War, Family, and Fiction 
 -- War: 
 In her eloquent postscript to this superb novel, Kate Atkinson says that when she decided to write about the Second World War, there were two subjects that interested her particularly: the London Blitz, and the bombing of German cities. The first she addressed in her phenomenally successful Life After Life, which told the life--or rather, the many possible lives--of a middle-class English woman, Ursula Todd, during the interwar years and the War itself. Now, in A God in Ruins, she concentrates on Ursula's brother Teddy, a bomber pilot with the RAF, and the action continues well beyond the War, almost to the present day. 
 As readers of the first book will know, Atkinson pulls no punches writing about the violence of warfare. The scenes in the Blitz in Life After Life were simultaneously terrifying and filled with humanity. Similarly, the bomber scenes here. She lists around forty memoirs and histories as sources, but her scenes of Teddy on the airfield or in the cockpit are as spontaneous and intense as if she had been there herself. The camaraderie between officers and crew is palpable, and the dangers so real as to make one amazed that the survival rate was not considerably lower than the overall fifty percent (ten percent, for those who were in bombers from the beginning). At the same time, one sees why Teddy was such a good pilot, in the care he takes with training and detail. These chapters rank with the best war books I have read, from authors of any gender. 
 -- Family: 
 Atkinson's second subject, an undeclared but obvious strength ever since her brilliant debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is family. After briefly checking in with Teddy's parents, who are much more prominent in Life After Life, Atkinson goes on to follow the lives of his daughter and two grandchildren, and even mentions their children too. Even if you removed the war scenes entirely, the two novels together would comprise a magnificent panorama of English life over the past century, told through characters who are achingly real. Although they sometimes seem out of synch with their times (Teddy's daughter Viola, for instance, joins a commune a full decade after the Hippie movement), they carry a strong sense of moving through history. This is far more than just a couple of period references, but a matter of inhabiting the thought of an era, meeting success and failure, and simply growing old. I find the sense of personal authenticity even stronger here than in the previous book, probably because Atkinson, who was born in 1951, is writing about her own lifetime. 
 This does not mean that all the characters are easy to like. Viola, in particular, grows up with very difficult feelings towards her father, and she becomes a poor mother in her turn. What is ironic is that Atkinson gives her an eventual career much like her own, making her a successful novelist, sensitive on paper but acerbic in person. Part of this is explained by trauma she has suffered in childhood, which will eventually be revealed. Her son Sunny is blighted by even greater trauma, but finds his way through it as an adult. Her daughter Bertie (for Roberta) emerges as a delightful young woman, and the bond that she forms with her aging grandfather Teddy is truly heart-warming. 
 [I should say here that although this second novel follows members of the same family, it is not a sequel. It is quite possible to read it without having read the first; there is no previous story one needs to know, none of those tedious catch-up passages of exposition for new readers. Indeed there are so many alternative scenarios in Life After Life that the new novel can only follow some of them, and is bound to contradict others.] 
 -- Fiction: 
 "Personally I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too." Atkinson again, from her Author's Note. I noted in my review of Life After Life that in writing about the Thirties and Forties, Atkinson was also returning to popular British mid-century genres, a kind of comfort food from the lending libraries of her childhood (and mine). She is not the only author to do so; you can see other novelists of her generation exploring a similar vein: Sebastian Faulks, Penelope Lively, Simon Mawer, and Ian McEwan among them. Like its predecessor, A God in Ruins inhabits a literary world; its characters are mostly readers, and their conversation is peppered with allusions to Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Hopkins. She even goes a step further by making Teddy's glamorous aunt Izzie base a series of children's books on the character of her nephew, whom she calls Augustus, but clearly a debt to the Just William series by Richmal Crompton. As this was part of my childhood reading too, I enjoyed the reference, but was less convinced that it worked in the context of the novel as a whole; fortunately, it is a minor aspect. 
 The most notorious metafictional quality in Life After Life, of course, is its shape as a branching tree of alternative scenarios: a child that dies at birth in one chapter survives in the next; a chapter that ends with a broken water main in a bombed-out cellar drowning the people taking shelter there is later seen as only one of several narrative possibilities. Although as impressed by Atkinson's abilities then as I am now, I felt that this structure undermined my investment in the earlier novel, making it hard to care what happened to the characters if that outcome was just going to be changed a chapter or two later. I had no such problem with A God in Ruins. While Atkinson still has tricks up her sleeve, it is possible to read this latest novel as a normal family saga almost to the end. If you invest in a character--and you will--you need not fear that he or she will be snatched away from you on the next page. 
 But Atkinson loves playing with the conventions of fiction. She does it here with her approach to time. The chapters are mostly much longer than those in Life After Life, but they jump around wildly in period: 1944, 1925, 1980, 1947, 1939, 1993, and so on, all the way to 2012. More significantly, Atkinson telescopes time periods even at the level of the paragraph, especially early in the book, where she is still instructing us on how to read it. Here is Teddy as a child, thinking of the boarding school to which "all the men in the family" have always gone: 
 Teddy supposed that his own son would have to go there too, although this boy existed in a future that Teddy couldn't even begin to imagine. He didn't need to, of course, for in that future he had no sons, only a daughter, Viola, something which would be a sadness for him although he never spoke of it, certainly not to Viola, who would have been volubly affronted.In this respect, the entire novel is like a fractal, every part being contained in every other part. By the end of only a few chapters, we know most of the events in the book: who will live and who will die, who will have children, even which of Teddy's bomber sorties will end in near-disaster. We read on not for the facts, but for the details, and because we have come to care about the people. I cannot think of a better way of making the point that a family (or by extension a nation) is the sum of its shared experience, its future and its past. 
 I was disappointed by Life After Life in that it lacked a satisfactory ending; if any outcome was theoretically possible, why end here rather than there, or somewhere else entirely? But I closed A God in Ruins with great satisfaction, indeed with tears in my eyes. In her endnote, Atkinson speaks of "...a great conceit hidden at the heart of the book to do with fiction and the imagination, which is revealed only at the end but which is in a way the whole raison d'etre of the novel." Metafiction again, but here it seemed absolutely right. Because of her mastery of the art of fiction. Because of the totality, and deep humanity, of her imagination.