From the author of Life After Life. When crime correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain from Singapore in 1945, he takes a quiet job with the Festival of Britain, a government-funded endeavor aimed at celebrating the nation’s creativity, grit, and ingenuity. There, he joins a team of misfits and eccentrics as they help to ready the Festival for launch.
Atkinson’s lighthearted novel mines delicious humor from this mismatch of grizzled cynicism and national heritage. Our Noble Selves is in part a workplace comedy ... Ms. Atkinson deserves to be rated as highly as her countryman Ian McEwan. Like him, she boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well.
Dark, always witty ... What a delightful plot it is — convoluted, confounding, at times harrowing, at times hilarious, laced with references to Shakespeare and shadowed by the aftermath of war ... The book abounds in period details, and Atkinson wastes none of them ... Entirely satisfying. Often funny. Never predictable.
It’s not that Atkinson can’t write a corker of a thriller ... By the author’s own admission, Our Noble Selves started as something very different: a serious look at the fall of Singapore and the fate of its P.O.W.s. But ultimately Atkinson decided that this was a 'relatively lighthearted novel,' and so somewhat uneasily juxtaposes the two registers ... Because this is Atkinson, there is richness aplenty. Unfortunately, rationing means that here it’s often rendered in margarine.
