Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

I suppose it's all a matter of perception really - what you see depends on what you think you're seeing. And anyway, how can we tell if what we're seeing is real? Reality seems to go out the window when perception comes in the door. And, if it comes right down to it, how do we know there’s such a thing as reality?

Thus muses Isobel, the 'alpha and omega of narrators', in Atkinson's 1997 novel Human Croquet. It is a challenging story about life, how we know what we think we know and what actually might be going on around us. It is a metafictional exploration of epistemological investigation with an unreliable narrator. It is also side-splittingly funny.

Beginning and ending with a wood that covers the planet, trees continue to be essential to the plot in more ways than one. Isobel and her brother Charles grow up with missing parents, under the care of their inept and unloving aunt Vinny, and even when their father returns with a new wife in tow the sense that something is missing cannot be escaped. Isobel's first-person narrative, starting on her 16th birthday, is interrupted by the third-person narrative of her parent's life and her own childhood. As well as the odd time-jump. The ancestral family history in the beginning is given depth in the end by providing a first-person account from the first lady Fairfax; the mystery that is Isobel's mother is revealed as we are ultimately told her story.
As is so often the case with Atkinson, storytelling is at the core of the novel and all is, of course, story. It's driving force is a mystery-filled plot, with loose elements lying about like debris in an abandoned attic, waiting to be reassembled into order. Who killed Eliza? Where did the dog come from? Why does Mr Primrose wear make-up? Why does Debbie fill the kitchen with mince pies? And who stole the shoe? At the final page it has come together, in shocking, tragic, comical and moving ways. The difficult issues addressed by the text are dealt with in spite of themselves, almost hidden within the force of the narrative.

Imagine meeting Shakespeare! But then what would you say to him? What would you do with him? You could hardly take him around the shops. (Or maybe you could.) 'Have sex', Carmen says...

By the time Isobel does meet Shakespeare for an erotic encounter it doesn't matter that the first conversation was part of Isobel's coma and the meeting with the Bard but a dream. Dreams, hallucinations, memories - sanity and reality are slippery concepts. As reading is a kind of dream, cued by the text, the memory of it becomes a 'fictitious' one. How do we know what is real? Perhaps by trying to focus on what is true. And following Shakespeare, a constant intertextual source of wisdom.

So, is this magical realism? Or psychological realism? Or fantasy? Does it matter? To Isobel it does not. To Atkinson probably even less. By the end of her story we know that it is a story, we also know that the truth is embedded somewhere within the stories that make up our lives.