Charlotte, the narrator, is a young woman living in nineteenth century Copenhagen, where she supports herself and Fru Schelswig, the fat, base old woman whom everyone assumes is her mother, by working as a prostitute.  When the cold winter drives her to seek further employment, she and Fru Schelswig find themselves working for the disagreeable Fru Krak, cleaning her house from top to bottom with the exception of certain forbidden rooms in the basement.  Convinced there must be something hidden there worth stealing, Charlotte cannot help investigating and discovers a mysterious machine left there by Fru Krak’s vanished husband which will change the course of her life forever as it catapults her, all unknowing, into twenty-first century London.

This is the sort of book for which the term ‘romp’ was invented.  It is light-hearted, witty, filled with adventure and generally great fun to read.  If nothing hugely surprising happens, the plot is sufficiently exciting and the narration more than engaging enough in spite of that to draw the reader in and keep hold of their attention throughout.

Charlotte’s voice is one of the key features which makes the book so enjoyable.  She is self-assured and inclined towards melodrama and exaggeration, but her easy humour transforms this from a narrative style that could have been alienating and tiresome (and I know this all too well after suffering through the horrendous exaggeration of The House in Dormer Forest) into one that is self aware and not afraid to be self mocking.  My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time is rather silly and the book knows it and takes great pleasure in being so.  Charlotte’s habit of referring to the reader directly as ‘dearest‘ and complimenting them frequently is just one example of the book’s playfulness which makes it so much fun.

Although people travelling backwards in time to visit periods in history is a subject often addressed in fiction, the reverse situation depicted in this book is not, and Liz Jensen does a wonderful job of imagining the twenty-first century as seen through the eyes of someone from the past:

But the dream did not end, & could not be escaped from so easily, & indeed it then most swiftly turned nightmarish, for waiting at the black wrought-iron park entrance…stood a shiny black carriage of iron, horseless, on four wheels, that growled like a foul-tempered hippopotamus.  Professor Krak bade us enter it through a door in its side: ‘Our means of transport, ladies,’ he said, & then, in a foreign tongue which I presumed to be English, commenced a rushed conversation with the driver of the vehicle, who was – Lord! I could scarcely believe my eyes! – as black as a coal-scuttle, just like in the illustrations of man-eating cannibals I had seen in the cellar at the orphanage!  But before I could scream in terror & make my escape, the machine roared to life with a smooth lurch & we sped into the pellucid gloaming which in that place seemed to pass for night.

All this is related in a mixture of archaicisms and modern slang which seems peculiarly appropriate to a time traveller.  Simple devices such as the use of ampersand instead of ‘and’ provide continuous reminders that Charlotte is from the past.  Fru Shleswig is also given an effective, distinctive manner of speaking, using a sort of Middle English spelling which implies her ignorance and peasant-like bluntness.

The book isn’t without its faults.  For an adventurous book about time travel, it takes a surprisingly long time in exposition building up to this actually taking place and although it is interesting from the beginning because of the narrator the story could perhaps have benefited from starting a bit sooner.  The pacing of the narrative remains slightly uneven throughout the book, but this is never enough of a problem to affect the enjoyment of reading such a thoroughly entertaining book.  I’ll definitely be reading more by Liz Jensen in the future.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen.  Published by Bloomsbury, 2006, pp. 311.  Originally published in 2006.

Human Croquet is narrated by Isobel Fairfax and is the story of her family and their neighbours in the village of Lythe.  Isobel and Charles’ exotic mother disappeared when they were very young, followed soon after by their father, leaving the children in the care of their steely, old fashioned grandmother and their irascible Aunt Vinny.  Even after their father returns several years later no one seems willing to talk about what happened or why.  In fact, lots of people in Lythe are hiding things and keeping secrets to themselves, not least Isobel, who keeps finding herself slipping into other periods of time without any explanation.

This is in many ways a very odd book, but it was exactly my kind of odd.  My family and I have always played word games and twisted phrases around on themselves, so Isobel’s narration reads rather like I think.  The text is peppered with her humorous asides in which she pokes fun at herself:

He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead, ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs.  I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ — more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire.

At other people:

Malcolm Lovat.  If I am to have a birthday wish it must be him.  He is what I want for birthday and Christmas and best, what I want more than anything in the dark world and wide.  Even his name hints at romance and kindness (Lovat, not Malcolm).

And, probably my favourite, when she takes common idiomatic phrases to absurd (yet also supremely logical) lengths:

‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life.  (Ah, but what does he give it?  B-?  C+?  He should be careful, one day time might mark him.  ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)

Isabel’s narration is something that I suspect a reader will either love or hate, but for me it was one of the book’s main attractions.

Another aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed is the way that Atkinson plays around with motifs from fairy tales (Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel spring to mind immediately as examples).  She gives the well-known stories subtle nods without ever explicitly copying them, in a way that suggests that all is not quite as it seems.  I found it simultaneously reassuringly familiar as I recognised elements of particular stories and unbalancing as what I knew of those stories indicated that things were not going to go as I expected, which is really how the whole novel works: fundamentally a story about family relationships, it is quite happy to have characters turning into dogs or time travelling without any indication that this is somehow unusual.

Atkinson has an approach to writing about different time streams which I have never come across before, but is so wonderfully simple I wonder why it’s not more common.  When Isobel is talking about events taking place in the main timeline of the novel, she writes in the present tense; when she narrates scenes from earlier on in her life, they are written in the past tense.  The clear definition between what has happened and what is happening is particularly helpful given how confusing and uncertain the reality of the present becomes, and I found the technique to be a good one (and how I wish Sarah Gruen had adopted it in Water for Elephants).  Given my dislike of present tense narratives I was surprised by this for the second time this year.  It turns out that I quite enjoy the present tense when it is used in a carefully considered manner and employed effectively.

Human Croquet is a bizarre and wonderful book which I suspect readers will either love as unreservedly as I did or find very odd indeed.  Either way, it’s definitely worth trying.

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson.  Published by Black Swan, 1998, pp. 384.  Originally published in 1997.

First, the reader is introduced to Melanie, a 1950′s wife and mother who has been confined to her bed since the birth of her child as she was taken ill with tuberculosis and has consequently been unable to see her child in case the excitement is too much for her weakened constitution.  As the novella starts, the doctor decides that Melanie is well enough to spend the afternoon in a different room to give her a change of scenery and she is carried to the Victorian chaise-longue of the title, a peculiarly compelling item of furniture which Melanie purchased in an antique shop whilst shopping in search of a crib for her coming baby.  There, she falls asleep, but on waking Melanie finds herself no longer in the 1950′s but back in 1864 and so the nightmare begins.

I thought that Melanie (or Milly as she is known in 1864) was a very interesting character.  When the reader sees her in the 1950′s she comes across as docile and rather vacuous, relying on her husband, the nurse and the doctor without any particular opinions or influence of her own, but there is still the feeling that there is something behind her perfect housewife exterior, an intelligence which she keeps hidden for some reason.  Ironically, it is only when she is transported back to 1864 that this is revealed: in the modern setting the reader is kept out of Melanie’s head, wheareas all of the Victorian section is shown entirely through her thoughts and reactions.  She starts to express her thoughts and try to act only at the time when she is most helpless and she no longer has other people around her to act as props.  The nightmare experience of finding herself in an alien time period is the catalyst which forces her to become independent and so in a peculiar way the reader watches her becoming free even as she is trapped.

The most thought provoking aspect of this book is its ambiguity; as I’ve observed, the reader only experiences the time travel through Melanie’s mind and so it is impossible to say what exactly is going on.  Is she dreaming?  Is she mad?  Has she really travelled in time?  She retains her modern sensibilities and is aware of herself as Melanie, not Milly, but also has some of Milly’s memories, so who is she really?  Has she regressed to a past life?  Can she get back or is she trapped?  If she dies in the past, what happens to her in the present?  The reader is just as confused and disoriented by this sudden, unpredicted change in the direction of the narrative as Melanie is and so is drawn into her panic and horror.

I found this book very effective and I’m very grateful to Persephone for introducing me to a wonderful new author, even if this wasn’t the book that I was expecting at all.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski.  Published by Persephone, 1999, pp. 101.  Originally published in 1953.

This book had an interesting premise but sadly never quite delivered in the writing. A Spanish conquistador falls in love with a Mexican girl, but circumstances drive them apart. When he leaves, she gives him a drink of enchanted chocolate which extends his life and slows his aging to allow him to return to her at a time when they can be together. Consequently, he wanders through time with Pedro, his greyhound companion, in search of chocolate and love. However, far more time and attention is given to the chocolate in this book. The descriptions of chocolate making, baking, experimenting and eating are rich and sensuous and instantly made me hungry. In fact, the food writing is what makes this book interesting to read.

The remainder of the plot does not fare so well. The time travel element, surely an essential part of the plot, was made to seem almost incidental and there was no attempt to make it either logical or consistent. That the main character did not react with any surprise or disorientation to the completely unpredictable passage of time, and so it comes across as a lack of development on the part of the author rather than a deliberate device. The characters were mostly undeveloped, but this bothered me less than I expected as their appearances in the narrative were so fleeting. I did enjoy Diego’s brushes with real historical figures, painfully contrived as they were, but they seemed an incidental rather than integral part of the story. Not enough was made of them, often they were unrelated to either love or chocolate, and so they did not really fit into the rest of the narrative. Ultimately, I suppose it’s difficult to write an interesting account of a man who very rapidly finds his own life uninteresting and repetitive.

The Discovery of Chocolate by James Runcie.  Promotional edition free with the Times.  Originally published in 2001.