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Human Croquet: A Novel Kindle Edition
From the award-winning author of Life After Life comes Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet, part fairy tale, part mystery, part coming-of-age novel
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
Human Croquet tells the story of Isobel Fairfax, a girl growing up in Lythe, a typical 1960s British suburb. But Lythe was once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English tutor named William Shakespeare, and as Isobel investigates the strange history of her family, her neighbors, and her village, she occasionally gets caught in Shakespearean time warps. Meanwhile, she gets closer to the shocking truths about her missing mother, her war-hero father, and the hidden lives of her close friends and classmates.
A stunning feat of imagination and storytelling, Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet is rich with the disappointments and possibilities every family shares.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateMarch 29, 2013
- File size1683 KB
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What's it about?
Isobel Fairfax unravels mysteries surrounding her family, village, and Shakespearean time warps in 1960s Britain.Popular highlight
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories. This is one of mine.65 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Reality seems to go out the window when perception comes in the door.54 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
I should never have tried to kill time. I wasted it and now it’s wasting me.49 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Atkinson's novel is obviously not rooted in dull reality. Narrator Isobel has an uncanny knowledge of past and future events; Charles is obsessed with the concept of parallel universes and time travel; and a faery curse hangs over everybody. Fortunately, Kate Atkinson is a masterful writer who manages to keep her world of wonders in check. Human Croquet is no ordinary novel, and readers who venture into the Fairfax universe are in for a magical ride.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
-Mary Loudon, The Times
"A first novel written so fluently and wittily that I sailed through it as though blown by an exhilarating wind. I loved it."
-Margaret Forster
"A novel which will dazzle readers for years to come."
-Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
-Penelope Fitzgerald, Evening Standart
"Huge, exhilarating, loving and detailed eruption of a novel...an utterly intoxicating display of novelistic elan...big and joyous, literary and accessible...storytelling at it buoyant best"
-The Scotsman
"Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns"
-Cressida Connolly, Observer
From the Inside Flap
But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes had dwindled too; now they lived in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and were hardly a family at all.
There was Vinny (the Aunt from Hell)--with her cats and her crab-apple face. And Gordon, who had forgotten them for seven years and, when he remembered, came back with fat Debbie, who shared her one brain cell with a poodle. And then there were Charles and Isobel, the children. Charles, the acne-scarred Lost Boy, passed his life awaiting visits from aliens and the return of his mother. But it is Isobel to whom the story belongs--Isobel, born on the Streets of Trees, who drops into pockets of time and out again. Isobel is sixteen and she too is waiting for the return of her mother--the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arpege and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Human Croquet
By Kate AtkinsonPicador USA
Copyright ©1999 Kate AtkinsonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312186883
Chapter One
STREETS OF TREES
CALL ME ISOBEL. (IT'S MY NAME.) THIS IS MY HISTORY. WHERE SHALL I begin?
Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time nor space and is therefore beyond our imagination.
Nothing will come of nothing, unless it's the beginning of the world. This is how it begins, with the word and the word is life. The void is transformed by a gigantic firecracker allowing time to dawn and imagination to begin.
The first nuclei arrive -- hydrogen and helium -- followed, a few million years later, by their atoms and eventually, millions more years later, the molecules form. Aeons pass. The clouds of gas in space begin to condense into galaxies and stars, including our own Sun. In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher, in his Annals of the World, calculates that God made Heaven and Earth on the evening of Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. Other people are less specific and date it to some four and a half billion years ago.
Then the trees come. Forests of giant ferns wave in the warm damp swamps of the Carboniferous Era. The first conifers appear and the great coal fields are laid down. Everywhere you look, flies are being trapped in drops of amber -- which are the tears of poor Phaeton's sisters, who were turned by grief into black poplars (populus nigra). The flowering and the broad-leaved trees make their first appearance and eventually the trees crawl out of the swamps onto the dry land.
Here, where this story takes place (in the grim north), here was once forest, oceans of forest, the great Forest of Lythe. Ancient forest, an impenetrable thicket of Scots pine, birch and aspen, of English elm and wych elm, common hazel, oak and holly, the forest which once covered England and to which, if left alone, it might one day return. The forest has the world to itself for a long time.
Chop. The stone and flint tools signalled the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end. The alchemy of copper and tin made new bronze axes that shaved more trees from the earth. Then came iron (the great destroyer) and the iron axes cut the forest down faster than it could grow back and the iron ploughshares dug up the land that was once forest.
The woodcutters coppiced and pollarded and chopped away at the ash and the beech, the oak, the hornbeam and the tangled thorns. The miners dug and smelted while the charcoal-burners piled their stacks high. Soon you could hardly move in the forest for bodgers and cloggers, hoop-makers and wattle-hurdlers. Wild boars rooted and domestic pigs snuffled, geese clacked and wolves howled and deer were startled at every turning in the path. Chop! Trees were transformed into other things -- into clogs and wine-presses, carts and tools, houses and furniture. The English forests sailed the oceans of the world and found new lands full of wilderness and more forests waiting to be cut down.
But there was a secret mystery at the heart of the heart of the forest. When the forest was cut down, where did the mystery go? Some say there were fairies in the forest -- angry, bad-tempered creatures (the unwashed children of Eve), ill-met by moonlight, who loitered with intent on banks of wild thyme listening furiously to the encroaching axes. Where did they go when the forest no longer existed? And what about the wolves? What happened to them? (Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it isn't there.)
The small village of Lythe emerged from the shrinking forest, a straggle of cottages and a church with a square clocktower. Its inhabitants tramped back and forward with their eggs and capons and occasionally their virtue to Glebelands, the nearest town, only two miles away -- a thriving market-place and a hot-bed of glovers and butchers, blacksmiths and vintners, rogues and recusants.
In 1580, or thereabouts, a stranger rode into Lythe, one Francis Fairfax, as dark and swarthy of countenance as a Moor. Francis Fairfax, lately ennobled by the Queen, was in receipt, from the Queen's own hand, of a great swathe of land north of the village, on the edge of what remained of the forest. Here he built himself Fairfax Manor, a modern house of brick and plaster and timbers from his newly owned forest oaks.
This Francis was a soldier and an adventurer. He had even made the great grey ocean crossing and seen the newfoundlands and virgin territories with their three-headed monsters and feathered savages. Some said he was the Queen's own spy, crossing the Channel on her secret business as frequently as others crossed Glebelands Green Moor.
Some also said that he had a beautiful child wife, herself already with child, locked away in the attics of Fairfax Manor. Others said the woman in the attics was not his child wife but his mad wife. There was even a rumour that his attics were full of dead wives, all of them hanging from butcher's hooks. There were even those who said (this even more unlikely) that he was the Queen's lover and that the great Gloriana had borne him a clandestine child which was being raised in Fairfax Manor. In the attics, naturally.
It is fact, not rumour, that the Queen stayed at Fairfax Manor in the course of escaping an outbreak of plague in London, sometime in the summer of 1582, and was observed admiring the butter-yellow quince and flourishing medlar trees and dining on the results of a splendid early morning deer hunt.
Fairfax Manor was famous for the thrill of its deer chases, the softness of its goose-feather mattresses, the excellence of its kitchens, the ingenuity of its entertainments. Sir Francis became a famous patron of poets and aspiring playwrights. Some say that Shakespeare himself spent time at Fairfax Manor. Keen supporters of this explanation of Shakespeare's famous lost years -- of which there are several, mostly mad -- point to the evidence of the initials "WS" carved into the bark of the great Lady Oak and still visible to the keen eye to this day. Detractors of this theory point out that another member of the Fairfax household, his son's tutor, a Walter Stukesly, can claim the same initials.
Perhaps Master Stukesly was the author of the magnificent masque (The Masque of Adonis) which Sir Francis ordered up for the Queen's entertainment during her midsummer visit to Lythe. We can imagine the theatricals being performed, using the great forest as a backdrop, the lamps glimmering in the trees, the manymechanical devices used in the telling of the tragic tale, the youthful Adonis dying in the arms of a young boy Venus under the Lady Oak -- ayoung, handsome oak much of an age with Francis Fairfax that once stood at the heart of the heart of the forest and now guarded its entrance.
It was not long after the Queen's departure from Lythe that Francis's wife first appeared, a real one made of flesh and blood and not kept in the attics, but none the less an enigmatic creature whose beginning and end were veiled in mystery. She arrived, they said, at the door of Fairfax Manor one wild, storm-driven night, dressed in neither shoes nor hose nor petticoat, dressed in nothing in fact but her silk-soft skin -- yet with not a drop of rain on her, nor one red hair on her head blown out of its place.
She came, she said, from an even grimmer north and her name was Mary (like the dreaded Caledonian queen herself). She did not persist in her nakedness and allowed herself to be clothed in silks and furs and velvets and clasped in jewels by an eager Sir Francis. On her wedding-morning Sir Francis presented her with the famous Fairfax jewel -- much sought after by metal-detectors and historians -- welldocumented in Sir Thomas A'hearne's famous Travels around England but not seen for nearly four hundred years. (For the record, a gold lozenge locket, studded with emeralds and pearls and opening to reveal a miniature Dance of Death believed by some to have been painted by Nicholas Hilliard, in homage to his mentor, Holbein.)
The new Lady Fairfax favoured green -- kirtle and petticoats and stomacher, as green as the vert that hides the deer from the hunter. Only her cambric shift was white -- this piece of information being offered by the midwife brought in from Glebelands for the arrival of the Fairfax firstborn. Onlyborn. It was, she reported when she had been returned to town, a perfectly normal baby (a boy) but Sir Francis was a madman who insisted that the poor midwife had her eyes bound in every room but the birth-chamber and who swore her to secrecy about what she saw that night. Whatever it was that the poor woman did see was never broadcast for she was conveniently struck by lightning as she raised a tankard of ale to wet the baby's head.
Lady Fairfax, it was reported, was strangely fond of wandering into the forest dressed in her green damasks and silks, her hound Finn her only companion. Sometimes she could be found sitting under the green guardianship of the Lady Oak, singing an unbearably sweet song about her home, like a Ruth amid alien green. More than once, Sir Francis's game steward had frightened himself half to death by mistaking her for a timid hart, bolting away from him in a flash of green. What if one day he were to shoot off an arrow into her fair green breast?
Then she vanished -- as instantly and mysteriously as she had once arrived. Sir Francis returned home from a day's hunting with a fine plump doe shot through the heart and found her gone. A kitchen maid, an ignorant girl, claimed she saw Lady Fairfax disappearing from underneath the Lady Oak, fading away until her green brocade dress was indistinguishable from the surrounding trees. As Lady Fairfax had grown dimmer, the girl reported, she had placed a dreadful curse on the Fairfaxes, past and future, and her monstrous shrieks had echoed in the air long after she herself was invisible. The cook clattered the girl about her head with a porringer for her fanciful notions.
Francis Fairfax fulfilled the requirements of a cursed man -- burning to death in his own bed in 1605 along with most of his household. William, his son, was rescued by servants and grew up to be a sickly kind of boy, hanging onto life just long enough to father his likeness.
The Fairfaxes abandoned the charred remains of Fairfax Manor and moved to Glebelands where their fortunes declined. Fairfax Manor crumbled to dust in the air, the fine parkland reverted to nature and within a handful of years you would never have known it had ever been there.
Over the next hundred years the land was parcelled up and soldat auction. An eighteenth-century Fairfax, Thomas, lost the last of the land in the South Sea Bubble and the Fairfaxes were all butforgotten -- except for Lady Mary who was occasionally sighted, dressed all in green, disconsolate and gloomy, and occasionally with her head under her arm for good effect.
The forest itself was gradually removed, the last of it taken during the Napoleonic War for fighting ships. By the time the nineteenth century really got going, all that remained of the once great Forest of Lythe was a large wood known as Boscrambe Woods, thirty miles to the north of Glebelands and -- just beyond the boundaries ofLythe -- the Lady Oak itself.
By 1840 Glebelands was a great manufacturing town whose engines thrummed and throbbed and whose chimneys smoked dark clouds of uncertain chemicals into the sky over its crowded slum streets. The owner of one of these factories, Samuel Fairfax, philanthropist and manufacturer of Argand gas burners, briefly revived the family fortunes with his mission to illuminate the entire town with gas lamps.
The Fairfaxes were able to buy a large town house with all the trimmings -- servants and a coach and accounts in every shop. The Fairfax women wore dresses of French velvet and Nottingham lace and talked nonsense all day long while Samuel Fairfax dreamed of buying back the tract of land where Fairfax Manor once stood and making a country park where the people of Glebelands could clean their sooty lungs and exercise their rickety limbs. He was hoping that this would be his living memorial -- Fairfax Park, he murmured happily as he looked over possible designs for the massive wrought-iron entrance gates and just as he pointed to a particularly rococo pattern (`Restoration') his heart stopped beating and he fell face first onto the pattern book. The park was never built.
Gas lamps were overtaken by electric ones, the Fairfaxes failed to see the new technology coming and grew slowly poorer until, in 1880, one Joseph Fairfax, grandson to Samuel, realized where the future lay and put the remaining family money into retail -- a small grocery shop in a side street. The business gradually prospered, and ten years later `Fairfax and Son -- Licensed Grocers' moved into the High Street.
Joseph Fairfax had one son and no daughters. The son, Leonard, wooed and won a girl called Charlotte Tait, the daughter of the owner of a small enamelware factory. The Taits were of stern Nonconformist stock and Charlotte was not above lending a hand in the shop when required, although she soon fell pregnant with her eldest child, an ugly girl named Madge.
The villagers of Lythe meanwhile waited for Glebelands to crawl across the remaining few fields towards them and swallow them up. While they were waiting a war happened and took three-quarters of the young men of Lythe (three to be precise) and as the war drew to a close no-one cared very much when most of the village, along with the land where Fairfax Manor had stood, was sold to a local builder.
The builder, a man called Maurice Smith, had a vision, the dream of a master-builder -- a garden suburb, an estate of modern, comfortable housing for the post-war, post-servant world of small families. Streets of detached and semi-detached houses with neat front gardens and large back gardens where children could play, Father could grow vegetables and roses and Mother could park Baby in his pram and take afternoon tea on the lawn with her genteel friends. On the land that once housed Sir Francis and his household, Maurice Smith built his streets of houses. Houses in mock-Tudor and pebble-dash stucco, houses with casement windows and porches and tiled vestibules. Houses with three and four bedrooms and the most up-to-date plumbing, porcelain sinks and efficient back boilers; cool, airy larders, and enamelled gas cookers.
Streets with broad pavements and trees, lots of trees -- a canopy of trees over the tarmac, a mantle of green around the houses and their happy occupants. Trees that would give pleasure, that could be observed in bud and new leaf, unfurling their green fingers on the streets of houses, raising their sheltering leafy arms overthe dwellers within. Different trees for every street -- Ash Street, Chestnut Avenue, Holly Tree Lane, Hawthorn Close, Oak Road, Laurel Bank, Rowan Street, Sycamore Street, Willow Road. The forest of trees had become a wilderness of streets.
But at night, in the quiet of the dead time, if you listened carefully, you could imagine the wolves howling.
The Lady Oak grew on, solitary and ancient, in the field behind the dog-leg of Hawthorn Close and Chestnut Avenue. Points of weakness in the tree had been plugged with cement and old iron crutches propped up its weary limbs but in summer its leafy crown was still green and thick enough for a rookery and at dusk the birds flew caw cawing into its welcoming branches.
At the end of Hawthorn Close was the master-builder's firsthouse -- Arden -- the one he built as his showpiece, on the long-lostfoundations of Fairfax Manor. Arden had fine parquet floors and light-oak panelling. It had a craftsman-built oak staircase with acorn finials and its turret follies were capped with round blue Welsh slates, overlapping like a dragon's scales.
The master-builder had intended the house for himself but Leonard Fairfax offered him such a good price that he couldn't bring himself to refuse. And so the Fairfax family returned, unwittingly, to its ancestral abode.
Charlotte Fairfax had given birth (difficult though it was to imagine this) to two more children after Madge, in order--Vinny (Lavinia) and Gordon (`my baby!'). Gordon was much younger, an afterthought (`my surprise!'). When they moved into Arden, Madge had already left to marry an adulterous bank clerk and move to Mirfield and Vinny was a grown woman of twenty, but Gordon was still a little boy. Gordon had introduced Charlotte to a new emotion. At night she would creep into his new little room under the eaves and gaze at his sleeping face in the softhalo of the nightlight and surprise herself with the overwhelming loveshe felt for him.
But time has already begun to fly, soon Eliza will come and ruin everything. Eliza will be my mother. 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.
Continues...
Excerpted from Human Croquetby Kate Atkinson Copyright ©1999 by Kate Atkinson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Product details
- ASIN : B00BFQAO4U
- Publisher : Picador; First edition (March 29, 2013)
- Publication date : March 29, 2013
- Language : English
- File size : 1683 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 354 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #395,532 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #108 in Contemporary British & Irish Literature
- #486 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
- #950 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)
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About the author
Kate Atkinson is an international bestselling novelist, as well as playwright and short story writer. She is the author of Life After Life; Transcription; Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a Whitbread Book of the Year winner; the story collection Not the End of the World; and five novels in the Jackson Brodie crime series, which was adapted into the BBC TV show Case Histories.
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The story centers around the Fairfax family, who appear to labor under a sixteenth-century curse. The larger-than-life heroine is Isobel Fairfax, who in the midst of a wildly dysfunctional family, just wants to be normal. But not even the neighbors in her suburban neighborhood are normal. Wife beating, rape, and child abuse are rampant. And Isobel keeps falling into time warps.
I loved the character of Isobel's ugly redheaded brother Charles, who's obsessed with the paranormal and the forlorn hope of finding his lost mother. Sour Aunt Vinnie is another gem. Isobel's elusive mother Eliza, whose perfume is Arpege and tobacco, is a wonderfully complex femme fatale. And there's a personable dog and lots of cats for added flavor.
Atkinson's people are so alive, that their comings and goings can support any number of improbabilities. This novel is a kind of post-modern Midsummer Night's Dream, with a few bizarre Christmas Eves thrown in. The reader may feel as well whacked as a croquet ball by the end, but somehow it all works.
Ostensibly the story of Isobel Fairfax, a young British woman who at an early age, along with her unattractive younger brother, Charles, "loses" her mother. Unlike Charles, Isobel appears to have the ability to slip through time, back to the Elizabethan period, and thus her life becomes this peculiar negotiation of time, space and people. Though the novel has this magic realist/mystical element it’s also a coming-of-age-story, a tale of familial and suburban dysfunction, murder, disappearances, secrets and lies, and an exploration of the ties that bind and tear us apart. The novel takes the reader on a remarkable journey through Isobel's childhood, adolescence and that of her parents and forebears, exposing warts, flaws, mistakes, triumphs and tragedies.
Capturing the essence of the 1960s as well as war-time London, the characteristics of class, neighborhoods and the passion and heartbreak of relationships of all kind, this pseudo and quite dark fairy-tale is remarkable. Moving, haunting, at times funny, always strange and yet familiar, the novel shifts points of view from first to third person and a cocky omniscient narrator who through Isobel also functions like a Greek chorus, or a Shakespearian player setting the scene and passing commentary upon what unfolds. The book plays with reader expectations, genre, the notion of secrets, and in doing so examines the minutiae of the everyday, and explores the adult world from a child's point of view and vice versa.
All the world and time is Atkinson's stage, and this is certainly an ambitious and clever novel that offers alternative readings of not only scenes, but characters' interpretations of events. What the reader accepts is up to her or him, but nothing is predictable.
The prose is simply lovely and some of the ideas expressed are timeless and erudite and have you reaching for a highlighter in order to recall them. This story won't appeal to everyone, and it’s very different in so many ways from Atkinson’s other books, but if you cast aside expectations and go for the ride, it's one you won't forget in a hurry.
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Die Mutter von Isobel und ihrem Bruder, so heißt es, hat die Familie verlassen und auch der Vater war sehr lange weg. Großgezogen werden die Kinder von einer eisernen Lady in Gestalt der Großmutter und einer verdrießlichen, verwitweten Tante.
In einer sehr witzigen, aber auch poetischen Sprache und mit vielen Wortspielereien wird die Geschichte der Familie erzählt und ich würde, wenn möglich, empfehlen, das Buch unbedingt in der Originalsprache zu lesen. Es ist eine Familiengeschichte, ebenso wie ein Thriller und jede Seite ein Vergnügen. Ein tolles Buch, das ich uneingeschränkt weiter empfehlen kann, weil es eine so unverwechselbare Sprache hat und einen so großen Gedankenschatz.