Book Review: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life (2013)

2.5 Stars out of 5

Kate Atkinson

Who hasn’t spent some time daydreaming about how history might change if only Hitler (or fill in historical villain of choice) had not reach the Chancellorship of Germany? It is perhaps a pleasurable experience for daydreamers and writers of speculative fiction, but in the end doesn’t really add up to much. Kate Atkinson has taken this motif and blended it with a Buddhists’ eye towards the cyclic nature to life. Unfortunately, like a daydreamer, her overly long book on the subject also does not add up to much.

Atkinson spins a long series of tales on the lives of Ursula Todd. She is an English girl baby/child/adolescent/young woman/mother/assassin. She is all of these things not because she lives each stage of her life in a linear fashion likes the rest of us (birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, aged, death), but because once she dies, she is reborn as the same baby each time. And each time she has the opportunity to live her life somewhat differently than the time(s) she did before. She has only the vaguest of memories from her previous trips around the cycle of life, and so there is close to zero learning going on. She can’t for example decide in a subsequent life to choose a different door like the lady in the Lady and the Tiger tale, and thus not choose the door that conceals the tiger. She might well have some cloudy idea that the door on the left is scarier than the door in the middle, but no understanding as to why; such as failure to learn causes serious complications to the plot structure of the novel.

Instead Atkinson has chosen to explore in depth through Ursula’s various lives what life in the countryside of early to mid-twentieth century England was like. Her descriptions of a bucolic life prior to WWII for the relatively wealthy Todd family are only modestly interesting, though they seem to be key comparative aspects to the story Atkinson really wants to tell. And that story is the one of life during wartime, the life for the civilians of London living under the German blitz. To her credit, she also explores via one of Ursula’s lives the life for the German civilians in Berlin during the final days of the war where the dreadful experiences of the English in the first part of the war are now visited in even more dreadful fashion upon the lives of the German citizenry. In terms of content, the best part of “Life After Life” is the brutal depiction of the suffering experienced by the average non-soldier in both countries. It may not be instructive on a deep level about human understanding and misery, but it certainly has an impact on the reader.

Ursula is born one snowy night in 1910 to her mother Sylvie. Sometimes Ursula dies at birth, sometimes her mother intervenes to save her, sometimes a doctor. The midwife that was to be there is held up by the storm, and spends each of Ursula’s lives drinking in a pub far from Ursula’s birthplace and home, Fox Corner. Ursula grows to childhood, and sometimes she dies in the ocean or by some other mischance. Sometimes Ursula grows to sixteen only to be diverted down paths leading to rape, childbirth and a life lost to such consequences, or in other lives she meets and falls in love with caring men who help her reach her later years. Sometimes she is saved after a fashion by her wild-at-heart Aunt Izzie (a stark counterweight to her mother, snobbish, self-centered Sylvie). Most of the book describes her lives during WWII when she either lives in London during the Blitz or in Berlin during its eventual destruction. Sometimes she is dying during a German bombardment, while other times she is busy saving the people in the very same bombed building she died during a previous life. All of these lives eventually provide sufficient learning, no matter how vague or cloudy such that at some point in all these trips around the circle of her curious life, she learns to plot to kill Hitler. She has her chance; she takes it; and what?

Yes, Atkinson is very skilled at telling a story in a fashion that is so fractured, she herself has described it a fractal. I would rush to agree with her. It is a complex picture she has created. It is not complex due to its content; it is complex in the manner of looking out a frost covered window at some simple scene in your backyard. The crystalline ice molecules refract and break up the image coming from the backyard. You as the viewer can see the image, not clearly but with an appreciation of the distorted beauty of the simple scene. Atkinson has a more important and complex tale to tell: war-induced misery in contrast to the gentle lives lived during peacetime. This is a good theme, but a story so lacking in plot, also nearly completely lacking in genuine character development that it leaves the reader with little more than the opportunity to enjoy the fractal view of their backyard. It’s pretty, but so what? I readily agree with other critics that to do what Atkinson has done with respect to telling a story in such a fashion requires great skill and verve. But the skillful telling of a story is not enough for me, the story must needs (to quote Sylvie) have content of some value, too.

If you like to read short vignettes of people’s lives as they experience the various possible experiences during peacetime or wartime, then perhaps this book is for you. It is artfully written with such a literary objective in mind. However, if you would like to explore the philosophical concept of a life re-lived, or the emotional consequences of certain paths taken in life that in hindsight provide an opportunity to learn, then this is not your book. I cannot understand the idea of randomly living the various paths that any life might take without the opportunity for anyone, the fictional, magical character living these lives (or the reader vicariously living them) to learn anything. Without plot or character development, the reader is left with short, seemingly pointless scenes that truly lead nowhere. A skillfully constructed novel in terms of creating the various pieces of the oft-mentioned fractal that build a picture of life in wartime, but no deeper meaning than that of a single picture from a battlefield. It can have an impact, just like photograph of a car accident, but in this book's case, there is so very little to be learned or felt.