Life after Life - Kate Atkinson

In The Wizard of Oz, Glinda offers Dorothy some very sound advice: “It's always best to start at the beginning.”  This is not the vogue method in modern literature, with authors liking to start their stories at the end (The Book Thief), the middle (The Secret History) or in an undetermined part of the plot (The Time Traveller’s Wife).  Starting at the beginning has begun to see a little old-fashioned, unimaginative even.   What the latest book on my review list has done is go in the opposite direction, not only starting at the beginning, but going on to re-start at that beginning many times.  This is Kate Atkinson’s much praised new book Life after Life.

Life after Life is one of those books that grabs you right from the synopsis.  It is the story of a girl, Ursula Todd, who dies minutes after being born on a snowy night in 1910.  But what if she hadn’t?  The story briefly relates her death before moving onto this ‘what if’.  She later drowns in the sea as a small child, but what if this hadn’t happened?  This book, at its most basic level, is about these ‘what ifs’.  It is about how a life can be changed after making seemingly innocuous choices.  Ursula’s life shifts from dying during the Spanish Influenza, to an abusive marriage to a school teacher, to dying in the Blitz (several times) to being the wife of a high-ranking Nazi.  Upon every death we are brought back to snowy Middle England in 1910, but this repetitiveness does not become tiring, it grounds us in the new reality before the narrative moves on.

Ursula is dimly aware of these other lives, of her pre-incarnations, but is mostly powerless to stop her respective destinies.  Indeed this story is both a repudiation and confirmation of the very idea of destiny.  The fact that Ursula has multiple ends belies the fact that she is subject to the whims of fate.  Her choices – and the choices of others – set multiple wheels in motion and shows us just how powerless she – and we – are in determining the course of our own lives.  This is in my view the most interesting part of this novel: an examination of just how much control we have over our own fate.

This is the first of Kate Atkinson’s books that I have read, and I have to say that I was impressed.  Even though it has been critically praised, a work of this scope and ambition has always got the ability to divide as much as it pleases, and I can readily understand why some may dislike it.  It does require an investment in time, as it took me around 250 pages before I really understood what the book was about.  Some critics have criticised it for being just a more elaborate version of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, and while I can see how they came to this view, I have to disagree.  This book is far more than just a set of circumstances repeating themselves.

If you are looking for a gentle read on a warm summer’s eve then this is not it.  Urusla’s fates are rarely particularly contented, especially as they pretty much all lead to a premature demise.  She is one of the ‘golden generation’ of people whose lives were inextricably caught up in the First and Second World Wars and she struggles to escape either of them with her life intact.  Kurt Vonnegut in a piece giving advice to new authors recommends: “be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of,” and Atkinson has really taken this to heart in this book.  Ursula, although the same person with the same personality, is shaped and bruised by the winds of fate in this story, and it is this brutal storytelling that compels the reader to keep going.  

This book is one about fate and destiny, and how despite the changing fortunes of Ursula in her many alternate lives, she is unable to plot her own course.  Merida in the Disney/Pixar film Brave dreams of taking her life into her own hands and ‘changing her fate’.  It is Ursula’s complete inability to do that is the cause of all the drama in Life after Life.  This was a tremendously ambitious project and one that I was worried that was impossible to pull off – but that I was largely proven wrong.  The story does take a while to get going and you have to have faith that the author will bring you round.  Once she does, it is an absolute treat.

8/10

Favourite Quotes

 “What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”

“She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.”

“Her heart swelled with the high holiness of it all. Imminence was all around. She was both warrior and shining spear. She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.”

“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”