The figurative language of Kate Atkinson…

Reading time: About 2 minutes

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes from Kate Atkinson…

I became a fan of the English novelist Kate Atkinson many years ago when I read her 1995 Whitbread-winning book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I also very much enjoyed her delightful 2022 novel, Shrines of Gaiety, the story of the London underworld of the 1920s.

Even though I rarely enjoy short-stories, I made an exception for Atkinson’s recent collection, Normal Rules Don’t Apply. I found the stories disappointing, but her writing, as usual, was exhilarating. Here are my favourite examples. Note the humour!

  • He wasn’t a horse who had much in the way of form to recommend him — four starts last year and placed in only one — but he was a glossy black creature, not shy at advertising his personality, rolling his eyes like a bad actor mugging villainy.
  • [There was] a woman called Vera who was wearing heavy-framed glasses and had her hair bobbed so severely that it looked as if it would cut you if you got up too close.
  • She smelt of roses and something rank, as if she were slowly decaying beneath her billowing filmy frocks.
  • Theo was asleep in his Moses basket beneath a big hydrangea bush. He barely fitted the basket now. He was like a fat peanut taking up the whole of its shell.
  • When she turned round, he saw that she was holding a carafe of water and a glass, which she placed gently on the bedside table. She moved carefully, like someone who was also made of glass.
  • The members of the book group perked up like meercats at the sound of the front door opening and then crashing shut, closely followed by Nicholas slamming into the room as if he was pretending to lead a SWAT team.
  • He flinched at the unexpected slight of a room full of middle-aged women, really he couldn’t have looked more horrified if he’d stumbled on a coven of naked witches sacrificing a goat.
  • “No thanks,” he said, but she insisted, pushing the cucumber into his mouth as if she were posting a latter into a reluctant postbox.
  • Mummy’s Mummy took just enough interest in Franklin to be able to say to him, “Would you fetch me a martini, please?” as if he was a hybrid of a waiter and a dog.
  • “I knew his mother, of course,” Dame Phoebe said, before scooting off again, clinging on to her glass of gin as if it was on a makeshift Ouija board.
Scroll to Top