Review of Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Difficult to rate this one - somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.

I now know why so many people love this book. It's a puzzle book, with a wrap-around plot structure. The focus is not on character, but on theme or a philosophical point of view demonstrated through a specific narrative structure and writing style. My difficulty with the book is I felt too much of the action happened off the page or was summarized. And characters were often underdeveloped or developed in such a way that it was difficult for me to care about them or emotionally relate to them in any way. In short, I did not care if they lived or died. And part of the reason for that was the narrative structure - in which you knew they couldn't really die.

Also, the narrative plays with your head a bit, or it played with mine. It all hinges on Ursula, the protagonist. When she dies, the narrative reboots. And it begins and ends with Ursula's birth - which is basically the snake eating its own tail, or the idea that everything circles in on itself indefinitely.
Actually that's not completely true. It begins and ends with three events. Snow. Ursula trying to kill Hitler and her birth, or rather the circumstances around it. On the day she's born - the midwife is held up at an inn during a snow storm and can't get there in time to deliver the child. Her father is busy bringing his sister back from France. And her mother Sylvie is alone in the house with her maid.

The first go around, Ursula dies, chocked to death on the umbilical cord. It reboots. Sylvie pulls out her sewing scissors and cuts the chord. Ursula lives. Well until she drowns. It reboots. And so on and so forth. Ursula dies in various ways. In her youth, by drowning, influenza or The Spainish Flu, which also kills her brother, the maid, and her sister. That is until she figures out a way to keep the maid from going to London, where the maid contracted it. In her adulthood, she is beaten to death once, and dies in a bombing three times. (She also died of the flu three times). There's a definitive pattern to the narrative - and to how Urusla dies and why.

Ursula herself is not that interesting. A sort of bland everywoman. In the first iteration, she is rather passive or reactive in her responses, the next go-around more aggressive, the next a bit more laid back. The characters around Ursula barely register. It's not really until the last 50 some pages that we get much of Teddy, Hugh, Bridget or Sylvie's points of view. Up until then we're basically stuck with Ursula, who is rather self-absorbed and doesn't appear to care all that much about things. Oh, she loves her brother, and to a degree her father and sister Pamela. But it feels remote somehow.

Romances happen off the page. Love happens off the page. While we get pages and pages of in depth description on the Bombings, the chatty dinner conversations, and the meaning of life and death. At times, the book feels like a philosophical discourse reminding me a bit of Sophie's World. It is not a book that is overly concerned with character.

The style is a sort of unemotional stream of consciousness via a third person close perspective. We do jump into other points of view, but not until the end. Which may or may not be jarring for the less savvy reader. Well that and the narrative structure - which I'm guessing can throw quite a few people off. The book is often told out of sequence, the narrative jumps around in time, often within the same paragraph, and it deliberately repeats itself in places. I didn't find it requiring all that much attention or concentration, outside of being certain to pick up the narrative clues as to when we were in time and when it rebooted and why.

As a writer, I found the concept of rebooting the story every time the writer wrote themselves into a hole, intriguing. The concept of trying various story threads. Which most writers, I think, or at least I do, in my head. I play out various scenarios. Okay, that scenario didn't work, let's try this. It's why novels are often tighter and better written than say a television show or a comic serial, because the novel has been revised multiple times - it's not the first draft. You can revisit it again and again until you get it right. While say a tv show - you have about two-three hours to get that first draft out, it is rewritten, then filmed, edited, and it's fast, and that's the first chapter, and you really don't know what chapter 2-18 is going to be. In a novel, you know and can go back and fix chapters 2-20 to make sure they fit chapter 1. Life After Life in a way reminded me of that feeling of telling a story, and thinking, wait, this doesn't work...I'll scrap that idea and go with this. Which if you think about it is a metaphor for life, wouldn't it be nice to think -- whoa that didn't work. I'm going to die and relive the whole thing until I get it right.

Only one problem with that, Ursula isn't the only person affecting events. This story is told in her pov, so we only read what she knows. And all people have tendency to think they are the leads in their own drama, when in reality everyone is merely supporting players in the drama at large and there aren't any leads. But in a story, we often see it as just that person's narrative - with all the characters supporting it and affected, their own ideas, etc, meaning little outside of that person's narrative. Ursula dies, everyone repeats. Ursula doesn't go home a certain way -- her friend dies.

That's the conceit up until the last 50 pages, when suddenly we are in Hugh's point of view. The father.
And Hugh shows us what was going on with Izzy, his sister, and what really happened to Izzy's child, something Ursula has forgotten. We also go inside Teddy's point of view, and in this iteration, Teddy doesn't die, and Ursula had little to do with it.

Her actions and attitude towards her life does have major consequences on it and on those around her, but it is not the sole variable or constant.

The reason I struggled with the book - was I didn't like Ursula, okay like is the wrong word. I didn't find her compelling. Nor her family. Or relateable. Which is an entirely subjective take. For me, Ursula's story was rather dull. And I found myself more interested in the characters surrounding her, which were barely developed. The writing style was also, at least to me, repetitive. I skimmed whole sections, bored out of my mind. Lots and lots of meaningless small talk, chatter, and filler. I wanted to cut about 200 pages of it.

The sections on the bombings - were quite well done, and rarely done in fiction. But the writer went on to long and didn't trust her reader. She felt the need to hammer points home. This is offset slightly by some rather brilliant passages on death, dying, and the futility of War. But I think the writer needed a better editor. (But then don't we all?)

Overall, an interesting read, and an interesting book. Reading it reminded me why book clubs can be quite useful. They can force you to give a book a chance that you might not have on your own. If I'd been left to my devices, I'd have given up on this novel halfway through (it kept putting me to sleep on the train), but I'm glad that I read it. Because it had some fascinating ideas and an interesting narrative structure. A perfect book to discuss in a book club or with anyone for that matter.