Great works of art beg us to revisit, to come back afresh, diving into the depths for new meanings. Ali Smith in Artful makes the case that literature as an art form is on the whole drastically overlooked for this kind of revisiting. Kate Atkinson’s Normal Rules Don’t Apply will undoubtedly increase in its gifts to the reader with each re-read. The 11 short stories in this collection each weave together, playful in their intertextuality as they nod to other stories in the collection and beyond, to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and even a rehashing of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s courtship. But Atkinson adds a magical realist twist, ensuring that what should be steady terrain is truly unknowable. Normal Rules Don’t Apply takes the set pieces of the everyday – offices, soap operas, dinner with the in-laws – and makes them bizarrely brilliant.
[ Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson: Vibrant, arch, entertainingOpens in new window ]
Throughout, the stories dance between reality and fantasy, lulling the reader into a comfort, say, by a commentary on modern office culture, before tearing down any scaffolding holding the story to reality. In the opening story, The Void, a mysterious climate emergency arrives, dropping the whole universe into darkness for a minute or so. During that time, all light and electricity stop completely. When the lights go up again, everybody outside has died. The streets become littered with dead people. But one species survives this deathly blackout: birds. The Void begins to arrive as regularly as the sun setting, as the title suggests normal rules don’t apply here. This story is delightfully strange in and of itself, but several stories later the Void reappears in the story Gene-sis, about an artistic creator (or The Creator), bored out of her mind in the drudgery of office life. In Blithe Spirit, Mandy, the aide to an English MP, works herself to death, then watches her own autopsy. Atkinson’s stories show us that the mundanity of modern living is an unacceptable drudgery. Nothing is guaranteed as life is bizarre and short.
Despite Ali Smith’s call to do so, I have rarely ever picked up a book again for a second go. But when I read the last page of Normal Rules Don’t Apply I had an intense desire to flick back to the beginning and start again.
Aimée Walsh is a writer from Belfast. Her debut novel, Exile, will be published in spring 2024
