Human Croquet.

Human Croquet Kate Atkinson Picador USA, $24,351 pp.

Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a comic novel bubbling with ebullient language, won the 1995 Whitbread Prize in England and critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Her new novel, Human Croquet, wraps some of that novel's concerns--especially the clutches of past generations--in a new narrative skin.

Like the first novel, Human Croquet alternates past and present. It opens with woodcutters and fairies, primeval forests, a lady dressed in green disappearing into a dark wood. In short, it distinctly resembles a fairy tale. Other literary allusions (to classics, to mysteries, to science fiction, and especially to Shakespeare) abound. At times Isobel Fairfax, the sixteen-year-old narrator of the "Present" sections of the book, sounds like a chirpy Edgar Allen Poe surveying the madness around her.

Isobel is the descendant of a distinguished family whose social standing is on a steady downward slide; her grandparents have been comfortable suburban grocers in the "grim North" of England, but even this bourgeois business is lost in Isobel's lifetime. She and her brother have been raised to believe that her mother deserted them when they were small. Her father vanished the day after her mother's disappearance but has since reappeared, claiming amnesia, and bringing home with him from New Zealand a hapless new wife named Debbie. (Isobel is at her scathing adolescent best on the subject of her stepmother.) Motherless, Isobel is consumed with defining motherhood, especially as it is connected to desire and the domestic violence all around her. Her images of sexually mature women fall pretty neatly under the rubrics of Madonna, whore, and stepmother.

Though the novel opens in the very beginning ("with the word and the word is life"), the present action of the story commences on April Fool's Day, 1960. It is Isobel's sixteenth birthday. She spends much of her time dodging stepmother Debbie, who believes that the furniture is rearranging itself and that the members of the family have been replaced by sinister doubles. Those other family members do not provide Isobel much solace. Her "aunt from hell," Vinny, who likes all recipes that begin, "Take a large cod and boil whole," has raised Isobel and her brother with equal disdain for their emotional stability and for the truth; her brother Charles repels young women but keeps his mother's memory alive; her father, once dashing, is now a shadowy figure sinking in a swamp of sadness. Isobel is drawn to the plump, maternal figure next door, Mrs. Baxter, who is continually covered in bruises she explains in a way that feels fictionally familiar: She has walked into doors, she has bumped herself again. Mrs. Baxter's daughter Audrey is Isobel's friend and, Isobel gradually comes to suspect, the victim of incest with her father, the cruel villain of the story.

The emotional stakes, then, are high; the tone is jaunty; the juxtaposition is unsettling and familiar (perhaps we heard this story in childhood). Throughout the course of the novel, Isobel falls into time warps (she takes them in stride, and they are not terribly bumpy going for the reader either, though they sometimes feel a bit random). It is fitting that Isobel should travel through history, for she has been brought up without knowledge of the most crucial character in her own history, her mother Eliza, who is beautiful and bewitching in the fairy-tale manner. Eliza's story is told in the "Past" sections of the novel, in a narrative that is far more stylized and ironic than Isobel's. Her tale becomes increasingly outrageous as the past progresses (or regresses); our fairy-tale narrator first reveals that Eliza is a loving Madonna figure to her children and later that she has been a prostitute whose heart seems sometimes made of gold and sometimes of brass. In the Eliza sections, Atkinson climbs all the way out on a fictional limb. The branch bobs precariously with the most removed history, Eliza's own infancy, which goes far beyond a reader's expectations of myth. Near brushes with incest (a major motif) mark the longest, and perhaps the most manipulative, of the narrative reaches. Atkinson never really loses her footing, though--the novel is beguiling no matter how outrageous its plot becomes--and as the layers of Eliza's disappearance story are peeled away the truth is not only shocking but deeply satisfying. We are made aware, finally, of Eliza's attempt to find "redemption in this awful world."

Isobel's journey is also revealed in layers, and the climax of her story is also outrageous. Her adolescent fascination with sexuality has led her to a heightened awareness of rape (there is a deeply troubling scene with teen-age boys taking after her, but Isobel, Daphne-like, conveniently turns into a tree). Isobel has witnessed plenty of sexual violence to inform her view of a young woman's place in midcentury England--she has touched her murdered mother's body, though she has repressed the memory, and she has Audrey and Mrs. Baxter to remind her of the horrors that might accompany the most domesticated scenes.

Atkinson's language--sometimes giddy, sometimes understated to accommodate the black comedy, occasionally frankly emotional ("I need my mother, I need my mother")--is a joy. Genial throughout, the story becomes positively expansive as it works its way toward resolution. Audrey, the incest victim, becomes one of the first women priests in the Church of England and does "a small amount of good." After witnessing the ghastly sexual order humans can impose, Isobel leaves her readers with a delicate paean to the forest, to nature's unruly and mysterious order. The last pages of the novel give us, finally, the rules to "Human Croquet," a game Mrs. Baxter has recalled nostalgically. It's a wacky metaphor worthy of Kate Atkinson's generous ambition for this novel. Like the best fairy tales, Human Croquet is appalling and disturbing even as it is reassuring. The forest is dark and deep.

Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest novel is Brain Fever (Doubleday).