Review by New York Times Review
"AFTER the first death, there is no other," Dylan Thomas wrote. How obvious, one might think. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson's new novel, "Life After Life." Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. She dies when she is being born, on a snowy night in 1910. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and contracts influenza. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. She is killed during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. Each time Ursula dies, Atkinson - a British writer best known here as the author of "Case Histories," the first in a series of highly entertaining mysteries featuring the sleuth Jackson Brodie -resurrects her and sets her on one of the many alternate courses that her destiny might have taken. A great deal of experience, and 20th-century history, transpires in the intervals separating Ursula's sudden and often violent exits from the world of the living. The novel begins with a scene in which she assassinates Hitler. Her serial and parallel existences take her through two brutal world wars and well into the 1960s. But each turn in her story is, like the end(s) of her life, subject to revision. As a teenager living at Fox Corner, her family home in the British countryside, she is raped and becomes pregnant, but in another version the encounter with her American attacker involves little more than a stolen kiss. A bullying first marriage is endured, and its ensuing tragedy wiped clean from the slate. Romances begin and end, then begin again, taking different trajectories. Ursula learns about her father's death in a letter she receives in Germany, where she has been trapped by the outbreak of World War II, and where she befriends Eva Braun and visits the Führer at his mountaintop retreat. But in a different rendition, she is in England when her father succumbs to a heart attack, and with her family for his funeral. A murdered child turns out not to be dead. Or is she? A dog named Lucky makes cameo appearances that the reader can't help seeing through the scrim of the transient but critical roles that the dog has already played in the plot. The mostly brief chapters, dated by month and year, keep us oriented amid the rapid chronological shifts backward and forward. And there are several relatively still points around which the whirling machinery turns. Sylvie, Ursula's mother, remains dependably snobbish and caustic, just as Ursula's free-spirited Aunt Izzie continues to provide shelter, help and the example of nervy rebelliousness for which such aunts are created in fiction and film. In several of her lives, Ursula attends secretarial school in London and travels in Continental Europe. Atkinson's juggling a lot at once - and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing. Even so, reading the book is a mildly vertiginous experience, rather like using the "scenes" function on a DVD to scramble the film's original order. At times "Life After Life" suggests a cross between Noël Coward's "Brief Encounter" and those interactive "hypertext" novels whose computer-sawy readers can determine the direction of the story. The first few reverses are startling, but after a while it begins to seem quite normal (if still pleasantly jolting) when a character who, we think, has left the narrative forever reappears in another guise or is seen from a new perspective. And the surprise of what happens is less intense than the unexpectedness of what doesn't happen: what seemingly irreversible damage is repaired with the "delete" key. In theory, this narrative method should violate one of the most basic contracts a writer makes with the reader: the promise that what happens to the characters actually does (insofar as the author knows) happen to the characters. But it's interesting to note how quickly Atkinson's new rules replace the old ones, how assuredly she rewrites the contract: we will stay tuned as long as she keeps us interested and curious about what all this is adding up to. Each tragedy continues to surprise and disturb us, even as we learn to expect that the victim will be all right in the morning. Inevitably, metaphysics creeps in. We travel and return to the psychiatrist's office where Ursula's parents take her, at age 10, for sessions in which the conversation touches on reincarnation and the nature of time. When Dr. Kellet suggests that the moody, spacey Ursula may be remembering other lives and asks her to draw something, she produces a snake with its tail in its mouth. "It's a symbol representing the circularity of the universe," the doctor explains. "Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now." Atkinson is having fun with this, as she often seems to be in the novel, which is as much about writing as it is about anything else. So many excellent books are read and quoted by its characters that the novel could provide a useful bibliography. Here's a partial list of writers alluded to in these pages: Austen, Byron, Keats, Eliot (George and T. S.), Dante, Dickens, Donne, Marvell, D.H. Lawrence, Ibsen and Marlowe. It crosses one's mind that Ursula's marriage to the controlling and bullying Derek Oliphant, fervently at work on his textbook about the Tudors and the Plantagenets, seems familiar. Eventually, Ursula discovers that her husband's book is basically nonsense, and comes to the conclusion that fans of "Middlemarch" will already have reached. "She had married a Casaubon, she realized." Ursula takes "The Magic Mountain" with her when she goes up to the Berghof with Eva Braun, only to be informed, by a "nice" officer in the Wehrmacht, that Mann's novel is one of the books that have been banned by the Nazi Party. And one of the dark plot threads running through the weft of the novel - the disappearance of a little girl - recalls Atkinson's own "Case Histories." "LIFE AFTER LIFE" makes the reader acutely conscious of an author's power: how much the novelist can do. Kill a character, bring her back. Start a world war or prevent one. Bomb London, destroy Berlin. Write a scene from one point of view, then rewrite it from another. Try it this way, then that Make your character perish in a bombed-out building during the blitz, then make her part of the rescue team that (in a scene with the same telling details) tries unsuccessfully to save her. One of the things I like most about British mystery novels (including Kate Atkinson's) is the combination of good writing and a certain theatrical bravado. Their authors enjoy showing us how expertly they can construct a puzzle, then solve it: the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. "Life After Life" inspires a similar sort of admiration, as Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final. The heroine keeps dying, then dying again. She dies when she is born, on a snowy night in 1910. Fremerne Prose's most recent novel is "My New American Life."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 28, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In a radical departure from her Jackson Brodie mystery series, Atkinson delivers a wildly inventive novel about Ursula Todd, born in 1910 and doomed to die and be reborn over and over again. She drowns, falls off a roof, and is beaten to death by an abusive husband but is always reborn back into the same loving family, sometimes with the knowledge that allows her to escape past poor decisions, sometimes not. As Atkinson subtly delineates all the pathways a life or a country might take, she also delivers a harrowing set piece on the Blitz as Ursula, working as a warden on a rescue team, encounters horrifying tableaux encompassing mangled bodies and whole families covered in ash, preserved just like the victims of Pompeii. Alternately mournful and celebratory, deeply empathic and scathingly funny, Atkinson shows what it is like to face the horrors of war and yet still find the determination to go on, with her wholly British characters often reducing the Third Reich to a fuss. From her deeply human characters to her comical dialogue to her meticulous plotting, Atkinson is working at the very top of her game. An audacious, thought-provoking novel from one of our most talented writers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's publisher is pulling out all the stops in marketing her latest, which will no doubt draw in many new readers in addition to her Jackson Brodie fans.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Atkinson's new novel (after Started Early, Took My Dog) opens twice: first in Germany in 1930 with an English woman taking a shot at Hitler, then in England in 1910 when a baby arrives, stillborn. And then it opens again: still in 1910, still in England, but this time the baby lives. That baby is Ursula Todd, and as she grows up, she dies and lives repeatedly. Watching Atkinson bring Ursula into the world yet again initially feels like a not terribly interesting trick: we know authors have the power of life and death. But as Ursula and the century age, and war and epidemic and war come again, the fact of death, of "darkness," as Atkinson calls it, falling on cities and people-now Ursula, now someone else, now Ursula again-turns out to be central. At heart this is a war story; half the book is given over to Ursula's activities during WWII, and in its focus on the women and civilians usually overlooked or downplayed, it gives the Blitz its full measure of terror. By the end, which takes us back to that moment in 1930 and beyond, it's clear that Atkinson's not playing tricks; rather, through Ursula's many lives and the accretion of what T.S. Eliot called "visions and revisions," she's found an inventive way to make both the war's toll and the pull of alternate history, of darkness avoided or diminished, fresh. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Apr. 2) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Life after life after life: Atkinson's telling title suggests not some glorious afterworld but the structure of this remarkable novel, about an English girl born in February, 1910. In fact, Ursula is stillborn in an opening chapter but emerges a lusty babe in the next; Whitbread Award winner Atkinson (Behind the Scenes at the Museum) then hopscotches through time, circling back to offer alternate versions of Ursula's life. Did Ursula endure an unwanted pregnancy, see her brother die of influenza, enter into a sour marriage-or not? Did she survive World War II Britain or instead marry a German and face down Hitler, a gun in her hand? One brief passage shows Ursula musing with a doctor about her fugue states, but Atkinson doesn't waste time belaboring the idea, instead delivering a clear understanding that one life can take different avenues-and what a difference that can make. Atkinson works both large and small, capturing the sweep of history while perfectly rendering the dynamics of Ursula's loving, contentious family: gentle father Hugh, disappointed mother Sylvie, generous sister Pamela, and more. VERDICT Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/28/12 and Editors' Picks, LJ 2/15/13, "Editors' Spring Picks."]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
If you could travel back in time and kill Hitler, would you? Of course you would. Atkinson's (Started Early, Took My Dog, 2011, etc.) latest opens with that conceit, a hoary what-if of college dorm discussions and, for that matter, of other published yarns (including one, mutatis mutandis, by no less an eminence than George Steiner). But Atkinson isn't being lazy, not in the least: Her protagonist's encounter with der Fhrer is just one of several possible futures. Call it a more learned version of Groundhog Day, but that character can die at birth, or she can flourish and blossom; she can be wealthy, or she can be a fugitive; she can be the victim of rape, or she can choose her sexual destiny. All these possibilities arise, and all take the story in different directions, as if to say: We scarcely know ourselves, so what do we know of the lives of those who came before us, including our own parents and--in this instance--our unconventional grandmother? And all these possibilities sometimes entwine, near to the point of confusion. In one moment, for example, the conversation turns to a child who has died; reminds Ursula, our heroine, "Your daughter....She fell in the fire," an event the child's poor mother gainsays: " I only ever had Derek,' she concluded firmly." Ah, but there's the rub with alternate realities, all of which, Atkinson suggests, can be folded up into the same life so that all are equally real. Besides, it affords several opportunities to do old Adolf in, what with his "funny little flap of the hand backward so that he looked as if he were cupping his ear to hear them better" and all. Provocative, entertaining and beautifully written. It's not quite the tour de force that her Case Histories (2004) was, but this latest affords the happy sight of seeing Atkinson stretch out into speculative territory again.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
