Though each story can stand alone, they are loosely linked together by common characters - and by ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ Just about every story has a reference to ‘Buffy’ or a character who watches ‘Buffy.’ In 'Evil Doppelgangers' the main character is a trendy TV critic and resident Buffy expert who regularly rolls out learned philosophical discourses on the Slayer.

Beginning with the understated but post-apocalyptic 'Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping' - where two women concentrate on a shopping spree as bombs explode and civil war breaks out - the stories mingle the mundane with the extraordinary. In 'Temporal Anomaly,' Marianne rings her mum up for a recipe for lemon meringue pie when she’s driving on the M9, and her car is overtaken by Hades’ chariot. As a ghost she is housebound. As she watches her husband and son cope with their grief, she is forced to rely on old episodes of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Buffy’ to gain an understanding of her undead state. In 'Unseen Translation' a nanny turns into Artemis. Throughout the book Atkinson shows her flare for the sharp one-liner and spot-on thumbnail characterisation.

Since ‘Human Croque’t Atkinson has been striking out in increasingly fantastic and surreal territory, but these elements took a very self-consciously quirky and farcical turn in her third novel, ‘Emotionally Weird.’ Not the End of the World’ however shows a consolidation and growth that transforms what didn't quite work in ‘Weird’; the playfulness that once veered into whimsy has real substance and wit here, and the irony actually made me laugh. I’ve always enjoyed the process of discovery that takes place when you learn that a character in one story knows someone in the other - and when you find out that several protagonists went out with the same guy! Linked stories are effective in communicating both connectiveness and chaos, as David Mitchell's ‘Ghostwritten’ showed a few years ago. After reading ‘Not the End of the World,’I’m wondering why the possibilities of this format aren’t tried more often.

i Though the understatement of the writing is one of the book's strengths, at times it leant itself to a certain distance. For this reason, the collection didn't wield the emotional impact of the rich and magnificent ‘Human Croquet.’ But the poignancy of 'Temporal Anomaly' and 'Sheer Big Waste of Love' - in which the son of a dying prostitute attends the funeral of the father who rejected him - provides some balance.

The book itself is beautifully presented, each story preceded by a woodcut illustration and quotes ranging from Ovid to Emily Dickinson to - yes, ‘Buffy.’ The collection is rounded off in a satisfying way when we return to the intrepid shoppers Charlene and Trudi. Now walled up by the plague police, they sensuously recall the luxuries of the past and tell each other "it’s not the end of the world." But these stories hint at some surprises that Atkinson may have in store for the future, and a world that could just be beginning...

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus a contribution to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten. She has reviewed books for TTA as well. She lives in South London with a venerable 16-year-old cat, and sometimes works as a freelance sub-editor on various magazines and websites. She has also been a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker, full-time doley and an editor of the late great Bad Attitude, a feminist mag ‘devoted to the overthrow of civilisation as we know it’. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, she has completed Noise Leads Me - a kind of anti-capitalist vampire novel set in Brixton ( looking for a forward-thinking publisher unfazed by genre boundaries!). Currently she is working on a second novel about a woman leader of the Adamites, a wild, anarchistic free-loving movement in 15th century Hussite Bohemia.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.