“Emotionally Weird” by Kate Atkinson
I love Kate Atkinson’s work and have done since I first read Life After Life. But Emotionally Weird is a strange creature. I honestly can’t say I enjoyed it, as the plot and characters go nowhere. But if you’re a fan, it’s fascinating to see how the ideas from his book would fuel her later (much better) work.
On a weather-beaten island off the coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother, Nora, take refuge in the large, mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear--like who her real father was. Effie tells various versions of her life at college, where in fact she lives in a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed, and to whom Klingons are as real as Spaniards and Germans.
But as mother and daughter spin their tales, strange things are happening around them. Is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog?
I have a weird thing with Kate Atkinson's books. I have loved each and every one that I've read so far, but I always find the first few chapters hard to get into. I don't know why this is, but it's always a slog to get into her writing. But then I hit a point where everything clicks, and I'm completely drawn in.
But with Emotionally Weird, that point never came. The book never pulled me in, and actually finishing it was a real slog.
Atkinson isn't a simple writer. Her writing has always had a magic feel because she is never afraid to avoid simple, linear storytelling. She works more with making us feel the character's thoughts and emotions rather than showing us their actions. This is always what I've loved about her work. But that only works if something is happening. And, in Emotionally Weird, that simply isn't the case.
This is the most "Literary" of Atkinson's books. And I don't mean that as a compliment because it isn't one. It means that Emotionally Weird is one of those stories where it feels like the language and writing are supposed to be more important than the story, plot, and characters.
The plot is framed as a mother, Nora, finally telling her adult daughter, Effie, the truth about her family's past. But for some reason, this involves Effie rambling on and on about her life at university. Now, I didn't mind this because I know how good a writer Atkinson is, and so I assumed all these random tangents and meanderings would come together at the end and reveal something significant. But no. None of it matters other than to show Effie is a passenger in her own life and has absolutely no agency in her own story.
The whole thing feels very self-indulgent. Despite the preface claiming that the characters, events, and settings of Effie's story are fictional and not based on real people, I can't help but think that this is just Atkinson exploring and telling her student life at Dundee. Why else would she pick that exact setting from her own life and then not use her experiences?
So no, I didn't enjoy Emotionally Weird. But that doesn't mean it wasn't worth reading. Because after I'd finished, I went and checked Atkinson's bibliography because I had a hunch about something. A hunch that turned out to be correct. This was Atkinson's third published novel, and the ones that followed it were the far superior Jackson Brodie series, then Life After Life, arguably her best novel. And what I had seen in Emotionally Weird were the seeds of ideas that would be spun off into those stories. Chick, the dilapidated private detective, seemingly divorced from life and simply existing between a family he lost and his current case, is clearly a prototype Jackson Brodie. And the way Effie tells her life story, as a being drifting through her own existence rather than actually experiencing it, as well as the way she retells parts of it when her audience insists something didn't happen the way it should have, has the genetics that would be passed on to Life After Life's Ursula Todd.
Emotionally Weird is Atkinson's most Literary novel, and I don't use that word as a compliment. But if you are a fan of her greater body of work, I'd say it's worth reading if only to see how the ideas she came up with here would grow and develop into her other - far better - novels. But I definitely wouldn't recommend reading it on its own. And definitely not as an introduction to Atkinson's work
