Emotionally Weird (Paperback)

While Effie, a student at the University of Dundee, recounts her painfully recognisable tale of student life circa 1972, her mother Nora (who isn't her mother) recounts the tale of Effie's true provenance. The pair are sequestered on a tiny Scottish island, so isolated that they refer to a bigger island nearby as the mainland.Their tales are distinguished by different typefaces, a necessary device as Nora's comments often interrupt Effie's tale, contributing to the ongoing critique. In a creative writing class Effie (an omnipotent narrator) allows a student to read from his fantasy epic (printed in a Gothic font). Nora tells her to stop him as she is wasting words. Effie replies: 'There isn't a finite stock of them'. Nora asks: 'How do you know? You might suddenly just run out and then you won't be able to finish the - '

Among other typefaces - and stories - that make guest appearances are Effie's own contribution to the creative writing class (a seaside-based detective novel), a lecturer's Kafkaesque work and his wife's Mills and Boon prose. Effie's dozy boyfriend throws in the plots of Star Trek and Dr Who. The lecturer's novel is as indecipherable as the academic language he uses in his stifling tutorials, where nonetheless a crucial point is raised: 'second-order verisimilitude won't suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world.' Atkinson fans who were impressed by the 'second-order verisimilitude' of 'Behind the Scenes in the Museum' might lose patience with this book, though to my mind she has really taken off. Her linguistic and comic flair rise to greater heights in this Reductio ad Absurdum (an expression she uses as a chapter title).

For all the fun she has with words and typography (including a half-page black square to indicate where Effie closes her eyes), Kate Atkinson has not eschewed the rules of the conventional novel entirely. She asks in a chapter heading near the end 'Is Achieving a Transcendentally Coherent View of the World Still a Good Thing?' This does seem to be what she is at. The novel raises similar themes (of family and belonging) to her ealier works. Despite flights of magic realism, there is plenty of mundane realism - ice-gems and Number 6, which, one old lady says, she only smokes for the coupons. When Salt and Vinegar crisps are mentioned I even found myself worrying whether that flavour existed in 1972.

Maybe the biggest surprise in this overtly experimental novel is the way the ends are tied up so neatly and Kate Atkinson delivers, as if despite herself, a carefully constructed story.

The fine line that Emotionally Weird treads, however, is that between intelligent mockery and clever-clever cockiness: some readers will revel in the metaphysical and magic realist send-ups, others will merely decide that either Effie or Kate Atkison has lost it. But, for this problem, Emotionally Weird tends to stay on the right side of the aforementioned line, occasionally dipping a toe into other waters (its only weakness). Those readers who don't get the literary references will undoubtedly love Effie's narrative style, along with the tottering old ladies, the yellow dog, and Andrea's Booker Prize-winning novel of the future, "Anthea's Anguish" (you can tell what Kate Atkinson thought of Angela's Ashes). Not to mention the hamsters, all called McFluffy, who keep on escaping and run amok across the pages.

Not as funny as "Behind the Scenes", not as original or literary as "Human Croquet", but with both in moderation that makes for a comfortable balance - a book which ought to be able to entertain both sets of readers (those looking for entertainment and those looking for substance), leaving both the author and the reader with only mild mental abbrasions.