Life After Life – a novel by Kate Atkinson
What if your mother sent you to a psychiatrist, to help with your recurring sensations of deja vu, and he turned out to be a Buddhist who supported your vague sensations of reincarnation?
And what if you began using those vague sensations to do disturbing things, like push your family’s maid down the stairs on the original Armistice Day, so she wouldn’t go to London with her boyfriend to celebrate, pick up the Spanish Flu, return home, give it to you, causing another in your long list of childhood deaths?
You make it all the way to the ‘30s, but then find yourself variously in Germany or London during war, and suffer through a life after life of bombs blasted by the other side, all causing … Darkness, over and over.
Kate Atkinson uses this conceit to explore in haunting scenes several seemingly unconnected vistas. She has conjured a pastoral painting of life in the English countryside just before, during, and after the Great War, a time when comfortable families still had a live-in servant or two, the fields weren’t filled with suburbs, yet children still faced risk from horrors we have now forgotten.
Ursula Todd is Atkinson’s heroine, growing up in a family of five with a gentle, perpetually bemused father, and a mother who sees raising children as the highest calling to whom a women of culture, education, and means can aspire. Ursula naturally rebels a bit, feeling that the strictures which limit her to few choices – wife or teacher or secretary – don’t really apply to her. Her mother, Sylvie, certainly plays favorites amongst her brood, and Ursula is not one of them. Placed smack in the middle, Ursula contends with her eldest brother, Maurice, destined to be a high placed cog in the English war machine. When she’s five, he throws her doll on the roof, causing one of Ursula’s several accidental demises before the flu trips her up. Pamela, her older sister, is the sensible one of the bunch, most clearly following her mother’s lead, and offering needed perspective on the evils of the Brownshirts when Ursula finds herself tethered to Germany after the Nazis rise to power. Teddy is Sylvie’s favorite, and probably Ursula’s as well, a lad who easily wins friends but never seems concerned about influencing people. And Jimmy, the youngest, seems an afterthought, both to the Todds and to Atkinson.
This family grouping, along with the opportunity to experiment with multiple time lines, provides a background to explore the evolution of feminist aspirations during the first half of the twentieth century. Ursula bobs her hair, learns how to stand up against entitled young men, and even seeks to change the course of history.
But the war scenes in Life After Life might have the starkest impact. London in the Blitz, a starving Berlin in April 1945 – neither was a place Ursula could easily to escape alive. During the Blitz, she serves on a team responding to the sites of recent bombing. She becomes inured to death and dismemberment: “…she would be in the middle of these awful scenes and she would find that she had drifted off to pleasant moments in the past. Little slivers of light in the darkness.” In Berlin, she ultimately sees no way out, and provides small terminal comfort to her daughter, then a strychnine capsule for them both: “She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.”
After this, she becomes more consciously determined to bend her fate towards specific ends, avoiding the pitfalls which are increasingly clear to her. “ ‘Time isn’t circular’, she said to Dr. Kellet. ‘It’s like a … palimpsest ’ … ‘And memories are sometimes in the future.”
With this realization, she can finally live the life she was meant to. Some tragedies avoided, others painful still, no matter what she does.
Life After Life, despite its less than linear structure, is not a difficult read. Rather, it is a continuing source of wonder. Atkinson’s surprising breadth of words (eg, “…the picalilil was the lurid color of jaundice”, an observation made when Ursula is one day old), along with her commitment to truthful, well rounded characters and coherent stories swept me along faster and faster, never really knowing where I was going, but glad to be along for the ride.