- 1 Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday. The first US edition was published by Little, B (...)
- 2 The new Jackson Brodie novel is announced on her website with the title Death at the Sign of the Ro (...)
1In 2002, British writer Kate Atkinson published her first collection of short stories, entitled Not the End of the World.1 At the time, Atkinson’s reputation was in the ascendant: in 1995, she had won the Whitbread (now renamed Costa) Prize for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum; two further novels, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000), had cemented her reputation as a playful and quirky writer of imaginative fiction who often looked to the history of Great Britain in the twentieth century for both inspiration and response. She would go on shortly thereafter to launch a series of detective novels set in the present, featuring detective Jackson Brodie; the first book in this series, Case Histories (2004), moved between locations in England (Cambridge) and Scotland (Edinburgh), and established a template for an additional four highly successful mysteries. Her acclaim in this genre was immediate, and the BBC quickly put the books under contract, using Case Histories as the collective title for a television series; filmed over two seasons in nine episodes, it received uniformly positive reviews, and expanded Atkinson’s audience beyond the boundaries of much contemporary fiction. She has continued along the path of this diverse career, most frequently adding to the list of novels set in twentieth century Britain, several of which have since been dramatized for television; but after a hiatus of over a decade, she indicates that she will publish another Jackson Brodie novel in 2024, following fast upon a second collection of short stories published in 2023, Normal Rules Don’t Apply.2 Strong reviews and awards continue to accrue to her name, including the awarding of an MBE in 2011.
- 3 Cooke, ‘Nanny takes Arthur to a parallel universe,’ in The Guardian for November 9, 2002; https://w (...)
- 4 See, for example, Birch in The Independent for November 2, 2002; also Anonymous in Publishers Weekl (...)
2Amid Atkinson’s many successes as a writer of fiction, however, the collection with which I began this introduction to her work, the short story collection Not the End of the World, stands out for the very modest enthusiasm with which it was received. Reviews following its publication tended to be brief, and the one consistently positive review, by Rachel Cooke in the Guardian, is an outlier;3 more often than not, reviews from the year following publication give off a hint, sometimes more than a hint, of disappointment that the book is not what it might be—in other words, not a full-fledged novel.4 Given the second-class status with which contemporary short stories are frequently assessed, the brevity itself of the reviews is not extraordinary; but most reviewers nonetheless invoked an ‘even Homer nods’ attitude to the stories in the collection, and generally gave them short shrift. In fact, one of the most detailed reviews is perhaps the harshest, offering as it does a laundry-list of features the review’s author finds at best distracting, but at worst, downright annoying:
- 5 Anonymous in Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2003 (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kate-at (...)
Characters from one tale are sometimes referred to in another [specific examples given] …. Ovid-like metamorphoses appeal to Atkinson, who prefaces the stories with Latin passages, even Greek, allusions that tend to make the stories seem the more minor. A prolixity of cuteness and verve can give energy but can also cloy [more examples given]. … The pieces are nothing, though, if not capable in their details [more examples given] .… Opening and closing the volume are twin stories, the first about futuristic threats to the world (‘Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping’), the other about its end (‘Pleasureland’). In both, the characters rattle off lists of things to do, eat, or buy in another Ovid-like device that just seems minimizing and affected.
Stories, on balance, that appear above all to love the sound of their own voices.5
- 6 Parey 2022: 86-97, relying on Mundler 2009 and others for interpretive suggestions.
- 7 Mundler 2009.
- 8 Exceptions include the one-off dismissal of ‘Ovid-like metamorphoses’ by the anonymous reviewer in (...)
- 9 For a general introduction to the environmental themes in the Metamorphoses, see Sissa 2023.
3A few literary scholars have approached the book with greater enthusiasm, although here too interest is limited; a recent literary biography of Atkinson, by Armelle Parey, for example, focuses almost exclusively on the novels, including the detective fiction. In a ten-page survey of Not the End of the World, Parey chiefly concerns herself with the challenges and limitations that are characteristic of the short story as a genre, and she offers broad observations on the features that make Atkinson’s collection typical of a short story cycle; Parey’s thematic and metatextual observations rarely move beyond the superficies.6 The one extended treatment I am aware of, a 2009 essay by Helen Mundler, reads the stories as exemplars of postmodern metafiction; Mundler focuses on the narrative frame created by the first and last stories in the book, in which the theme of apocalyptic change is most prominent and most thematic, using them to suggest that Atkinson’s goal is to interrogate the limits of narrative.7 While I too will focus on the narrative frame of Not the End of the World, my discussion will range more broadly through the collection; and my focus will be on one remarkable feature of Not the End of the World that has provoked surprisingly little comment,8 its clear and complex relationship with and response to the thematic center of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the role of transformation in a cycle of destruction and creation. I suggest, furthermore, that Atkinson’s engagement with Ovid has two inflections or implications: first, it offers a brilliant and complex understanding of Ovid’s poem that reveals itself through a wide-ranging intertextuality, and that is reciprocated in the cleverness of Atkinson’s surprising stories; and second, it configures the Ovidian Metamorphoses as a ‘prequel’ to our understanding of the causes and effects of incessant change in our contemporary world, where natural and man-made disasters increase every year and challenge the very notion of human control over the forces of nature.9
- 10 The term paratext, made famous by Genette 1981, refers to the material present in a literary work—a (...)
- 11 In NEW, Atkinson quotes a text of Ovid containing the transmitted reading illas, instead of the con (...)
4Atkinson opens the book’s first story with two paratextual10 items: a reproduction of Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and an epigraph consisting of the first four lines of the Metamorphoses, the latter of which I provide here (Met. 1.1-4):11
In noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam uos mutastis et illa)
aspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.
My spirit moves to tell of shapes transformed
into new bodies. Gods, inspire my work
(for you’ve transformed it too) and from creation
to my own time spin out unceasing song.
- 12 Thus, e.g., the conversation between Trudi and Charlene as they watch the department store go up in (...)
5These paratexts are initially somewhat puzzling, since neither the Book of Revelation nor Ovid’s poem seems immediately relevant to the story that unfolds. The plot of the story they preface, furthermore, adds to the puzzle: entitled ‘Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping,’ it quickly introduces what will turn out to be frequent, sometimes jarringly casual references to mythical characters and stories, but these myths are neither foreboding nor chaotic; in fact, quite the opposite. One typical example appears after they escape from a department store fire the cause of which is unexplained but arouses in the two women thoughts of an apocalypse in which they might somehow be transported back to an idyllic preindustrial world.12 The real world around them, meanwhile, is devastated; police have disappeared, and people wander in and out of abandoned museums, carrying off precious items. Charlene has absconded with a Sèvres bowl, which she and Trudi then use to serve themselves a dinner of buckwheat and celery (NEW 16):
‘Presentation is everything,’ Charlene said. Afterwards, they drank the only thing they could find, which was a bottle of emerald-green Midori, and listened to a Mozart string quartet on a foreign radio station. Charlene stayed the night, lying on the sofa, watching the lizards run across the ceiling. In the sky right above her head she could see a few drops of the Milky Way, which she knew was the milk from Hera’s breasts splashed across the heavens.
6The allusion to the Milky Way is strikingly beautiful, even sensuous, unlike the strange and disturbing setting in which it appears. The eternal repetitions of heavenly beauty stand in stark contrast to the seemingly random degeneration of the real world in which Charlene and Trudi live.
7A second instance appears a day or so later—the precise timing is unclear—as the two friends talk on the phone, although even the ability to hear each other is in doubt. Again, the beauty of an image drawn from classical myth is juxtaposed to a scene of growing terror (NEW 18):
- 13 The mention of a lamp to wish on suggests another mythical world besides the classical, that of Ara (...)
Lying awake in the dark, Charlene wished she had a lamp to wish on.13
‘See the moon? See Selene’s silver beams?’ she whispered to Trudi although she knew Trudi couldn’t hear her because the telephone exchange was burning and melting and the mobile-phone masts were toppled and anyway Trudi was asleep on the other side of town behind the barricades of wires and running shoes and dead dogs, mostly mongrels.
8In Atkinson’s artful prose, the brief allusion to ‘Selene’s silver beams’ gives way to a sentence that races its reader through a scene of mounting environmental disaster, concluding with the grim image of ‘dead dogs.’ No reason is provided for any of the destructive components of the chaos; no single agent provides a rationale or limit for the events described. The paratextual image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, on the other hand, does seem to have some relevance after all, while the promise of novelty in the opening four verses of the Metamorphoses now begins to take on a logical, if sinister, appropriateness.
9Indeed, there is a discernible if meandering pattern of repeated ideas, events, and even characters that binds the narrative together and that responds to a similar structural strategy in the Metamorphoses. First, there is the structure itself of the collection: twelve distinct and separable stories. Each has a discrete cast of characters, and locations shift among Edinburgh, London, and a few unidentified locales. All are set in a modern period, but without any indication of date; presumably the world is the same as the one the book’s readers occupy. And although most characters change from one story to the next, Charlene and Trudi reappear in the twelfth story, ‘Pleasureland,’ which like the first is introduced by an epigraph from Ovid: six of the last nine lines of the Metamorphoses. I shall return to this closural device later; it is enough now to note how the adventures of Charlene and Trudi thus provide a sort of bracketing or ring composition for the collection.
- 14 Each story has an epigraph complemented by an illustration; given my Ovidian focus, I limit my disc (...)
10The artful structure of the book is also emphasized by Atkinson’s use of paratextual material, particularly epigraphs.14 A complete list of epigraphs proceeds as follows:
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.1-4
2. William Blake, from ‘Auguries of Innocence’
3. Emily Dickinson, from ‘Exultation is the Going’
4. Paul, 1st Corinthians, 13: 7
5. Virgil, Eclogue 8.43, nunc scio quid sit amor
6. Homeric Hymn to Artemis 1-2
7. Edgar Allan Poe, from ‘A Dream within a Dream’
8. Christopher Smart, from ‘Jubilate Agno’
9. George Herbert, from ‘Vertue’
10. Buffy Summers
11. Book of Proverbs 31: 28
12. Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.871-76
- 15 Smart’s remarkable poem, composed during or shortly following his internment in a mental asylum, co (...)
11An apparently random and even incongruous group of sources: but a careful reader who pursues the source of each quotation will generally be rewarded by a playful idea. The Poe quote, for example, ‘All that we see or seem | is but a dream within a dream,’ introduces a story involving doppelgängers, in which the main character, Fielding, falls deeply asleep while his double does outrageous things, all of which Fielding is blamed for. Perhaps the most striking and curious is that which introduces the eighth story, ‘The Cat Lover’: ‘For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.’ This somewhat opaque line is drawn from Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (c. 1759-63), a portion of which was first set to music by Benjamin Britten in 1943.15 Britten selected 48 verses of Jubilate Agno for inclusion in his cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, thereby bringing to the attention of a wide audience for the first time Smart’s strange and beautiful song in praise of his cat, Jeoffry. Atkinson’s story takes the concept of Smart’s poem and gives it an interpretation that is both extremely bizarre—some might even say disturbing—and, at least for the central character, profoundly life-affirming. Heidi, a lonely office worker who wants a baby, takes in a stray cat, to which she gives the name Gordon. The cat thrives in her care, but after several months with her, Gordon is gone, leaving tracks in the snow. The story is not quite done, however, because a few months later, thinking she is pregnant by an old boyfriend, Heidi joyfully sees on an ultrasound not one but four or five babies in her belly, a veritable litter.
12 With paratexts such as these, Atkinson invites, even teases, her readers to anticipate the theme of the story to follow, both creating and undermining the readers’ expectations. The structure of the collection as a whole is undercut, even fractured, by the randomness of the epigraphs as a sequence: the logic, if there is one, of following a quote from Buffy Summers with one from the Book of Proverbs belies easy parsing, except in a world where anything can, and does, happen.
- 16 Bacchus: after a series of linked episodes in Metamorphoses 3 (birth in 3.253-315; with Pentheus, 3 (...)
- 17 A representative list of mentions of Romney Wright: NEW 72, 116-32, 137, 147, 201.
- 18 The series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, inspired by a film of the same name (1992), was broadcast on A (...)
- 19 The title may have been inspired by a successful American series with this name that was broadcast (...)
- 20 I note here that Atkinson’s recently released second volume of short stories, Normal Rules Don’t Ap (...)
13Structure is not the only Ovidian characteristic of Atkinson’s collection. Much like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Atkinson’s stories contain an unpredictable but frequent sprinkling of seemingly random cross-references. From so many I mention here three of the most frequent: first, a woman named Romney Wright, a Kardashian-type celebrity featured in the sixth story, ‘Unseen Translation,’ whose main characteristic is her tendency to disappear. In this story, she repeatedly disappears from her son’s life, until he escapes along with his nanny; in later stories, Romney reappears in quick allusions, rather like Hercules or Theseus, or Bacchus, in the Metamorphoses16—she is always close, but always disappearing.17 My second and third examples center on two television series, each of which embodies the recurrent themes of the larger work: the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which a young woman is fated to fight against the forces of darkness that repeatedly threaten human existence;18 and an apocryphal British television series given the name Green Acres, apparently a soap opera which various characters in Not the End of the World are particularly fond of watching as an escape from reality.19 Taken together, the two television shows serve as a sort of mise en abyme of the book as a whole, in which the looming threat of environmental destruction is countered by a world of Arcadian simplicity in which, as one character wryly observes to himself, ‘Green Acres wouldn’t be Green Acres without an underlying narrative device about sheep’ (NEW 149).20
14Nonetheless, the most Ovidian instances of repetition in Not the End of the World take the form of catalogues: Atkinson’s characters, especially Charlene and Trudi, love catalogues. Again, I offer three examples, all taken from the first story. The two women wander through a spectacular food hall ‘as vast as a small city’ (NEW 4), reminiscent of Harrod’s, and consider buying honey:
There was plenty of honey to choose from. There was lavender honey and rosemary honey, acacia and orange blossom and mysterious manuka. Butter-yellow honey from Tuscan sunflowers and thick, anemic honey from English clover. There were huge jars like ancient amphorae and neat spinster-size pots. There were jars of cut-comb honey that looked like seeded amber. There was organic honey from lush South American rain forests and there was honey squeezed from parsimonious Scottish heather on windswept moorlands. Bees the world over had been bamboozled out of their bounty so that Trudi could have a choice, but she had already lost interest.
15A crescendo of honeys, capped by the delightful alliteration of B-sounds (and proliferation of bees) at its close: ‘Bees the world over … bamboozled out of their bounty’; but this crescendo comes to an abrupt halt in the face of Trudi’s loss of interest. This shift not only allows Atkinson to move the narrative to other potential catalogues, including types of soap, oranges, and fountains, but also signals the complacency of humans in the face of nature’s bounty.
16A similar denouement marks the close of the next major catalogue, as the two women enter an aisle filled with types of tea (NEW 5):
They were walking down a street of teas. They were lost.
‘Who would think there were so many different teas in the world?’ Trudi mused. ‘Chrysanthemum tea, White Peony, Jade Peak, Oriental Beauty Oolong, Green Gunpowder, Golden Needle, Hubei Silver Tip, Drum Mountain White Cloud, Dragon’s Breath tea—do you think it tastes of dragon’s breath? What do you think dragon’s breath tastes like?’
‘Foul, I expect,’ Charlene said.
17Charlene’s blunt comment brings Trudi’s breathless list to an abrupt close, in which nature’s bounty is again subject to cavalier dismissal. But it also allows for another transition that takes shape as the two women, inspired by the preceding list, stop for tea in a nearby hotel lounge. They are discussing the comparable virtues of particular kinds of animals as pets, beginning with cats (perhaps in anticipation of the cat Gordon that, as we have seen, will loom large in the eighth story), and proceeding through hamsters, mice, capybaras, kangaroos and other creatures both likely and outlandish, returning repeatedly to cats, until the waitress volunteers that her preference is for dogs. Atkinson continues (NEW 7-8):
Charlene and Trudi swooned with delight at the idea of dogs.
‘Oh God,’ Trudi said, overcome by all the breeds of dog in the world, ‘a German shepherd, a golden retriever, a Great Dane, a borzoi—what a great word—a Saint Bernard, a Scottie, a Westie, a Yorkie. An Austrian pinscher, a Belgian griffon, a Kromfohrlander. The Glen of Imaal terrier, the Manchester, Norwich, English toy, Staffordshire, Bedlington—all terriers also. The Kai, the Podengo Portugueso Medio, the Porcelaine and the Spanish greyhound. The bloodhound, the lurcher, the Dunker, the Catahoula Leopard Dog, the Hungarian vizsla, the Lancashire heeler and the giant German spitz!’
‘Or a mongrel called Buster or Spike,’ Charlene said.
18The last of these catalogues especially recalls the famous, or notorious, list of dogs’ names that appears in Metamorphoses Book 3. The hunter Actaeon has inadvertently come upon Diana and her attendants while they are bathing. As punishment, Diana transforms Actaeon into a stag, who consequently is hunted by his own hunting dogs (Met. 3.218-37 – McCarter 3.218-37):
… His dogs catch sight of him.
Blackfoot and clever Scout bark signals first
(Scout is a Cretan breed, Blackfoot a Spartan).
Others dash forth more quickly than the wind:
Omnivore, Spotter, Hiker (all Arcadian),
stout Deer-Killer and Hunter and fierce Storm,
Swift-footed Flyer and the keen-nosed Chaser,
And Ranger (lately tusked by a wild boar)
And wolf-born Meadow, Shepherdess (a guide
Of flocks) and Harpy (joined by her two pups),
Ladon (a thin-flanked Sicyonian breed),
Racer and Rowdy, Tiger, Spot, and Brawn,
White Alabaster and the dark-furred Ash,
Powerful Spartan, Whirlwind (champion runner),
Darter, and Wolf with Cyprian, her brother,
And Glutton, whose black brow was marked with one
White spot, and Ebony and long-haired Silky,
And Wildman, Shining-Fang, and loud-voiced Barker
(their father Cretan and their mother Spartan).
To list them all would take too long! …
19Ovid’s last words, like Charlene’s concluding remark, bring the reader back to reality—in the Metamorphoses, a reality that is brutal and bloody, and all too physical, but whose narrator can stand detached; in Atkinson, on the other hand, a reality that is more practical, less fantastical, and simpler—but also out of reach, even as the world around Charlene and Trudi implodes. Both catalogues take their readers to the boundaries of credibility, but in each case, to different effect. Atkinson’s list moves from impressive to exotic to obscure in a rush of names that tests one’s ability to comprehend them with equal speed; Charlene’s concluding addition of ‘a mongrel called Buster or Spike’ effectively slows the movement of the passage so that not only can readers luxuriate in the details but also breathe a sigh of relief. Ovid, on the other hand, never wavers from the disorienting combination of horror and pleasure: this catalogue has far-reaching consequences for the entire Theban saga of which Actaeon is a part. The comparison puts Ovid’s detachment into high relief, and makes the escapism of Charlene and Trudi into something much gentler, even playful.
- 21 Perhaps signaled by the story’s epigraph, spoken by Buffy: ‘The hardest thing in this world is to l (...)
20The surprisingly Ovidian framework of Not the End of the World, combined with other familiar features of Ovid’s style, supports the recurrence of a more general theme which is also, at least broadly, Ovidian: in the temporal progression of the disjoined narrative, survival and fertility struggle against barrenness and death in a pattern of cyclical repetition. The most prominent instance of this occurs in the tenth story, ‘Temporal Anomaly,’ in which the main character, Marianne, dies in an auto accident on her way to visit her mother. She, or her spirit, remains conscious but invisible—she can see and hear others, but she is invisible to them. She exists in a sort of zombie state21 for several months, trapped, inexplicably, in her former home, where all she can do is watch reruns of Green Acres and Star Trek Voyager while the others are out living their lives. One day she happens upon her son’s half-eaten pomegranate; and after picking at it, she suddenly finds herself back in the world of the living. As the story ends, she is about to revisit her mother (NEW 211):
Marianne was on her way to see her mother. She still didn’t understand where her mother had been while she was dead and her mother was reluctant to discuss it, saying it was better to let sleeping dogs lie, which seemed almost willfully enigmatic to Marianne. Marianne had been back in the land of the living for six months, six months of summer. … The summer was over, but there would be more. There were always more summers, even when you were no longer there to see them….
And today she would sit in her mother’s garden, which was a miracle for this dreich part of the hemisphere—a cornucopia of lettuce and beetroot and onions, of sweet peas and honeysuckle and roses, strawberries and raspberries and black currants, pears and plums and apples. … but just then the sky darkened and Marianne heard the sound of horses’ hooves and she looked in the rearview mirror and thought, ’Oh no, not again.’
21Marianne’s reluctant recognition of temporal necessity comes into direct confrontation with her anticipation of a return to her mother’s lush garden: this modern Proserpina knows in spite of herself that her generous mother is waiting for her to stay—and is also waiting for her daughter’s usual departure with Hades, previously recognized by ‘the deafening sound of Hades’ chariot wheels as he overtook her’ (NEW 197).
22This cyclical character is also evidenced in the fact that in all of the stories except the first and last, parents and children are in some way estranged from each other, or divorced parents are the cause of unhappiness or confusion for their children, as well as for themselves; yet children continue to be born and to survive, and even to thrive, in the most unlikely places and manners, whether it is with a nanny who has a cloak of invisibility that helps her and her charge escape from a thoughtless mother (sixth story, ‘Unseen Translation’) or the orphan Vincent, who as a young man writes a doctoral dissertation called ‘Body and Soul: The Transcendence of Death in the Metaphysical Poets’ (ninth story, ‘The Bodies Vest’).
23The most obvious and most extended instance of the cycle of creation and destruction occurs in the first and last stories in Not the End of the World, and I shall therefore devote the remainder of this discussion to them. In the first story, featuring the three almost obscenely luxurious catalogues I have discussed, and more besides, Charlene and Trudi are surrounded by consumer excess as the world around them implodes. A bomb goes off as they leave the store; inexplicably, there are no taxis; a man drops dead at the bar as they have a drink; sirens go off in the distance. There are no salespeople in the store the next day; there has been an earthquake, and stores and the museum are being pillaged; a fire breaks out; there is no radio, and wild animals are roaming the streets. A list of apocalyptic events captures the devastation that is no longer impossible (NEW 15):
There was no food for the animals in the zoo. The animal freedom militia unlocked their cages so that now there were bears rooting in dustbins and penguins swimming in the river and at night the tigers roaming the streets roared so loudly that no one could sleep. Trudi lay awake listening to the tigers roaring and the bears growling and the wolves howling and the dragons breathing fire over the blacked-out rain-sodden streets of the city. A family of small green lizards took up residence in her apartment.
There was a rumor that the rare wolfkin had been sighted in the botanical gardens in the west of the city. .... All the panes of the glass in the hothouses were broken so that the rain came in and drenched the plants in the desert house, causing them to bloom extravagantly and then die, even more extravagantly. An unseasonal microclimate in the palm house resulted in a typhoon snapping the great palms that had been alive longer than anyone on the planet. A polar bear made its home on the island in the middle of the lake in the botanical gardens and a flock of parrots flitted in and out of the pagoda.
24This list consists of the incongruous, the bizarre, the impossible, befitting a place where the boundaries between civilization and wild nature are quickly eroding. In fact, they eerily resemble the adynata that occur after the great flood and that are so vividly described by Ovid (Met. 1.293-312 – McCarter 1.315-334):
One person occupies a hill. Another
Sits in a skiff and rows where he just plowed.
One sails above the cornfields or a sunken
Farmhouse’s roof. Another catches fish
In canopies of elms. Sometimes by chance
An anchor fixes to a verdant meadow
Or curving keels graze vineyards down below.
Where slender she-goats lately grazed on grass,
There ugly seals recline. Nereids gape
at underwater groves and towns and homes.
Dolphins inhabit woods. They dash against
The lofty boughs and smack the shaken trees.
Wolves swim with sheep. Waves drag off tawny lions.
Waves drag off tigers. Boars cannot employ
Their lightning force, or floating deer swift legs.
The roving bird seeks ground on which to stand,
Then falls into the sea on weary wings.
The ocean’s lawlessness had covered hills,
And strange new surf was pounding mountaintops.
Most are dispatched by waves. Prolonged starvation
From lack of food kills those the waves have spared.
25This fractured, almost nightmarish landscape stands in sharp contrast to the bubble in which Charlene and Trudi survive. At the very beginning of the first story, Trudi makes a mental catalogue of all the things that could break if they were packed for the mail; the last of these is ‘a mirrored-glass globe in which nothing but the sky is reflected’ (NEW 3). There is no mirrored-glass globe here, aside from the metaphorical one in which they dwell; but their resilience, while fractured as much as a glass globe might be, endures, through one assault after another.
26On what appears to be the following day, we find Charlene, a wedding planner, carrying in her coat pocket a bonbonnière containing sugared almonds that, as she tells Trudi, symbolize ‘happiness, health, wealth, fertility, and long life’ (NEW 17). This image suggests to Charlene a new string of fantastical images describing a fairy-tale wedding; yet as the two women discuss the details, ‘[t]he ATM in the wall exploded and banknotes fluttered like distressed birds into the dirty sky’ (NEW 17). As the two women walk through the city, evading sniper-fire as they go, Charlene tries to remember the tenets of Pythagorean philosophy (NEW 17-18):
‘When you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.
‘The visible world is false and illusive.
‘Abstain from beans.’
‘Beans?’
‘In case they contain the soul of an ancestor.’ …
‘Men and women are equal and property held in common.
‘All things are numbers.
‘Everything is infinitely divisible and even the smallest portion of matter contains some of each element.’
‘And the transmigration of the soul,’ Trudi whispered, ‘don’t forget that.’
- 22 A pastiche of Pythagorean (and pseudo-Pythagorean) guiding rules loosely based on the Akousmata (‘T (...)
27This odd litany offers up a garbled mishmash of half-remembered, half-forgotten Pythagoreanisms, based on the sundry scraps of wisdom contained in several ancient texts associated by tradition with the elusive philosopher of the sixth century BCE.22 But the central concept is Ovidian, finding its origins in Met. 15.75-478, when the character Pythagoras give a speech of over four hundred verses detailing the immortality of all creatures and the natural processes of birth, death, and transmigration by which souls are repeatedly renewed and reborn. From his lengthy exposition I offer two brief quotes, that, like Charlene, capture the essence of Pythagoras’ ideas (Met. 15.165-68 – McCarter 15.178-81; Met. 15.252-58 – McCarter 15.269-75):
‘Everything changes, nothing dies. Our spirit
Roams here and there, taking whatever limbs
It meets, moving from beasts to human bodies,
Then back to beasts. It never perishes….’
* * * * *
‘No form is fixed. Nature, the innovator
of things, refashions new shapes out of old.
And, trust me, nothing in creation dies.
It varies and transforms. What we call ‘birth’
is just the start of being something different,
while ‘dying’ is the end. Though all things may change
to this or that, the total sum is fixed.’
- 23 Hesiod, Works and Days 197-201: καὶ τότε δὴ πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης | λευκοῖσιν φάρεσσι (...)
28Pythagoras offers faint hope, poorly transmitted; but still, it is hope of a sort. The women’s wistful hope for survival amid the carnage around them appears to have helped, within reason, because at the end of Not the End of the World they return, they are still there, still alive as everything around them continues to deteriorate. They live together, in order to share their limited supply of food, clothes, and bodily warmth in a city without water, heat, and electricity; when plague erupts, an unseen force nails shut all the doors of all the buildings and marks each with a red cross, presumably so that, as at the culmination of the ten plagues in the Book of Exodus, the Angel of Death will spare the people within (Exodus 12: 23). At one point, a cat wanders in, much like the stray living with Heidi in the eighth story; but unlike that earlier cat, this one dies in its sleep, in a passing marked by Hesiodic nostalgia: ‘The gods left the city, without ceremonies or farewells’ (NEW 242).23
- 24 Another instance of agrarian regression: see above, n. 12.
29This ominous coincidence stirs a sense of regret in the two women, although the ever-optimistic Trudi frames her thoughts in the future tense: ‘From now on … I only want good, simple things’; she then lapses into a series of imaginary ‘simple things,’ most of which are suggestive of an agrarian past—‘a bushel of russet apples, a truckle of cheddar cheese, a firkin of bloodred wine’—rather than of the future.24 Charlene, meanwhile, keeps her thoughts firmly in the past; she regrets ‘never having concentrated on rote learning. We could recite poems to each other, epics and sagas, odes and epithalamiums. We could revive the traditions of our oral culture, so long lost to us’ (NEW 242).
30Further thoughts about the future on Trudi’s part, meanwhile, leave her not liking the idea of being dug up some day by archaeologists. She turns to Charlene and asks her for a story. Charlene replies, beginning with some options that circle back to earlier episodes in the previous stories and that gradually give way to a catalogue of Ovidian metamorphoses (NEW 243-44):
‘I could tell you the story of the seven sisters who became the Pleiades.’
‘I think we’ve had that one.’
‘Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died?’
‘We’ve definitely had that one.’
‘Her mother, Demeter, who rescued the world from endless winter? Jeri Zane—pioneer astrophysicist? The fish that swallowed a magic ring, the death of the Great God Pan, the man who woke up and found he was a cat, Aphrodite in love, the wolfkin and the princess, Tyler Zane’s Broadway success, the man who turned into a flower, the girl who turned into a cow, the endless series of transformations perpetrated by the gods—people turned into bats, larks, pigs, lionesses, bears, wolves, laurel bushes, nightingales, owls, partridges, springs, fountains, rivers, echoes---’
‘Echoes?’
‘Echoes. Rocks, poplars, ravens, pine trees, ospreys, dolphins, mountains, white doves, comets, stars—really the list is endless,’ Charlene said. ‘Or how about Circe, who turned men into animals?’
‘No, I don’t think I’ve heard that one.’
So Charlene told Trudi the story of the great witch Circe, and the story lasted all night long so that on the morning of the thousand and first day they were still awake when Helios left his magnificent eastern palace…
31In this closing scene, Charlene and Trudi together combine the range of Scheherazade (‘the story lasted all night long’; ‘on the morning of the thousand and first day …’) 25 with the interests of the daughters of Minyas in Met. 4.1-415, who shut out the rest of the world as they sit at their looms and weave both tapestries and stories. But this comparison begs the question: will they survive, like Scheherazade, or are they doomed, like the daughters of Minyas? There is hope in Charlene’s following words, as she recalls once more the Pythagorean promise of indestructibility and imagines catasterism for them both—a kind of immortality that would keep the glass globe whole (NEW 244):
32‘Nothing dies.’ … ‘All matter is transformed into other matter.’ She then muses aloud about what they might become:
‘A star would be nice,’ Charlene said. ‘Or a constellation. A new constellation in the night sky where we could shine like precious diamonds. Are you still there?’
‘I’m still here,’ Trudi said. ‘It’s grown very dark, don’t you think? Keep talking. Tell me another story.’
‘I can’t remember anymore,’ Charlene said.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world.’
33Trudi’s concluding reassurance notwithstanding, Charlene’s final admission that she is unable to remember any further introduces a hint of insecure worry into the end of the story. After all, the stories Charlene tells Trudi are their sole sources at this point of consolation and pleasure; they encapsulate not only memories of the past but also the significance of those memories and the consequent courage to live and to dream. With this ambiguous conclusion, Atkinson invites her readers to wonder about when and how the two women’s story, and our own, will end, and whether memory can keep them, and us, afloat in a sea of darkness.
- 26 The envoi consists of nine hexameters (Met. 15.871-79); Atkinson uses the first six, but excludes t (...)
34The twelfth story in Not the End of the World, like the first, is prefaced by an Ovidian epigraph. In this case, the epigraph consists of six verses drawn from the very end of the Metamorphoses,26 the envoi with which Ovid triumphantly announces the completion of his project and predicts his own catasterism (Met. 15.871-76 – McCarter 15.933-38):
Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iouis ira nec ignis
nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere uetustas.
cum uolet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aeui:
parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.
I’ve made a masterpiece Jove’s wrath cannot
destroy, nor flame, nor steel, nor gnawing time.
That day, which governs nothing but my body,
can end at will my life’s uncertain span.
And yet my finer half will be eternal,
borne among stars. My name can’t be erased.
35Atkinson, like Ovid, is an unlikely optimist, even in the face of looming loss. In Ovid’s case, loss is characterized not primarily as death—though that is inevitable—but as a threat to his name, his poetry, and his memory; he counters this threat with a triumphant promise of survival thanks to the power of poetry and memory working together. Ovid’s confidence is remarkable, given the ravages not only of contemporary politics but, even more so, of time. Atkinson’s optimism takes a somewhat different and qualified form: her book, with all its surprising transitions and sudden transformations, disconcerting disconnections and unimaginable connections, offers us a postmodern Metamorphoses, in which we are invited to see our own damaged world and to fluctuate between hope and fear for what comes next. Will we survive, in a mirrored-glass globe in which nothing but the sky is reflected, or will the world take us with it as it comes crashing down? Trudi and Charlene live endlessly in the world of fiction; but our world, the only one we have, grows increasingly estranged from us from one day to the next as it seeks to avoid further harm to itself. The stories we tell ensure the survival of our world’s past, as long as we can and do tell them; but we can only hope that the stories will continue into the future, too.
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