light, nostalgia grips the heart. Nobody can forget the Lancasters returning at dawn, assembled again in their nine-plane squadrons but this time with gaps, some aircraft flying with a dipped wing and stuttering engines, one or more feathered and useless. Nobody wants war, but nobody who was in it can ever forget. All honour to Kate Atkinson for a wonderful, heart-rending book.

Alison Prince