A Review of Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life”
Darkness Falls …
Some time ago, I wrote a review of Kate Atkinson’s World War II novel Transcription (which I wasn’t particularly enamoured with) and wrote that the book was so tepid that I was going to put off reading another of Atkinson’s novels, Life After Life. That volume had gotten much more resounding good praise from critics and, as a result, had found its way onto my Kindle based on the uniformity of the critical consensus it received. It turns out that that statement struck a chord with some of my readers and I must have received a good five or six e-mails from strangers imploring me that I absolutely must read Life After Life. Well, it took me a great deal of time, but I finally got around to reading the book and agree that it is a much better read — surprisingly so, because Life After Life is partially set during World War II and one must wonder why Atkinson revisited the setting in Transcription when Life After Life seems to put a period on the end of all writing about that war.
In any event, Life After Life centers on the life of British woman Ursula Todd, born in 1910, and charts her life well into her 50s — through the First World War, through the Spanish Influence outbreak (how timely), through the Great Depression and through the Second World War. However, there’s a twist. The novel supposes that Ursula died at certain points in her life — during childbirth, during a visit to the oceanside, during the Spanish Influenza outbreak, and so on — and has been reincarnated multiple times in order to live her life out without perishing, at least until old age rightfully claims her. Life After Life is basically the British version of Groundhog Day in book form, except that it plays out over the course of many decades rather than a single day lived over and over again. Right now, I can hear my mom in the background saying, “There goes my son, reviewing science-fiction books again.” However, I can say that Life After Life is less science fiction and more literary, as it is a work of ambition. (Not that science fiction novels aren’t sometimes ambitious. Maybe I should be silent, now. I’ve revealed my biases.)
The novel is an interesting one, as I recently was part of a videoconferencing call at work where someone brought up the notion — for whatever reason — that the worst time to have been born was right before the First World War, simply because you would live through so many global tragedies. Life After Life bears this out. Life is downright dangerous for little Ursula, and it takes many different iterations of her life lived and different life choices to be made to find a way to circumnavigate through them. However, Life After Life is also a character novel — one that gradually fills in the blanks of the particularities of Ursula’s family life as she goes on to relive and revisit her life again and again. I know that Michael Ondaatje once said that masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Life After Life is no different. If you had no idea what this book was about until you opened the cover, you would have to read for quite a bit before it might dawn on you what this novel was going on about.
With time, I’ve generally forgotten what my grievances about Transcription were (and I generally don’t re-read my reviews once I’ve filed them). However, I can say that — despite a few boring lulls where the writer perhaps fills in one detail too many — Life After Life is the superior novel. I don’t know if a more harrowing account of life during the London Blitz has been written, and I’ve read Connie Willis’ Blackout (which is science fiction) and Life After Life makes Blackout (and, presumably, its sequel All Clear) seem like a walk in the park in comparison. For instance, in Life After Life, Ursula sees a dress hanging on a hanger in a bombed-out apartment building, only to realize that the head and legs have been blown off and a woman’s arms remain attached to the dress. It’s the little details such as that one that makes Life After Life such a harrowing, yet important read. Life After Life is about a lot of things, but, in the section that deals with World War II, it is a particularly damning account of the horrors of war as experienced on the home front.
All in all, I quite liked Life After Life, though I did think it perhaps went on a smidge too long, and perhaps an iteration or two of Ursula’s many lives could be shortened. There’s a fair amount of bloat in this novel — again, to color in some of the gaps (which may or may not be unnecessary to fill in) — and the book could have been guided by the hands of a good editor. I’ll also caution adventurous readers that Life After Life does take some time to warm up to, especially if you’re not so familiar with the premise. Much of the first part of the book deals with Ursula’s attempts to survive childbirth and childhood, and she doesn’t become much of an interesting character until she starts to mature and grow up. However, in the meantime, the book is an examination of the dying days of the class system in Britain and the Isles’ diminishment from being an empire into something a little less so. Thus, there are all sorts of things you can read into Life After Life, which makes it a fairly absorbing, yet sprawling, novel. In the end, I’m glad that I finally got around to reading this work and finding out that Transcription was something of an aberration from Atkinson’s usual quality of writing. I’m sorry that it took so long, but at least readers of this blog now have something else to write to me about now that I’ve tackled the mountain peak that is Life After Life.
Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life was published by Reagan Arthur Books on April 2, 2013.
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You may also be interested in the following review: Kate Atkinson’s Transcription.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
