Kate Atkinson "Headed in the Clouds"

Do you want to play a game? In this game, you need to get the word "hour" from the word "moment", while you can only change the letter at a time. Or let's, if suddenly this game seems too simple for you, let's play another one. Let's call the word, say, "book" and for each letter of this word we will come up with words from five categories - city, river, flower, writer and composer. Calgary, Colorado, Camellia, Kerouac, Kalman. Now you start with the letter N. But if suddenly this game does not seem interesting to you, let's read Kate Atkinson.

She is a postmodernist, a new generation of literary engineer, framing works of incredible surreal forms with the ease of an illusionist. Not everyone is yet able to appreciate the subtlety of her humor and the depth of her reflective play. I had to read reviews like: "I was looking for a female novel, but I got metafiction, it's all too complicated." Is it really difficult?

"Throwing in the Clouds" is a delightful example of lively, vivid, intelligent metafiction. The word looks scary, needs some explanation. Metafiction (not to be confused with metanarrative) is a special case of postmodernism, which is characterized by a violation of the boundaries between the inner world of the work and the real world of the “author on paper”. The author here is not impersonal, not hidden from the eyes of the reader, he clearly speaks of his presence, can criticize his characters, change the plot at will or his own, or one of his characters. The author himself admits that his whole book is fiction, even if there is truth in it. Why, then, read it, if there is no chance to believe in its authenticity? Then, that the theme of metafiction is the very event of "telling", and not the story itself. The process of reading becomes a goal - it is exciting, unpredictable, it involves the reader in events. The reader is no longer a third person, he is a participant in the multidimensional world created by the author. Again. Metaprose was created not for the sake of the story itself, but for the sake of the process of storytelling, and subsequently - reading.

What do we have in "Soaring". The story is told in the first person - the author under the guise of the main character Effy. The fact that this is the author is hinted at by some parallels with Kate's life - studying at the same university, specialization and similar trifles. However, this does not make Effie a Kate and vice versa, they are not identical. It just means that Effy's mask was chosen by Kate for herself in this novel.

The first level of the narrative is Effy's conversation with her mother. They live on an island and tell each other stories - Effy tells her mother about her life while studying at the university, mother tells Effy about their family. This is the second level of the story. A story about Madame Astarte, which Effy writes, is periodically wedged into all this. This is the third level of the story. There are actually more, but these three are the most significant.

What happens in simple terms? The author tells the story of Effie, who tells the story of the self who writes the story of Madame Astarte. It's a book within a book within a book and it's amazingly entertaining. The whole world of this book is a game construct that Kate changes in the manner of a Rubik's Cube. If suddenly the narrative, in the opinion of one of her characters, has reached a dead end, she changes it. More precisely, it is not Kate herself who changes it, but Effi-Kate - “the author on paper”. It looks incredibly organic within the framework of postmodern literature. There is a mention in the text that “I have postmodernism here, which means I can write as I please.” And since it’s not what is written that comes to the fore, but how it is written, we evaluate it primarily by the style of narration. And he has no complaints.

There are quite a lot of characters in the book, all of them are given with a brief but very characteristic description. A gloomy American who loves dogs more than people. A guy hanging on the grass, repeating the behavior model of a seal. An elderly professor playing word games. A feminist girl who doesn't wear a bra. A detective in an old Ford Cortina with a year's supply of cigarettes. And so on, and so on, and so on. The images are bright, they do not get lost in the crowd, despite the fact that they themselves create it.

Also pleasant is the abundance of allusions - references to literary works. The most obvious - to Shakespeare's "The Tempest" - is a bit like Joyce's trick in "Ulysses", when the whole story is built on the model of an already existing classic. And it's amazingly interesting too.

But one should not think that metafiction - the play of the author with characters and readers - is an achievement of the twentieth century. Metaprose existed long before, although it was never called that. At the beginning of the 17th century, readers of high society were shocked by Cervantes' book on Don Quixote of La Mancha. First of all, of course, by the fact that all of it from the first letter to the last is a parody of a chivalric romance that was fashionable at that time. But also by the fact that the author does not hesitate to talk to the reader on the pages of his book, he discusses his characters, condemns and justifies them. And most importantly, in the second volume, he introduces his own book into the universe of Don Quixote! And this is pure metafiction.

The bottom line is this. "Throwing in the Clouds" is an example of chic modern entertainment literature. This is not a miserable banal women's novel, not a literary treatise, there are no dramatic stories that will certainly evoke a response from sympathetic hearts. This is the next gen in literature - a new generation of prose. It requires the reader to have intelligence and erudition. It's funny, reminiscent of Woody Allen and his short stories. But since she has more demands, then she is able to give much more than the elegance of a hedgehog, for example. And by the way, everything that is written on this page is not true.