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Once it had been the great forest of Lythe - a vast and impenetrable thicket of green.And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana herself. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees.The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all. But Isobel Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother - the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arp ge and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.
User reviews
LibraryThing member jennyo
Atkinson continues to amaze me with her ability to make the most heartbreaking stories somehow humorous and hopeful. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but funny in the way that makes you smile even as you wipe a tear from your eye. Hard to explain.
I also love the way she so completely inhabits her
I've now read three of Atkinson's books and can put her on my list of authors whose books I'll buy regardless of the reviews. I really like her.
A couple of quotes I liked:
I am Isobel Fairfax, I am the alpha and omega of narrators (I am omniscient) and I know the beginning and the end. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.
Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics -- such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal, they are, in fact, working very, very hard.
I also love the way she so completely inhabits her
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narrator's head, the way she gives voice to this teenage girl. Her nuances of thought and speech rang very true to me. At that age especially, I liked to play with words and wasn't so much worried about what I was saying as how it might sound tripping off the tongue.I've now read three of Atkinson's books and can put her on my list of authors whose books I'll buy regardless of the reviews. I really like her.
A couple of quotes I liked:
I am Isobel Fairfax, I am the alpha and omega of narrators (I am omniscient) and I know the beginning and the end. The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.
Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics -- such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal, they are, in fact, working very, very hard.
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LibraryThing member sussabmax
I love Kate Atkinson. You can't expect her books to be firmly grounded in reality, although some of her more straightforward mysteries are more realistic. This was a bit of a combination--there was a fairly straightforward mystery in one sense, but it was a bit separated from reality, too. I love
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the way Atkinson tells the reader things that the characters do not know, and how she experiments with reality. Also, how things that are not real give us information that is really true. It is fascinating figuring out the interaction between the real world inside her story and the imaginary--because there are connections, the imaginary is a commentary on the real. I am very interested in the nature of reality, personally, so I love to read Atkinson's investigations of the subject. Show Less
LibraryThing member leesster
One of my favourite books, I reread it from time to time for the rich and imaginative language. A laugh, coming of age, romance,thriller, all included. I will buy Atkinson's books whenever they first come out, no matter what she writes about.
LibraryThing member janglen
An intriguing novel that slips between present, past and future, real and imaginary. Just when you think you are coming to grips with the central mystery you are presented with a different view of 'reality'. Recommended.
LibraryThing member debnance
Behind the Scenes at the Museumhas sat on my shelves for months;now that I see how wonderful thisauthor is, I must read it, too."How can I trust reality when the phenomenal world appears to be playing tricks on me at every turn?" Eliza tells us.And, indeed, it does. Her motherand father disappear.
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Timeshifts. Her brother changesinto a dog. Just what is real?As Eliza says over and over,"Appearances can be deceiving."A wonderful book I never wouldhave read had it not been forBookCrossing. Recommended. Show Less
LibraryThing member diana.hauser
I have read many of Kate Atkinson’s books and enjoyed them all. I became familiar with the author while watching the Jackson Brodie series on Masterpiece Mystery/Theatre. HUMAN CROQUET is my latest Kate Atkinson read.
The story is a melancholy one and a bit confusing at times. The writing is very
Is the Widow or Aunt Vinny Gordon’s mother?
Did the neighbor, Mr. Baxter, die by his own hand or his wife’s?
Did Audrey’s baby die? or was she left at the Fairfax doorstep?
How did the Widow die?
No one ‘looked for’ Eliza (or Gordon) after they disappeared?
I think I know the answers. But I read and reread a passage and am still a bit fuzzy with the details.
I like the prologue - setting the tone for the area.
I like the main character, Isobel Fairfax.
I liked the ‘Lady Oak’ as a character, a sentinel or symbol of the history of the area.
I liked the sense of place.
I liked the surprise appearance of a young William Shakespeare as a tutor at the Elizabethan estate of the then Lord Fairfax.
I liked the sense of ‘time shifting’ as opposed to outright time travel. This story is very subtle and multi-layered.
All in all, I did enjoy the subtleties of this book and would recommend it and other titles by the author.
The story is a melancholy one and a bit confusing at times. The writing is very
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lyrical and dream-like. Atkinson’s unusual writing style mixes time travel and reality so that the present becomes a bit blurred. The chapters bounce back and forth from Beginning to Present to Past to Present to Past to Present to Maybe to Past and ending with Future and we shift in and out of events during these different time periods. It is a bit difficult to explain, hence the adjective ‘blurred’ being used a lot. HUMAN CROQUET is a ‘layering of plots’.Is the Widow or Aunt Vinny Gordon’s mother?
Did the neighbor, Mr. Baxter, die by his own hand or his wife’s?
Did Audrey’s baby die? or was she left at the Fairfax doorstep?
How did the Widow die?
No one ‘looked for’ Eliza (or Gordon) after they disappeared?
I think I know the answers. But I read and reread a passage and am still a bit fuzzy with the details.
I like the prologue - setting the tone for the area.
I like the main character, Isobel Fairfax.
I liked the ‘Lady Oak’ as a character, a sentinel or symbol of the history of the area.
I liked the sense of place.
I liked the surprise appearance of a young William Shakespeare as a tutor at the Elizabethan estate of the then Lord Fairfax.
I liked the sense of ‘time shifting’ as opposed to outright time travel. This story is very subtle and multi-layered.
All in all, I did enjoy the subtleties of this book and would recommend it and other titles by the author.
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LibraryThing member bhowell
This is truly an amazing novel and Ms Atkinson is a very fine writer. The mix of history, imagination, literature, and ghastly family ties and secrets make for a riveting read but this is also very beautiful prose. The stories within are sometimes heartbreaking, abandoned children, abusive men, but
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the stubborn heart of Isobel Fairfax shines through and binds these stories together with her own brand of black humour and wry observation. Show Less
LibraryThing member AJBraithwaite
Was so delighted to find this in my local library. It had been shelved after Margaret Atwood's works, but never mind. It's populated with wonderful, believable, often monstrous characters and a wicked sense of humour. Brilliant.
LibraryThing member jessinfl
Intriguing and occasionally funny, but didn't quite come together for me; and at the end, I still can't be sure what, if any of it, even happened.
LibraryThing member froxgirl
I had no idea that Kate Atkinson was set on the path of multiple lives/time travel so early in her writing career. People in 1997 must have been completely tripped out by this one. It takes place in a haunty part of England, in a town dominated by the Lady Oak tree, which allegedly has William
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Shakespeare's initials carved on it. The narrator is Isobel, daughter of a misbegotten marriage between her fey mother Eliza and her straight-as-nails father Gordon. After Eliza and her father disappear, separately and mysteriously, she lives a meager life with her despicably awful grandmother and aunt, right out of Cinderella. But she, and the household, slip through slits in time, and as in Atkinson's recent novels, what is real and what isn't, what could be and what wasn't, is never quite certain for the reader. It's sheer pleasure to sit on Isobel's shoulder and observe (happily, not to be her!) as it all unwinds. There's a kind of summing-up rush at the end which is not as smooth as it is almost two decades later, but fans of Atkinson's Life After Life and A God In Ruins will want to hit her back catalogue for sure. Show Less
LibraryThing member deckla
Told from the point of view of Isobel, its omniscient narrator, this is a complicated family history, full of fantasy masquerading as truth and truth masquerading as fantasy, of mixed identities, of events that turn into dreams and dreams that turn into events. It is set in England, on the estate
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of one Francis Fairfax, some 300 years after his residence there. Shakespeare is a bit player, along with a cast of evil schoolteachers, missing mothers, spinsters, smart adolescents, kindly matrons cooking poisoned mushroom soup, and other goings-on such as might appear in an entertainment by the Bard. And babies. Lots of babies, changelings, left on doorsteps, snatched from carriages, and suddenly breaking forth from unprepared wombs. Fascinating and wise and sad and satisfying and well said. Show Less
LibraryThing member BLBera
Brilliant coming-of-age story. There is so much to think about. Loved it.
LibraryThing member Greatrakes
The Fairfaxes of the Forest of Lythe, owned the forest and now own Arden, a house at the end of Hawthorne Close. Aunt Vinny, Gordon the returned father with fat Debbie the step mother.
Drops into the past with William Shakespeare and an elopement.
Drops into the past with William Shakespeare and an elopement.
LibraryThing member RLucyG
Another classic from Atkinson, similar undertones and theme to Behind the Scenes.
LibraryThing member piemouth
I read this after being disappointed by Case Histories and Emotionally Weird, neither of which I liked. This one was okay. A teenage girl in a suburban village tells the history of her family (there’s a mystery there, of course) with some coincidences and elements that might be supernatural but
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don’t feel contrived. There are stories within stories. I liked it. She’s a good storyteller when she has a real story to tell. Show Less
LibraryThing member PollyMoore3
Re-read recently; I'd forgotten how very dark it is, having only remembered the quirky dysfunctional family (notably the awful Aunt Vinny, who somehow becomes quite loveable in a weird kind of way). I also like the alternative versions of events that run concurrently through the story. Not normally
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a fan of "magical realism", I do like this, and prefer it to "Behind the Scenes at the Museum" or "When will there be Good News". Show Less
LibraryThing member ShellyS
Kate Atkinson has been one of my favorite authors for a while now, and since I started reading her books after she'd published a few, I went back and read this earlier tale, which reminded me of her more recent work Life After Life in its time bending structure. It's almost as if this book was a
Isobel Fairfax is an ordinary 16-year-old girl living an ordinary life in 1960, yet somehow, she can slip into the past for brief glimpses of her hometown as it was. Isobel and her older brother have been haunted for most of their lives by the disappearance of their mother when they were young, and Isobel's brother in particular, has been obsessed in recreating her, grasping at any artifact or clue as to who she was or where she is, while Isobel would prefer to regain their mother as a whole entity. Instead, they must contend with their father, Gordon, who returned to them after an absence of seven years; a cranky aunt; and a stepmother with odd obsessions. But how well does Isobel know the adults in her life? Who were they and, more importantly, how did they all come to this place in their lives?
The story unfolds as a historical treatise, starting with the formation of all things, then a brief chronology of the area of England the Fairfaxes have called home, an area William Shakespeare is said to have visited, ending with Gordon's early years, before returning to alternating timelines of present and the past, a past when Gordon, returned from WWII, brought home his bride, Eliza. Family secrets abound as Isobel seeks answers to life's mysteries and her own family's.
As always when I read one of Atkinson's books, I got caught up with the characters and their lives. They're fully realized people, warts and all, and by the end of the book, not everything is what I thought it was, and it's not too many books that can fool me and take my breath away as this one did. I hate saying too much because I'd hate to ruin a wonderful, surprising, amazing, ultimately uplifting, yet poignant reading experience this book is.
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test run for that, yet this stands on its own with its own special take on the flexibility of time.Isobel Fairfax is an ordinary 16-year-old girl living an ordinary life in 1960, yet somehow, she can slip into the past for brief glimpses of her hometown as it was. Isobel and her older brother have been haunted for most of their lives by the disappearance of their mother when they were young, and Isobel's brother in particular, has been obsessed in recreating her, grasping at any artifact or clue as to who she was or where she is, while Isobel would prefer to regain their mother as a whole entity. Instead, they must contend with their father, Gordon, who returned to them after an absence of seven years; a cranky aunt; and a stepmother with odd obsessions. But how well does Isobel know the adults in her life? Who were they and, more importantly, how did they all come to this place in their lives?
The story unfolds as a historical treatise, starting with the formation of all things, then a brief chronology of the area of England the Fairfaxes have called home, an area William Shakespeare is said to have visited, ending with Gordon's early years, before returning to alternating timelines of present and the past, a past when Gordon, returned from WWII, brought home his bride, Eliza. Family secrets abound as Isobel seeks answers to life's mysteries and her own family's.
As always when I read one of Atkinson's books, I got caught up with the characters and their lives. They're fully realized people, warts and all, and by the end of the book, not everything is what I thought it was, and it's not too many books that can fool me and take my breath away as this one did. I hate saying too much because I'd hate to ruin a wonderful, surprising, amazing, ultimately uplifting, yet poignant reading experience this book is.
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LibraryThing member samfsmith
What an odd book. It breaks one of the rules that is always dictated to beginning writers - no odd turns of plot that later turn out to be a dream. In this case there are three odd turns of plot that all happened while the narrator was in a coma, which the reader know nothing about until later.
And
And
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yet it all works somehow. Let me be honest - I love the writing style of Kate Atkinson. She could write a grocery list and I would read it. Her style really resonates with me, and I thoroughly enjoyed this queer book, strange plot twists and all. Show Less
LibraryThing member Marse
Atkinson's second novel shows the wonderful play with time and knowledge that became stunning in "Life After Life" and especially in "A God in Ruins". Sixteen year old Isobel Fairfax, the unlikely heroine seems to be going in and out of time distortions. They happen unexpectedly and for short
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periods, and Isobel, though confused by this weird phenomena, is not particularly disturbed by them, at least not at first. Plus there's the mystery of where her mother is, her father's "amnesia", and all the characters in the town, whose secret lives are slowly becoming apparent to Isobel in particular. It starts out rather benignly, but becomes quite dark. Show Less
LibraryThing member PhilipJHunt
My third Kate Atkinson book (and her second). I discovered her by reading a detective novel she wrote in 2011 and enjoying it so much, decided to look at her earlier oeuvre. Quite different. Quite. And it may be unfair to say, but in these earlier books it feels like she is learning the craft of
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novel writing. There's lots of back story which is entertaining but feels rather over-explanatory and advantages the reader over the characters (which just feels wrong way about). Undeterred, however, I shall look for more of her detective stories. Show Less
LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
Interesting characters and lush language this is a surreal story of life, death, love and intertwined generations. While interesting it has moments that you question their inclusion. I finished the story still wondering what happened in the story but although that often annoys me I actually enjoyed
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the trip. Show Less
LibraryThing member Iira
I love Kate Atkinson. This was a surprise for me, not knowing these alternative/multiple strains of time and personal histories were already in her repertoire at this early stage. This one was perhaps less polished than the later ones, at times a bit confusing but nonetheless delightfully dark and
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sinister read. Dod not see any of this coming as I started! Show Less
LibraryThing member arosoff
This is Kate Atkinson's second novel, and it shows a little. It has all the ingredients of her later novels, but the structure is a little shaky. The writing is still good, the concept works, the characters are interesting, but the construction of the novel--which flips back and forth in time--is
It's still a delight to read, though.
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not as strong, so that you can guess much of what happens in advance, and the reveals aren't all doled out as well as they should be. It's still a delight to read, though.
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LibraryThing member lisahistory
Not my favorite Kate Atkinson so far, but an engrossing story from the viewpoint of Isobel Fairfax, who along with her brother lost their mother in the woods when young, and it's unclear whether she was killed or why the father left the kids with older relatives. Isobel occasionally lapses into a
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different time, but I was somewhat unclear why that happened except to show some instability and make one question the reliability of the narrator. There were a few moments where I struggled with some squeamishness. The alternate possibilities at the end were interesting. Show Less
LibraryThing member LisaMLane
Not my favorite Kate Atkinson so far, but an engrossing story from the viewpoint of Isobel Fairfax, who along with her brother lost their mother in the woods when young, and it's unclear whether she was killed or why the father left the kids with older relatives. Isobel occasionally lapses into a
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different time, but I was somewhat unclear why that happened except to show some instability and make one question the reliability of the narrator. There were a few moments where I struggled with some squeamishness. The alternate possibilities at the end were interesting. Show Less
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 1999)