Reviewed by Harriet
‘The country is stuck in the doldrums; we need to see the future’.
So says Gerald Barry, one of the organisers of the 1951 Festival of Britain. Less than a decade after the end of WW2, Britons were still recovering from wartime traumas and privations, and the Festival was designed to cheer them up and instil them with optimism. So a site was chosen on the South Bank of the Thames, where exhibitions, demonstrations, theatre performances and countless stalls would provide entertainment and education. The massive Dome of Discovery was filled with scientific and technological exhibitions broken down into categories such as land, sea, sky, and outer space. There were carefully constructed ‘parlours’, showing how people lived or would live in the future. The public was encouraged to send in suggestions, and there were so many bizarre and wonderful ones that, as Kate Atkinson says in her author’s note, she found so much information about them that “really, the only thing I made up was the plot to fit around all this”.
The central character of this delightful novel is ex-journalist Harry Flynn. We never get a description of him, but he must be very attractive, as women swarm about him in numbers. However, though he sometimes succumbs, his recent past has made him wary of commitments. Flynn has had a very bad war, ending up working on the notorious Burma railway under the Japanese, and on his return he had injudiciously married Ivy, a flashy war widow with an eight year old daughter called Veronica and a small dog called Mrs Betty. So when Gerald Barry, his previous newspaper boss, suggests he might join the team preparing for the Festival, he agrees, and quickly finds himself with a group of rather ill-assorted colleagues attempting, not entirely successfully, to organise the chaos.
All this could easily produce a straightforwardly comic novel, but there’s a lot more going on behind the eccentricities of the festival. Soon after joining the team, Flynn rather reluctantly agrees to go out for a drink with Parisian Delphine, who behaves rather oddly during the evening and leaves abruptly with no explanation. She’s never seen again, and to his horror, Flynn finds himself suspected of her murder. Unfortunately he can’t provide an alibi, as he has no memory of the rest of the evening, and having woken up next morning covered in blood, wonders if perhaps he had a blackout and killed her.
The plot thickens considerably after this. Somehow involved in it all seems to be the ghastly Mitzi Blinkhorn, who has somehow managed to win the prize for the ‘Festival Cake’ despite her contribution being disgusting, and her husband Archie, who is extremely sleazy and generally dubious. Archie has somehow discovered a piece of incriminating evidence that Flynn has been sure he destroyed, and threatens him with exposure unless he undertakes to recover some extremely revealing photos of Mitzi engaged in sexual exploits with the sinister failed Tory candidate Dangerfield, who happens to be one of Flynn’s colleagues.
Flynn is rather lost in all the goings on, and fearful of being convicted, but he acquires surprisingly helpful support from Veronica, now thirteen, who has been dumped on him by her mother, along with Mrs Betty. Very bright and very perceptive, Veronica comes as a bit of shock to Flynn, but he comes to enjoy her company, and her addiction to trashy crime novels helps him to navigate the frequent twists he encounters in his attempt to discover what really happened to Delphine. Other characters he encounters include chirpy fourteen-year-old cockney Tommy, glamorous lady spy Lydia, several thugs, and elderly Maud Oglilvie, who emerges from the typing pool but turns out to have a lot to contribute to sorting out not just the mess that Flynn’s team are making but also the behind the scenes police investigation that is causing Flynn so much anxiety.
Our Noble Selves manages to combine much that’s best in Atkinson’s varied fictional output. The crime novel aspect is a reminder of her great Jackson Brodie series, Transcription (2018) is a spy story set in 1950, and the twin novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins are set in WW2. I loved every minute.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.
Kate Atkinson, Our Noble Selves (Doubleday, 2026). 978-1529937824, 352pp., hardback.
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Sounds like a fun novel. And my library has it!