Life After Life

Most reviewers of “Life after Life” have taken the main character’s multiple deaths and resurrections as evidence that the novel is about second chances, the option of having a new life after the previous one has been snuffed out. I read it differently. On one occasion Sylvie Todd, the sharp-witted mother of the protagonist Ursula Todd, calls her daughter “Cassandra,” referring to the mythical figure who had the gift of delivering dire prophecies that nobody listened to. Accordingly, I viewed the multiple calamities that befall Ursula – umbilical strangling, drowning, political assassination, rape, marital homicide – not as “what ifs?” imposed by a post-modern tease of a storyteller, but as projections of a mind uncannily attuned to the precariousness of living. How Ursula manages to create her own, authentic life in the face of such mind-bending catastrophes is the real story of Atkinson’s oddly constructed ode to a very human heroism, and it is the beacon that leads the reader through the maze of dead ends. Set largely against the two greatest (real) disasters of the 20th century – the two world wars – Ursula’s journey is an often scintillating one, deftly told. But, at some 500 pages, it’s an awfully meandering trek, requiring you to maintain a balance between empathy for Ursula’s trials and awareness of being manhandled by a relentlessly clever author. The experience is both exhilarating and wearying. Whether it’s worth it in the end is a question that Atkinson leaves entirely up to you.

Life After Life–wherein Kate Atkinson shapeshifts the life of Ursula Todd– is a virtuoso performance. Other novelists–Virginia Woolf, Carol Anshaw and Ian McEwan have done so in earlier works. But none has done it with such flair and with so many balls in the air, juggling so many characters and tales, that are both different and similar. In every phase of Ursula’s existence, over the course of a 60-year span, there are at times three stories existing simultaneously. Each existence is entirely plausible but small changes or decisions create entirely different outcomes. Three early childhoods; three 16-year-olds, three 20-year-old Ursula’s and 3 adult versions. Readers familiar with Anshaw’s Aquamarine will recognize the premise, but Atkinson’s “Life” is far more ambitious in scope and more daring. The rewards, are greater too I believe.

I’ve actually read God In Ruins and Life After Life out of sequence and regret having done so. They vary in perspective as one novel has brother Teddy living to a ripe old age, the other has him cut down in his prime an RAF captain flying raids over Germany. If Life After Life feels indebted to Anshaw and Aquamarine, then God In Ruins owes a tip of the cap to McEwan’s Atonement. It is only how time and incidence impacts life that the four books have a convergence. Atkinson’s two novels thus far (the third and final is in September) about a family living from the Twenties to modern Britain also reminds one of Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music of Time.

The scope and techniques used to tell the stories of Teddy and Ursula are brilliantly managed and fascinatingly played out. Without sentimentalizing their lives she manages to find the heroic in two ordinary lives. Beautifully told and extraordinarily accomplished.

This fascinating novel is based on the premise that death isn’t necessarily forever. The central character, Ursula Todd, is born on a snowy night in England in 1910. In the first account of this, she dies almost immediately, strangled by the umbilical cord with no doctor or midwife to help her mother through the birth. In the next account, the doctor has arrived, the umbilical cord is cut, and the baby lives. And so on and so forth — Ursula’s life follows a different pattern each time, which leads to her death but then to a new pattern.

The book is full of philosophical questions, but they do not intrude; it works brilliantly as a novel. The narrative carries the reader right along with the strongest of hooks: what will happen next (time)? The descriptions of time and place are haunting, particularly those of World War II London. The characters are rounded, and some engaged at least this reader emotionally. And they are diverse — Ursula, of course, is not the only one whose life follows a different pattern in her various iterations, and it becomes almost a game to figure out what has changed for which character. The ending is mysterious, but that is appropriate a novel that explores so many possibilities.

“Life after life” is the kind of book you hope to encounter whenever you pickup a novel for the first time. I had read the follow up “A god in ruins” not knowing what to expect and was engrossed in that novel to the extent that there was a sharp intake of breath when I ultimately got to the end. . Whilst this book covers the fate of the same family and even covers much of the same time line, both can be read on their own. However, having read either of the two, there is a fair chance of wanting to read the other. Intriguingly, there are little elements within this first volume which I cannot recall getting answered in the second and I would be very keen to read a third novel about the Todd family.

Simply put, this novel takes the notion of having different possibilities open to you throughout life and puts the main protagonist in amongst a wealth of alternatives, the principle storyline looking at the Second World war through both an English and German perspective. The idea may seem too eccentric to work but Kate Atkinson pulls the ideas off with aplomb.

For me, there are two elements of great story telling. There first is to create such strong characters that we know who they are when speaking because their voices come out so strongly in the dialogue. All the characters in this book are terrific , whether it is the flaky Irish housemaid Bridget or my particular favourite, the incorrigible aunt and authoress, Izzy who surely deserves a book of her own. The other component is having the sensation of being plunged in to a world where the people and places seem real and who you feel sad to leave behind when you finish the book.

Kate Atkinson has tapped in to something truly wonderful in this book and whilst both this and “A God in ruins” ultimately reveal a more shocking face of 20th century life than initially supposed in the two differing accounts of the Second World War from the perspective of both the bomber and the bombed, there seem enough potential in the little world she has created to make another visit to Fox Corner highly desirable. This is a fantastic novel.

I could not get into this lengthy book, I am afraid. I read it for the book club, otherwise It would be left unfinished. An interesting idea for a shorter novel, but this one is, in my opinion, overworked, repetitive and predictable. I was hoping it would all come together at the end with some deeper meaning or a twist, but alas no. Characters not developed enough to care for any of them and there is nothing too interesting in the historical backdrop to the plot. Seeing the glowing reviews, I was expecting much more. A frustrating read.

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