It is hard to imagine a setting better suited to bureaucratic absurdity than the lead-up to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Conceived of as a tonic for the battered postwar nation, an exercise in rebuilding, hope and celebration, it captured British eccentricity. There was even an ‘Eccentrics’ Corner’, designed to show off the ‘fertile madness of the British character’, which featured among other things the Festival emblem made up of 604 gallstones – all belonging to one patient. When Kate Atkinson tells us at the beginning of Our Noble Selves that ‘the Festival was due to open in a handful of weeks and absolutely nothing looked as if it would be ready’, we can be in no doubt that we’re in for a good time.

The novel follows Harry Flynn, recently returned from Burma, where he had begun the war as a foreign correspondent and ended it as a prisoner of war. Having all but abandoned his former life, he takes a job putting together the Festival’s (abysmal) poetry collection. But trouble beyond bad poetry awaits. He soon becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of Delphine, a glamorous Parisian with whom he had a date on the night she vanished – before waking up with no memory of it but mysteriously covered in blood. A Kafka-esque investigation begins, which follows Flynn throughout the novel and forces him to take matters into his own hands. Chaos, of course, ensues.

This is not the subtlest of Atkinson’s books, but it is a riot of colour, pageantry and subterfuge. The plot is breakneck, bordering on farce, and the motley cast occasionally cartoonish. But even at its silliest, it is never uncontrolled. The intrigue and confusion fall away satisfyingly, like peeling an orange in one fell swoop. The author is doing what she does best: Our Noble Selves is a literary romp. In this postwar setting you can feel the noir-ish spy elements of her previous novel Transcription, while the constantly up-ended investigation recalls her much-loved ‘Jackson Brodie’ crime novels.

But there is, as always with Atkinson, more going on. Flynn’s war trauma is ever- present, providing a human backdrop to the circus of the Festival. His unlikely assumption of a paternal role with his recalcitrant step-daughter is genuinely moving; and the overarching message of hope is as much a tonic to the reader as the Festival ultimately was to the country.