Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson
Our Noble Selves is set in post-WW2 Britain. After suffering through the events and tragedies of a long war, a Festival of Britain is being planned for 1951. This mammoth undertaking is designed to boost public morale and engender pride in rebuilding Britain. It aims to show Britain’s ‘best face’ and a change in direction with new innovations, science, craftmanship and love of freedom.
We meet Harry Flynn in 1949. He has returned from his war years as a POW in the East and is trying to find a ‘normal’ life. As a foreign correspondent, he was imprisoned in Singapore for four years. On his return to Southampton “the old Flynn had been chrysalized, and a new one was yet to emerge”.
Harry bumps into his old boss, who offers him a job working at The Festival of Britain planning office. His initial task is to coordinate a collection of (awful) Festival Poems, to be submitted by members of the public. Harry also becomes a keeper of the supply catalogue and can name with precision the companies that donate the props needed to create the different festival displays. These vary from household items to industrial machinery, a live cow and precisely two hundred and eight plaster doves. There is a competition to invent a Festival Cake, which creates some controversy.
There is a wonderful cast of characters, working together in a dingy office in London. Amongst them is The Boy, who brings a breath of fresh and youthfully innocent air into the company of misfits, all of whom come with intriguing backstories. The traditional class system is being challenged in this new post-war world, and not everyone is quite who they appear to be.
Harry becomes a suspect in the disappearance of a young woman whom he has met in a pub. This leads to all sorts of secrecy and skulduggery, revealing some interesting relationships among various players in the festival office.
The undertone of the war horrors is always there, but people tend not to talk too much about it, wanting to move on. It has, however, affected them all in different ways. There is a collective understanding of what can be spoken about, and anything shared is done so with a certain respect for each other’s experiences.
Kate Atkinson says in her notes that she decided not to focus on Harry’s war backstory, as she said there was no place for it in what is a relatively light-hearted novel. She said it did not feel right to use the story of the POWs on the Burmese Railway for her own ends. The conversations between the characters reveal plenty of what they went through, each in their own way, and the baggage they carry with them.
The Festival of Britain was a real event, which makes its bizarre and quirky elements even more fascinating.
Kate Atkinson has a way with words, and you may be reaching for the dictionary with some of them (Stygian gloom, panegyrics).
Our Noble Selves is a fabulous read, with a great plot and wonderful characters. It’s clever, intelligent and comic, yet it makes you think deeper about the underlying issues society was facing at the time. Kate Atkinson at her best.
Reviewer: Rachel White
Penguin
