46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AtkinsonA God in Ruins
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 13-Final InterludeChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “2012: All the Way to Bright”
Bertie had gone on a date with a man named Angus. She hadn’t liked him but had gone home with him, and they had had drunken sex. As she walks home in the early morning, she sees a swan-necked barge being rowed toward her on the Thames. Angus is suddenly standing beside her, talking, but she doesn’t pay attention to what he says. She walks away, saying that she left her “real self” (423) on the train and has to go find her. At home, Bertie calls Viola at Poplar Hill, who is visiting Teddy on the day she left for the book tour. She talks to Teddy on the phone, asking him if he is enjoying the pageant. When she tells him that Sunny sends his love, Teddy makes a noise as if he might be choking. Later, Viola calls Bertie and tells her that they have been summoned to the hospital.
Chapter 14 Summary: “2012: The Last Flight ‘Dharma’”
Sunny teaches yoga at a place called the Bright Way in Ubud. Viola visits him while on a wellness retreat in Bali. She is surprised to see that he now has “[t]he physique of a dancer, the shaven head, the oriental tattoos, the wash of an Australian accent” (431). His students call him Ed. Viola remembers getting a call from the hospital in Leeds after Sunny tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists, shortly after beginning college.
Only Sunny and Bertie know where Viola is, “on a different continent from her ailing father” (433). Viola had emailed her agent before the Singapore trip, saying that she needed to have an operation and to make her apologies to everyone at the festival. She stays at an expensive hotel near the village where Sunny lives a minimalist life. She is only able to see him at his classes. While leaving his class one day, she receives a call from Poplar Hill. Viola tells Sunny that Grandpa Ted is dying. Sunny looks sad but will not leave. When Viola flies home, she describes herself as being overwhelmed with love for Sunny, but he never hears it from her.
Bertie sits by Teddy’s bedside and reads one of his favorite novels to him. Teddy is thinking about the final flight, when he escaped from the plane:
Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment (439).
The author takes over the narration and describes a place called the Solemn Temple; in a blast of trumpets, accompanied by the singing of bird, its five walls begin to fall, one by one.
Sunny meditates on the veranda of his room. He will soon leave for Sydney, where his pregnant girlfriend is waiting for him. When he takes Viola to the airport, he plans on sharing the news with her and giving her the silver hare that Teddy gave to him.
Bertie holds Teddy’s hand and knows that the moment of his death is close. The author describes an alternate version of Teddy’s final flight, in which he crashes and sinks to the ocean floor and dies. The author writes, “And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!” (441). The author presents alternate lives for each of the people affected by Teddy’s existence: Agnes dies in the rest home, because Viola was never born and therefore never allowed Agnes to escape Poplar Hill. Nancy marries someone else and has two sons. Viola’s books vanish from bookshelves. The author tallies the hundreds of millions of deaths from the Vietnam War, back to the day when Cain killed Abel, describing them as “all the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination. And this one is Teddy’s” (442).
Chapter 15 Summary: “1947: Daughters of Elysium”
Ursula shows Nancy a patch of blooming hawthorn and says that Teddy would have loved it. Nancy cries and says she can’t believe that Teddy is gone. They watch a skylark fly away until it disappears into the horizon. When Nancy asks if she believes in reincarnation, Ursula says, “I believe we have just one life, and I believe that Teddy lived his perfectly” (444). The author concludes the section with the line, “When all else is gone, Art remains. Even Augustus” (444).
Final Interlude Summary: “The Adventures of Augustus: The Awful Consequences”
Ursula reads an Augustus book to Teddy. In the story, Augustus makes plans with his friends that may disrupt a school pageant, just before seeing a young girl named Madge whom he instantly develops a crush on. Teddy interrupts, asking her to stop reading: “He’s nothing like you” (453), says Ursula, laughing.
Chapter 13-Final Interlude Analysis
Bertie receives her most significant scenes in Chapter 13. She goes on to marry happily, have a successful career, and to have two children with a man she loves. The characters that cause the least amount of drama to the rest of the family are those who make the fewest appearances in the novel. Bertie’s visits to Teddy are the opposite of Viola’s: Bertie is attentive, loving, and kind, reading to him from his favorite books even when it is no longer clear that he understands. She is at his side when he dies and will later claim that he lived his life “perfectly” (444).
Viola’s visit to Sunny in Bali provides closure for the reader in terms of Sunny’s future. He has managed to escape the torments of his youth by becoming a celebrated yogi. Sunny has obviously been a dedicated student and is committed to the contemplative life of teaching, thinking, meditating, and helping others do the same. Viola visits him for selfish reasons and stays in a lavish hotel. This is a stark contrast to Sunny’s self-enforced, genuine humility when he refuses to see her anywhere outside of his classes. His commitment to existing in the moment is wholehearted, and although he is not unkind to Viola, he does not treat his mother as he does any of the other students.
Viola views his classes as boring, painful, and as punishments. She is able to frame any situation as being persecutory, even though the classes are a manifestation of her son’s emotional peace and happiness. When she leaves, she feels that she is overwhelmed with love for him. Although this could be a positive step in her character development after ignoring him for so long, Viola does not share the experience with Sunny. The realization that she loves him profoundly exists for her alone. Her wealth and fame have not brought her happiness, but her brief time with Sunny has helped her feel better, at least temporarily.
Teddy’s death in Chapter 14 raises the deepest concept in the novel: the consequences of war and death. When the author begins discussing the five falling walls during Teddy’s final moments, she refers to the story she has told as a house of fiction, which then falls. This is akin to an actor addressing the audience in a play, film, or television show, which is known as “breaking the fourth wall,” the fourth wall being the divide between performer and audience. Atkinson reminds the reader that the entire novel has been a work of fiction.
By suggesting that Teddy’s life might have actually ended during his final flight, Atkinson invites the reader to ponder the lives that would have been altered—or that would never have been created—if Teddy in fact died on that last mission. The lives of his children and grandchildren would have become fictions, just as the novel is a fiction devised by the author. Had the book never been written, the stories inside of it would never have been told. Because the novel focuses on the permanence of art, versus the importance of life, A God in Ruins is itself an attempt to express truths that will survive longer than its author. Death alters the future. War creates death on a scale that alters the future to a vastly greater degree. The joys, sorrows, suffering, and pains of the characters would have been different, or even nonexistent, without Teddy’s life.
Chapter 15 is a callback to Chapter 1, in which Izzie and Teddy watch the skylark. The chapter takes place in an alternate future in which Nancy and Ursula are still alive, talking about Teddy, his death, and how much they miss him. The final interlude with Augustus revisits Teddy’s displeasure with how Augustus is portrayed, and how much Ursula liked to tease him with the books. By the time the novel ends, the reader knows that Teddy could not be less like Augustus.
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