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.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “1939: Teddy’s War”
Teddy is 25 on the day that England’s entry into the war is announced. He plans to propose to Nancy soon. He goes to her family home to visit her and finds that she is ill, so the visit is brief. At home, Teddy tells Hugh that he wants to be a pilot. He sees the war as freedom from banking, studies, and domestic life. During a family lunch, his siblings ask him about his intentions, and he tells them he will join the RAF. Ursula confides in him that she is having an affair with a married man. After lunch, he takes a train to London.
Teddy catches Nancy’s cough, which delays his entry into the war by several weeks. Two years later, he returns to see his family after his pilot training is finished. Ursula has been working with the Official Secrets Act group and tells Teddy that the war has been horrific so far. They visit Hugh’s grave, and Teddy is surprised by the intensity of his grief. Ursula must go back to London, and Teddy goes with her instead of staying with his mother. He remembers an accident that happened when a plane crashed during training. Teddy saw one of the pilots burned to death, with the flesh stripped off his bones. He had felt relieved that it hadn’t been him, and sickened.
At her apartment, Ursula gives Teddy a silver hare charm that used to hang on his baby carriage for good luck. That evening, Teddy visits various pubs where people buy drinks for him. He gets very drunk, meets a woman named Ivy, and takes her to his hotel, where they have sex. The next day he takes a train to the next place where he will continue his preparation for war.
Chapter 5 Summary: “1993: We That Are Left”
Viola and a 19-year-old Sunny are helping Teddy pack his apartment. For weeks, Viola has been going through Teddy’s belongings and discarding things that will not fit in his new flat at Fanning Court, “[a] sheltered retirement housing complex” (138). Teddy is now 79, and Viola has convinced him to move to the retirement home so that someone can help him at any time he might need it. The possibility of Teddy moving into Fanning Court had begun when he slipped on a patch of black ice and broke his hip.
Viola had called Sunny to tell him that he will have to “put in some time” (158) looking after Teddy. Sunny had recently attempted to kill himself, and Viola worried about him constantly. Viola is now 41 years old. She had moved to Leeds after her time with Dominic and married a man named Wilf Romaine, but they divorced. Sunny enjoys his time with Teddy. Sunny can drive, so Teddy is not housebound. He has Sunny drive him to a cemetery that holds the graves of over 8,000 men who died on training flights. Sunny asks if he saw terrible things during the war. Teddy remembers a beloved nurse named Hilda who was decapitated when the propeller of a damaged plane flew off as it was landing. She had been walking nearby on the airstrip.
Teddy and Nancy had moved to this house in York in 1960. As Viola sorts Teddy’s things, she finds an unopened coffee machine that she gave to him as a gift. They argue because it is a Krups brand machine, and Teddy says the Krups gave money to the Nazis. Viola argues that the current family of Krups had nothing to do with the war. Viola has been frustrated for weeks over Teddy’s frugality, his sentimentality, and what she sees as his stubbornness about his possessions. She sees their arguments as material for a novel she wants to write.
Teddy and Viola had received a tour of Fanning Court from the warden, a woman named Ann. Teddy found the experience depressing and makes no secret of the fact that he doesn’t want to move. While they walk, Teddy remembers his brother, Jimmy. Jimmy was a homosexual, and when he had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer in his fifties, he drove his car off a cliff, an act that Teddy had found fittingly brave and flamboyant. However, it is Ursula he misses the most: She died from a stroke 30 years ago. He remembers visiting Izzie in 1974 shortly before she died. She had left the copyright for the Augustus books to Teddy, but it was worth little.
Sunny goes into the attic to look through Teddy’s boxes. He finds his war medals and a photograph of himself and Bertie when they were kids. He puts the medals and photo in his pocket. When he goes downstairs, Teddy asks if he saw his medals because he wants to wear them to an RAF reunion dinner. Sunny claims that he doesn’t know if he saw them.
Chapter 6 Summary: “1951: The Invisible Worm”
Teddy and Nancy had been trying to have a child for five years when they had applied as candidates at an adoption agency. The interview process is lengthy and humiliating. Nancy feels as if they are being judged on every question they are asked and never feels as if she manages to give a correct answer. Before there is time for them to be approved or denied as prospective parents, Nancy becomes pregnant. She was in labor for two days during the delivery and nearly died. The doctor asked Teddy who he should save if he had to choose between Nancy and the child. Teddy chose Nancy, but both survived. Nancy loves Viola and devotes her life to her. Teddy “knew he could never be so consumed by another person” (185), but he loves his family and sees them as his duty, replacing the duties of wartime. After Viola was christened, Teddy gave Nancy a ring, “the engagement ring [he] never gave [her]” (187).
They had moved out of Mouse Cottage into a large farmhouse in Ayswick. In 1960, Nancy said they needed to move so that Viola would have more options and more stimulation for her mind. Weeks later they moved to York, which Teddy remembered from his time there during the war. Teddy quickly missed the country life. He did not like hearing the trains run at all times, and there were no animals he could see outside of the zoo. Soon, Nancy was leaving every month to visit her sisters. Each time, she failed to call, claiming she never had access to a phone. One time, she left to visit Gertie. Gertie called Teddy the next day asking if he would like to have an oak sideboard of hers that he had always admired. She revealed that Nancy was not there with her. Teddy did not understand why Nancy had lied, and did not mention it to her when she returned.
Teddy falls at Fanning Court, and Viola takes this to mean that he should move to an official nursing home where he will be surrounded by medical professionals. When she visits him at Fanning Court, she tells him that one of her novels is being made into a movie, and she has to meet with executives that afternoon. She leaves him a brochure for a nursing home called Poplar Hill.
Nancy next claimed to visit Millie. Teddy called Millie, probing to see if Nancy was there. Millie said that she had just sent her back on the train to him, but Teddy believed that she was lying. At home, he caught Nancy talking on the phone late one evening, but she hung it up as soon as she saw him. Another night, he caught her looking at Viola with pain in her face: “Betraying one’s husband was bad enough, but to betray one’s child was a different matter” (206). He began to imagine the worst: that she was having an affair. After she arrived home drunk in a taxi, smelling like cigarettes, he accused her of infidelity, and he believed that she was carrying out the trysts in a nearby hotel. Nancy said, "You don’t know. You don’t know anything” (207).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapter 4 provides the details of Teddy’s formal training and entry into the war. When he informs his family that he wants to be a fighter pilot, no one, including his father, Hugh, pushes back against him. Teddy never acts uneasy or contemplates the danger the war will place him in. Rather, he finds the idea of leaving home so liberating that the war looks to be a grand adventure.
Ursula’s experience of the war is anything but an adventure. She sees horror upon horror as she treats the injured men and watches them die. When Ursula gives Teddy the silver hare to keep him save, she knows how badly the men need protection. Ursula and Teddy have an intimacy that he does not share with his parents or his other siblings. They tease each other frequently, and more than once Ursula is shown reading to Teddy when they are children. Later, when she dies of a stroke, the loss is a grievous wound to Teddy.
When they visit their father’s grave, Teddy is also overcome with grief. There are few moments in the novel where he is overtly emotional, and the fact that he feels sorrow at Hugh’s grave surprises even Teddy. He will later profess to being uncomfortable when people show their feelings, and it is this calm stoicism that inspires his men in the war and makes them want to be near him. Teddy is always controlled at ease, at least outwardly.
His night with Ivy is not presented as a night of debauchery or as an unsavory, unfaithful blow against his relationship with Nancy. Relationships are formed and abandoned quickly during the war, when every night could be a soldier’s last night. Teddy is not above carnal appetites, and by the time his night with Ivy appears in the book, the reader already knows that he will marry Nancy, and that Nancy herself has had sex with other men after she thought Teddy had been killed.
Chapter 5 makes Viola a more unsympathetic character than before. She is badgering Teddy into moving into a retirement home so that she will no longer have to visit him. Later, when he is near death, Viola derives no pleasure from visiting him, but that is already true during the earlier chapters. She is now 41 years old and is still searching for peace. The revelation that Sunny survived a suicide attempt gives a deeper understanding of the torment that his childhood caused him. It has also been revealed that Dominic suffered from bipolar disorder, and it is possible that Sunny has inherited the condition. The reader does not yet know the cause of Dominic’s death, which will cast more light on Sunny’s mental state.
Sunny seems most at peace when he is with Teddy. Teddy lets him drive, tells him stories, and does not act impatient or resentful that he has to be in Teddy’s presence. In Sunny’s view, Teddy has acted heroically, but rather than using it as a source of inspiration, Sunny feels as if his own life is pathetic compared to that of his courageous grandfather. When he sees the 8,000 graves at the cemetery, Sunny feels a longing to make his life matter. He will get his wish by the time he is a celebrated yogi, but by that point, Sunny will no longer care about fame, brave deeds, or contemplating more than the present moment.
Chapter 6 primarily comprises Teddy and Nancy’s attempts to conceive a child, the birth of Viola, and Teddy’s growing suspicions that Nancy is cheating on him. After being subjected to a lengthy adoption screening in which Nancy and Teddy both feel as if they are being judged by the adoption worker, Nancy becomes pregnant. The discussion Nancy and Teddy have about the choice they would each make between saving their newborn baby or spouse is a sign of what they each need. Teddy needs to be with Nancy more than he needs a baby. Nancy places a higher priority on safely bringing her child into the world than on Teddy’s life, or her own. She dotes on Viola with a devotion that appears obsessive to Teddy, who cannot imagine giving himself wholly to one person in such a way.
Viola appears to feel the same way about her mother, which may be why her attitude toward Teddy grows so venomous after she sees him smother Nancy with the pillow later. Once Teddy has revealed that he would save Nancy instead of the child, he begins to suspect that Nancy is having an affair. He worries that he might be losing the person he is most devoted to. Later, the reader learns that Nancy is actually trying to hide her cancer diagnosis from him, sharing it with her sisters instead. However, she is willing to let Teddy continue to worry about her, and Teddy does not act as if anything is wrong until the end of Chapter 6 when he confronts her. The chapter ends without resolving the question, setting up one of the major points of tension for the chapters to come.
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