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On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can -- will she?
Darkly comic, startlingly poignant, and utterly original -- this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best.
"Kate Atkinson is a marvel. There aren't enough breathless adjectives to describe Life After Life: Dazzling, witty, moving, joyful, mournful, profound. Wildly inventive, deeply felt. Hilarious. Humane. Simply put: It's one of the best novels I've read this century."
She's taken it up a notch, was my first (and nearly my last) critical thought, as the pages of Life After Life closed over my head. Kate Atkinson's previous book, 2011's Started Early, Took My Dog, was the fourth to feature her muddled, rueful, violent and wholly sympathetic private eye/justice dispenser Jackson Brodie, and beneath its many enjoyments I (stringent superfan) thought I had detected a certain hastiness or slackening of style. Atkinson is a captivating writer — I once consumed, or was consumed by, three of her novels in as many days, as if the author and I were having a sort of dirty weekend — but here was Started Early, Took My Dog giving me those slight, perhaps unfair, sensations of jaundiced been-here-before-ness...
Not so the enormous and dreamlike Life After Life — although been-here-before-ness is the book's theme. This is Atkinson fully empowered by her talent and hitting a new level of imaginative exhilaration. There's a giddy intensity to the book, the thin-air atmosphere of an artistic high. Ursula Todd is born on a winter's night in England in 1910: born blue, born into death, umbilically strangled. "Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird." The doctor who should have been attending the birth, whose intervention would have saved her, is stuck in a snowdrift somewhere. Baby dies. The End.
Except: not. Time flickers, the universe double-takes, and on the same night Ursula is born again, surviving now thanks to the surgical scissors of the pedantic Dr. Fellowes. ("I arrived at Fox Corner in the nick of time. Literally.") Four years later, during a summer in Cornwall, Ursula toddles into the sea with her big sister Pamela. Death — in the form of a big wave — snatches her off her feet. "No breath. A drowning child, a bird dropped from the sky." Back to the beginning: parturition on a winter's night, the tiny silver hare dangling from the hood of her pram... When the wave takes her this time, a gentle bystander (happily present on the beach with easel and watercolors) ruins his boots by wading in and scooping her to safety. But four years after that, in November 1918, she is carried off by influenza. "One breath, that was all she needed, but it wouldn't come."
Outliving these layered suffocations one by one, starting over and starting over, Ursula begins to retain impressions of her former lives. It's not Orlando-esque reincarnation, nor is it the black joke of Groundhog Day, but some kind experiment in possibility. In one life a bundling seduction turns into a rape, and then an abortion; in another life the same seducer-rapist is cheerfully rebuffed, leaving no mark on the story. The lethal dose of influenza, meanwhile, was delivered by Bridget, a servant, who picked it up while celebrating the Armistice in London. So, on her next go-around, eight-year-old Ursula contrives to prevent Bridget from going to London at all. How? Why, by pushing her downstairs. Her worried family take her to a psychiatrist, a tolerant, and pipe-chewing New Ager by the name of Dr. Kellet. He tells her about Nietzsche and the ouroboros. But he doesn't solve the mystery, and nor does Ursula — she simply lives it, with a little more premonitory know-how each time. To the point where, having observed the currents of history as they flow (have flowed, will flow) around her and her family, she comes to the conclusion that it might be quite a good idea to kill Adolf Hitler. There. Now you have to read it.
Ursula is born into Edwardian privilege, her spiral of lives embedded in a world of cooks and groundskeepers and runaway aunts and suitable and unsuitable men and Lawrentian yearnings for farmhands, etc. — all of which means that many readers of Life After Life will unavoidably be experiencing it through the interpretive grid of PBS's absurd Downton Abbey. This may not be an entirely bad thing: smatteringly and soapily educated by Downton as to the issues facing British society between (and during) the wars, we can here deepen our understanding, courtesy of Atkinson's gift for historical mood and her eerie deftness at characterization. Hugh Todd, for example, Ursula's father, is a kind, dutiful and self-effacing Englishman — a complete nonentity, in other words, who nevertheless flares fully into personhood at the tip of Atkinson's pen. A line here, a look there, a small scene from his marriage: the heart of this long- suffering man seems to irradiate the narrative.
The Atkinson style is a marvel: loose, open, visceral, idiomatic, full of foreshadowings and reverse echoes, and with a steady pulse of poetry. Her plotting may be as zany and compacted as an episode of Doctor Who, but she writes like someone to whom Palgrave's Golden Treasury has been mother's milk. Poetry in quotation (Keats, Donne) spangles Life After Life, and from time to time the book actually steps inside a poem — T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land spectrally envelops the text at two points. First, as a 1923-model Ursula and her aunt Izzie encounter a march of unemployed men on Westminster Bridge ("A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many...") and then again three years later, as a pregnant Ursula — pregnant with the rapist's child — contemplates throwing herself into the Thames and drifting "gently on the tide, past Wapping and Rotherhithe and Greenwich and on to Tilbury and out to sea." ("Down Greenwich Reach past the Isle of Dogs," croons the bard Eliot, in his mourning song.) I make this point not, I hope, to show that I know my Eliot but to show that Kate Atkinson, popular novelist, is sitting somehow at the wellsprings of the English imagination.
James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press), and a correspondent for The Atlantic.
Reviewer: James Parker
A Conversation with Kate Atkinson, Author of Life After Life
Interview by Tess Taylor
This book traces the life of Ursula Todd, a woman who lives many times. But each time she lives, her life begins in 1910. What drew you to this time period? What about this particular generation seemed remarkable to you?
I don't think I started by thinking in terms of this generation being remarkable particularly, although I thought that more as I went on and read more about the war. I think they were very stoical in a way that perhaps we are not, they just got on with things, which was a pretty handy trait to have to get you through a war. I had never intended to write so much about the period before the war but then I got caught up in the atmosphere and the language and exploring how Ursula - and the rest of the Todds - came to be how they were. They might have flourished during the WWII but they were forged in the crucible of the 'Great War' and the years after.
As I just mentioned, Ursula lives many times. But unlike the way most people often think of reincarnation, Ursula lives her life as Ursula over and over, with the same family in the same house. What drew you to this version of living again?
I was trying to avoid 'reincarnation' it didn't feel right and I've always been attracted by the 'Groundhog Day' structure (for want of a better reference - but it's a good reference) and I used it to an extent in Human Croquet but always wanted to explore it more. I had thought to write a novel called 'Parallel Lives' (I still might) but I was surprised when I suddenly realised as I began to write that this was the right structure for this book.
As you decided the points in Ursula's life when the narrative would fork, did you have rules for yourself around what could or could not happen? How did you decide which events would be most significant?
No, I didn't have rules, only that she would improve in her understanding and knowledge and 'come into' her heroism. I always knew the book was working towards the Blitz as the fulcrum and Teddy's death would be the thing that changes everything for her.
Without giving the plot away too much, it's worth noting that in some ways Ursula lives radically divergent lives, but in other ways many characters and even events stay the same. How did you imagine narrative coherence across lifetimes?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'imagine' narrative coherence, it's more a case of wrestling with structure. I can hold a book very clearly in my mind, where everyone is, what's happening, so it's just a case of moving forward with it and instinctively adding those threads and echoes and whispers that tie everything together.
I couldn't help but notice that there were animal figurations that wove through the story: Ursula means bear, and there are also many rabbits, foxes and even wolves that show up at key points in her many lives. What drew you to these figures? What did you most hope to explore with them?
I don't think I was hoping or exploring anything with them. The fox is obviously important, Tod or Todd is an old English name for fox and Fuchs, Ursula's married name in German means fox. The fox is rather like a spirit animal for Ursula and Sylvie, Teddy to some extent. I always have a lot of animals and birds in my books, millions of dogs, I think they're as important as people in some ways.
At Barnes & Noble, we like to ask writers to give us some recommendations. What new authors have you discovered lately? Which books are moving you?
I've enjoyed The Fields and The Silent Wife but it takes a lot to move me. And let's add Telegraph Avenue and Billy Lynn's Long Half Time Walk to the list of recent recommendations.
When I first read the synopsis of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, I immediately wondered how Ursula Todd would come back to life. Would it be like Captain Jack Harkness in the television series Torchwood, where moments after death she'd revive with a huge gasp for air? Would it be more like the movie Groundhog Day, with all the frustration that came with not being able to escape the loop? Would she be aware of what was happening? Would other people be aware of it happening to her? No matter how many possibilities I envisioned, I was still surprised by the way Kate Atkinson crafted this plot point. It is handled with ingenuity and originality; never cheesy, never trite. I'm purposely being vague here, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone. But I think every time I feel déjà vu in the future, I'll be reminded of this novel...
Much of the story took place in London during the bombings (the "Blitz") of WWII. These pages were terrifying and heart-wrenching. I would start to feel overwhelmed and think, "Is this ever going to stop?" I'd want to put the book down for a while, and then feel guilty. I'd been reading over the course of only two days, and could take a break whenever I wanted. London had 57 nights in a row of bombings. Atkinson gives readers an incredibly vivid portrayal of war, a poignant and multifaceted look at its enormity and how distressing - and wearying - it is for all involved.
Life After Life is beautifully written and reads like a classic. Wonderfully complex, it's a story you could read over and over and always make new connections.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.
31 out of 35 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Shudro
Posted Tue Apr 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I received an ARC of Kate Atkinson's latest book and was not disappointed! Kate wields Ursula's life and her various possibilities like a kaleidoscope; with one simple twist the results are so beautifully different and complex.
From the publisher, "On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization."
Facing the unknown, reincarnation and ownership for our actions or passivity is a fascinating backdrop to this wildly powerful tale that courses through different time periods in England and Europe's 20th century. It was so easy to be caught up in Ursula's many lives; I got the same rush of excitement and anticipation as I did when reading the "Choose Your Own Adventure” book series in the 80’s as a young girl! I highly recommend “Life After Life”, as it was thoroughly engaging and engrossing – which is the marking of a phenomenal book!
18 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
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“There is a fine line between living and dying,” a character observes in Kate Atkinson’s new novel. And it does certainly seem to be the case here, in the midst of two world wars, during the Great Influenza, at the beginning of the twentieth century in Britain. Characters come close to death, and some do not escape it: alternate histories are woven together until we are not really sure what is true. And this is the message. “History is all about ‘what ifs’” a character says late in the novel. More to the point here, perhaps, is that fiction, and this fiction in particular, is all about ‘what ifs’.
This is my first experience with what I would call a literary mash-up. Mash-up is a relatively new concept in literature that was borrowed from music where two or more songs are combined, usually by laying the vocal track of one song over the instrumental track of another. Wikipedia defines a literary mash up as taking a pre-existing work of fiction, often a classic, and combining perhaps thirty or forty percent of it with a vampire, werewolf, or horror genre. Atkinson has taken “classic history,” which is the Führer’s horror story, and overlaid many possible stories (love stories, family histories, employment possibilities) so that outcomes in some cases are different for individuals, but not, that we can see, in the larger history.
Stories cascade upon one another, all centered around a single family, indeed, a single person, Ursula, who we meet in the first chapter and who succeeds, we think at first, in killing the Führer.
“Don’t you wonder sometimes, “ Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don’t know, say a Quaker household—surely things would be different.”
The juxtaposition of the chapters makes one remember those times when we stare into the unknowingness of the future and wonder what it will hold for us…and once there, looking back at the innocence of the early years, when we proceeded with our lives as though we had any control at all. Which brings me to a larger observation in this novel and in Atkinson’s fiction in general: oftentimes Atkinson’s characters are not agents of change, but reagents, possibly causing a chain reaction when they are introduced, possibly having no discernible impact at all.
“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously making history for the future.”
Sometimes there are exceptional people, but even they cannot escape that possibility that “one thing” could change everything. Therein lie our power, and the power of the fiction writer.
The title, Life After Life, points to those lives impacted by another’s life, or a close escape from death, or lives that continue after another has died, or simply the alternate histories we all might have if “one thing had been different.”
When the book and the stories were drawing to a close, I admit I didn’t want to get to the end. I didn’t want another person to die unexpectedly. I didn’t want Ursula to grow older. I didn’t want to know which story was true. So, you see, I was caught, too.
12 out of 15 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Sat Apr 06 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Long, boring, and depressing. You'd think after so many pages (and lives) she'd get at least one right. I want the time I spent of my life on this book back.
8 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Wed Apr 03 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I am sorry that I purchased this book
8 out of 39 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Tue Apr 02 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Got cheaper on amazon
7 out of 53 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Apr 13 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I was a big fan of this author BUT this book is a waste of time and money. VERY DISAPPOINTED
5 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.katsy315
Posted Wed Apr 17 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Don't give up on this book. It is very confusing for at least the first third. But it is captivating and you just become fascinated by the lives in it. I'm still not sure what it's all about but may reread it again soon to take it all in again. I don't know how Kate Atkinson thought of an idea for this book.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sat Apr 06 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I thought that the story was something I have been thou, but no one would beleave me , well enough of me the book if I had to rate what read already , it's A 10, why I say this ,
is I beleave that what is and what was is today ,and this should be A movie , life after life is very true , and really would make A gold star movie ,
3 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Wed Apr 24 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Imagine plodding through a Christmas card from a distant relative or friend with a 2 page insert of all the mundane things that have been happening in the life of their family. Now imagine over 400 pages of this and the family is not even real – it’s fictional. That’s what this book reads like. The premise is great – the execution of it is another matter entirely. Each chapter is filled with mundane details of the routine activities of daily living of the protagonist and her family – kids playing in the yard, people eating, blah, blah, blah. You have to get to the last paragraph of each chapter before anything interesting happens, and that is the part where Ursula dies. It would have been nice if she could have spared us the agony and just stayed dead in the first paragraph of the book and end it there. As it is, you find yourself reading because of the interesting premise of the story, only to be continually frustrated as the Christmas card tabulation never seems to end. I have to confess, I value my time and was not going to get snookered into wasting anymore of it than I had to, so I gave up after 50 or so pages. But in my opinion, if the author can’t say something interesting by this point, then he has failed the reader, and with so many books to be read out there, the reader should move on to the next one. I could have saved some time and money by paying more attention to some of the negative reviews. They were spot on. Unless you’re a big fan of Christmas cards, save yourself the trouble and find another book. This one is a snoozer.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Tue Apr 23 00:00:00 EDT 2013
It was long and boring. I did not connect with any of the characters and couldn't wait for the end. I actually put the book down around page 350 and have no intention of finishing it.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Wed Apr 17 00:00:00 EDT 2013
This is by far one of the most entertaining and intriguing novels I have ever read. I will not try to describe it as it truly defies description. If I had to sum it up in a sentence I would say: A marvelous morality tale of what ifs and what could bes. Ursula, the main character, has a chronic case of deja vu. With it, she gets a do over when she needs it. This way, everyone gets a happy ending. A totally charming novel, I found it difficult to put down. …LEB…
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.MollysMomFL
Posted Thu Apr 11 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I've always believed in reincarnation so this book looked exciting at first glance...I'm at page 163 and it's like a durge trying to get thru to something interesting. Maybe I'm missing something here...I don't find it complex, just simple and boring...author will probably throw in a rape pretty soon and maybe Ursula won't even know what happened...go figure!
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Mon Apr 08 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Very disappointing. I agree with whoever wrote that they would like the time back that they spent reading this book.
As for the Overview that states, "breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions", I question whether we read
the same book.
2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Fri Apr 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I was not real impressed with this book. It was hard to keep track of the characters. First they were alive and in the next chapter they were gone. It was hard to keep up with the plot of the book.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Fri Apr 26 00:00:00 EDT 2013
The beautiful and lyrical writing took me through, and was the strength of this novel. The continual 'rebirths' became monotonous.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Sun Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2013
I tend to be skeptical of books that have a big fuss made about them, finding them either too “artsy” or too “James Patterson-ish” -not literary at all. But Life After Life far exceeded my expectations. It was well-written with a great sense of atmosphere, a believable but likeable protagonist, and a great sense of time and place. The main character, Sophie, is born again and again throughout the novel on a chilly evening in February 1910. Each lifetime a circumstance changes sending Ursula and her family’s future on a different trajectory. What if we get to live again and again until we get our life right? Highly recommended for fans of historical and literary fiction!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
This was a selection for our book club, and I have to say it isn't one I would have picked myself, nor would I read it again. The premise is very intriguing and the history and writing are well done. The explanation of the "deja vu" and how Ursula moves past a previous obstacle each time she starts over were very well done. However, about halfway through, the story just became mundane, and while a lot of it lended to the history of the time period Ursula lived in, I felt that the more important parts of the plot were lost in boring daily detail. It also became a little jumbled at the end, and i'm not quite sure i really understand what happened or why it happened in the end after all. If you just want ot give something different a try, a chance to read outside the box, give it a shot. But dont expect a riveting story.
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Posted Wed May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Loved it!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Tue Apr 30 00:00:00 EDT 2013
Phew! Was I glad that book finally ended. It is one of the most tedious books I've ever read. Utterly exhausting. Barely got through it. Wish I would have stopped several pages in like some of these other readers.
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Overview
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on ...