In 1951, in a desperate attempt to raise the spirits of a shattered nation, the government came up with the Festival of Britain, a celebration of national creativity, grit and ingenuity. It is a moment in history that could have been designed for Kate Atkinson, who loves nothing more than a quirky detail and a cast of British eccentrics.
Harry Flynn (definitely think Errol), the quietly magnetic hero of Our Noble Selves, has survived Burma as a foreign correspondent turned war reporter. After a doomed marriage to a war widow called Ivy, and a stint in a mock-Tudor semi in Wealdstone with her, her eight-year-old daughter Veronica and a terrier, Mrs Betty, he resumes his bachelor life in London. A chance encounter with his old newspaper boss, Gerald Barry, leads him to a job compiling the festival’s poetry anthology. Barry provides a handy introduction: “The country’s stuck in the doldrums; we need to see the future,” he explains. The festival will celebrate “the Land and the People … Our love of country, love of freedom, love of nature, pride in craftsmanship, our reputation for tolerance and fair play.”
Flynn’s colleagues are mostly a likable bunch: there is 14-year-old Terence, “the Boy”, who behaves like “a motherly Cockney in a hammy play on the wireless”. There is “Badger”, rotund, affable and posh, something secret in the war; and Evans, a decent, melancholy, battle-scarred Welshman. When the team fall woefully behind schedule, Maud Ogilvie, a Scotswoman “beyond retirement age”, appears “from Typography” to sort them out. Anyone remotely familiar with Atkinson’s novels will know there’s no way a post-menopausal Scotswoman from typography is going to be a minor player.
As in Atkinson’s 2018 spy-themed novel Transcription, we are in a murky, plucky, postwar Britain that’s riddled with secrets. Atkinson’s method for controlling an extensive cast is to give each new character quirky identifying details. Individuals appear in Technicolored garb, sporting excellent period names (Flynn’s downstairs neighbours are elderly “spinster sisters” Hilda and Gertie Murgatroyd, who knit for the Distressed Gentlewoman’s Society). The signposting is rarely subtle. When a Mr Dangerfield appears at Flynn’s tea trolley, all military neatness and sinister jade eyes, and we learn that he’s a failed Tory candidate whose wartime stint in Secret Services didn’t “stick”, there’s really no need to wonder if he’s a wrong ’un.
A gentle noirish plot unfolds after Flynn has a date with the Parisian Delphine. That night, Delphine disappears but Flynn, inconveniently, has no memory of how the evening ended. He does wake up the next day, however, covered in blood.
Meanwhile, a competition to make the festival cake is won, inexplicably, by Mitzi Blinkhorn, a cartoonish ghoul in costume jewellery whose cake is repugnant. When her husband, Archie, appears, a skinny-legged “bantam cock” in a camel coat that indicates “a sleaziness of character”, we know there’s shady business afoot. It becomes clear that this is connected to Flynn’s increasingly alarming position as suspect No 1. His attempts to clear his name lead him into bed with the porcelain-skinned Lydia “who knows both Milton and more than one sexual position” and is, of course, more than she seems.
Flynn’s ex-stepdaughter Veronica, now a fearless 13-year-old, arrives at his flat bringing Mrs Betty (who, sadly, adds little) and helps him negotiate good-natured plot twists featuring colourful thugs, fillies and floozies, fascists and spies and good eggs. Devotees of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels and of the more recent Shrines of Gaiety, with its big cast of London baddies, will probably love all this.
The background research provides a plethora of detail – you can’t go far in this novel without encountering a festival cow, a consignment of 208 plaster doves, or a room full of hopeful Nell Gwyns. Flynn admits to finding the Stock List (cricket bats, different kinds of Pyrex …) “soporific” and it’s hard to disagree; this is not an intellectually demanding fictional world, and a surfeit of details can clog the narrative.
There are glimpses, though, of Atkinson’s more subtle brilliance. She handles Flynn’s war trauma with a particularly deft touch: a well-chosen hint or two conveys more about hell and inner fragility than any exposition could. This is the Atkinson of Life After Life and A God in Ruins, her most sophisticated and powerful novels. Our Noble Selves doesn’t touch these in scope, structure or depth, but perhaps that isn’t the point. There is a gentle plea, here, for resilience and decency, couched in a nostalgia for a plucky and decent Britain that – if it ever existed – is certainly disappearing fast. Our prime minister might want to take notes. Hope lies in the willingness to celebrate difference; it lies in everyday kindness, a basic sense of right and wrong and in the willingness to be brave. In novel form, this can feel a bit twee but, when you think about it, Atkinson has a point.
• Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
