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 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “1960: His Little Unremembered Acts of Kindness and of Love”
Nancy’s illness begins with a headache. The school nurse tells her that she has a migraine. When she gets home, she falls asleep until nine o’clock in the evening. Over the next few days, she has more headaches, but they are less severe. She assumes that the pain is simply a function of getting older. While Teddy is away with Viola at an agricultural show, Nancy decides that moving to York would be good for the family.
Shortly after the move, Nancy’s left arm begins to tingle and feel numb. She gets another migraine. One afternoon she goes blind in her left eye for 10 minutes. She begins seeing doctors but does not tell Teddy; instead, she turns to her sisters. One day she tells them that she has news from the hospital, and it is the worst possible scenario: Nancy has widespread and inoperable brain cancer. She leaves her sisters, promising to go home and tell Teddy, ending his fears of her having an affair.
Nancy spends the next few weeks staying as busy as possible. She cleans the house and buys clothes for Viola that will last through her next two sizes. She begins playing the piano again, determined to enjoy some of her final weeks. At dinner one evening, Nancy asks Teddy to promise her that he will “help her to go, when it starts to get bad, if I can’t help myself” (351). He protests that it would be murder, and she changes the subject, saying that maybe it won’t be that bad after all. Teddy feels like a coward. He has killed many people but feels unable to promise Nancy that he can be “her executioner” (353). Nancy spends the evenings reading books together with Viola. During the days, she realizes that she can no longer do math in her head, given the severity of the headaches. She plays the piano loudly, trying to drown out the buzzing noise the migraines cause. In her final moments in bed, before she dies, “the bees took flight and blessed her in farewell” (357).
Teddy drinks with Dr. Webster and tells her that he killed Nancy. Dr. Webster argues that he simply helped her along with the morphine that he had provided the night before during their checkup, and that his conscience should be clear. Teddy says he wants to turn himself in, but Dr. Webster asks him to imagine what would happen to Viola if he were arrested and imprisoned. After the doctor leaves, Teddy goes upstairs and tells Viola that he loves her.
The night before, Viola had shouted that something was wrong. Teddy had found Nancy hitting the piano keys as hard as she could. He sat her in a chair and, “when he looked into her eyes he knew the thing she had feared the most had happened to her. Nancy was no longer Nancy” (358). In her bed, Nancy had thrashed and pulled at her clothes as if she were burning. She began screaming. In desperation, Teddy pressed a pillow over her face, thinking, “This is what it meant to kill someone. Hand-to-hand combat. Until death do us part” (360). Then, he turned and saw Viola watching from the doorway.
Chapter 11 Summary: “2012: Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace”
Viola sits with Teddy at Poplar Hill, watching the Thames Pageant on television. She remembers being humiliated the night before and also thinks about marrying Wilf Romaine one month after meeting him. Viola had started writing after her children moved out. Her first novel, Sparrows at Dawn, had modest success. Viola was disappointed when Teddy wasn’t overwhelmed by her achievement, and also when he failed to see that the book was based on them. Her second novel, The Children of Adam, was based on life on a 1960s commune and was a great success.
The night before visiting Teddy, Viola had come to York. She had gone out to a restaurant called Bettys before going out into the streets during a massive bachelorette party. She is surrounded by drunken young women and men in costumes. After falling and tripping, Viola bursts into tears and whispers “I want my mother” (372). A group of older women take her back to her hotel at Cedar Court. At the door, one of them gives her a Valium for her nerves.
Viola has been visiting Teddy every week for three years, but she “derived no pleasure from being with her father. She had always been wary of him for one reason or another, but now that he was a wreck, more child than colossus, he felt like an utter stranger” (377). She had told her therapist, Gregory, that she found all old age repellant. She wonders if she could go live in Bali with Sunny, who has become a Buddhist. It has been 10 years since she has seen him. Viola thinks about telling Gregory that she was “wary” (386) around Teddy, because “[h]e was good. He was kind. She watched him kill her mother” (386).
On the way out of Poplar Hill, she sees an old woman named Agnes, stricken with Alzheimer’s, looking at the front door. She is in the way and won’t move, so Viola punches in the code. Agnes slips out the door, and Viola gets into a taxi. The next day the newspapers report that Agnes was missing, but Viola never sees them. She goes to the airport and leaves for a literary festival in Singapore.
Chapter 12 Summary: “30 March 1944: The Last Flight ‘The Fall’”
Teddy is on his third tour. He signed up despite having fulfilled his obligations. On the day of a mission, he receives a letter from Nancy asking if his feelings have changed, because he rarely writes anymore. During a briefing, the men learn that the night’s target is Nuremberg. It will be a long, dangerous flight. Before leaving, the men take everything out of their pockets that could be used to identify them. They reach their first turning point near Charleroi, and “not long after that the slaughter began” (409).
The fleet is overwhelmed by German fighter planes. Teddy’s plane is badly damaged by gunfire, and as they crash, he throws himself out of the escape hatch and opens his parachute. He turns and watches his airplane dive, crash, and then explode. Teddy realizes that he will live, and “[h]e gave thanks to whichever god had stepped in to save him” (415).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Chapter 10 reveals the greatest source of Teddy and Viola’s suffering. After Nancy is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, she asks Teddy to help her die if she stops being herself. Teddy does not think he is capable of killing her, even at her request, despite the many deaths he has contributed to in war. Contemplating Nancy’s death makes him see himself as an executioner. Dropping bombs from the distance of an airplane was a luxury; Teddy never witnessed the horror caused by the bombs once they hit the ground.
Nancy’s decision to keep the diagnosis from Teddy is in part due to a desire to protect him, and a way to protect herself from having to witness his reaction to the news—and even his hope that a solution could be found. Keeping the secret also postpones what would be the eventual need to tell Viola. Viola witnesses the killing, but there is never a scene of Teddy discussing it with Viola. The reader is left unsure of whether she learns of her mother’s cancer, although it seems unlikely that she never would have gained the knowledge from another relative, even if Teddy never spoke about it.
From then on, Viola is wary of Teddy, as she describes it to her therapist. She never claims that Teddy gives her a single moment of comfort, love, or security. When she falls during a bachelorette party, drunk and miserable, it is her mother she cries for. Viola has retained many childlike qualities that the other members of her family—including her own children—grow out of.
She visits Teddy at Poplar Hill each week out of some sense of obligation but finds the visits miserable. If she believes that Teddy killed her mother maliciously, her willingness to visit him, or interact with him at all, is questionable. However, she makes no secret of the inconvenience of the visits. Viola’s carelessness with Agnes, who escapes from Poplar Hill with her help, is another example of how little Viola cares for the consequences of her actions.
Chapter 12 is almost entirely a description of Teddy’s final, savage bombing campaign. The fighting is ferocious, and he manages to eject from the plane before he is killed. Although religion is a peripheral issue in A God in Ruins, often as the source of jokes, Teddy attributes his continued existence to being saved by a god.
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