A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson

A God In Ruins is Kate Atkinson's follow up ("companion") to her highly praised (not least by me) novel Life After Life.

We follow the life of Ursula Todd's much loved brother Teddy through his Second World War experience as a bomber pilot and on to marriage, parenthood and old age. The story is told in a non-sequential way, jumping backwards and forwards through time, visiting various points of the characters' lives. We see through the eyes of Teddy himself, Nancy (his childhood sweetheart and wife), Viola, their daughter, and his grandchildren. There is less "magic" here but this is because so much was sucked out of the world by the second big war (as much a continuation of the first really).

There are many beautiful moments, moving and thoughtful, some very funny but also some darker and more terrifying, as we experience what is was like to pilot a bomber over Nazi occupied Europe. As well as raining a terrible death and destruction over Germany, creating an inferno as the war reached its climax, most of the air crew were very young, and many never came back. Atkinson is very good on the human face to war. But as well as this tragic destruction of human life and European civilisation, the aftermath of the war is a heavy weight on survivors; we see this through the generations.

I like these two books for the evocation of the pre-war world for the Todd's at Fox Corner, their house: comfortable family life, nature, dogs and poetry. A vanished world. And then the attempt to understand how the country turns out once much is swept away by the war. People are not so easily regenerated compared to the physical world. People forget, and want to forget, or perhaps never want to know. Uncomfortable reading sometimes, but worth it.