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Life After Life
by Kate Atkinson
Winner of the Costa Novel
Award 2013.
Her first novel, Behind The
Scenes At The Museum, won
the 1995 Whitbread Book of
the Year prize.
Life After Life is the enthralling story of
the life (and death) of Ursula Todd, the
third child of a wealthy English banker
and his wife. Ursula is born at home
on a bitterly cold and snowy night in
1910. The doctor and midwife are stuck
in the snow and the umbilical cord is
wrapped around her neck. “Little lungs,
like dragonfly wings failing to inflate
in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in
the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a
thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of
an ear.” Darkness falls and Ursula dies
before she can draw her first breath.
But Ursula’s story does not end there.
That very same night she is given another
chance - born again - and this time the
doctor makes it through the snow in time
to avert tragedy and saves Ursula’s life.
Many of us have experienced the
strange psychological concept of déjà
vu; perceiving that we’ve already lived
through the present moment. For
Ursula, death is not an ending but a new
beginning and she gets the chance to live
her life again and again. She repeatedly
comes back from a series of childhood
calamities - drowning, a fall from the roof,
influenza – to right past mistakes and, in
doing so, change the direction of her life
and the lives of those around her.
Ursula is not consciously aware that she
is re-living different lives but has vague
memories which prompt her to take a
different course of action. Pushing the
family’s maid down the stairs to avoid
a greater harm leads Ursula’s horrified
mother to send her to a psychiatrist who
introduces Ursula to Nietzsche and amor
fati (love of fate).
One would imagine that reading the
same character’s life over and over again
would become tiresome but, each time
a scene is re-visited, it is described
differently, from another character’s
perspective or with more detail. I
warmed to the characters, particularly
Ursula’s younger brother Teddy, the
darling of the family, who goes off to
46
become a WW2 fighter pilot.
The book is set across both World Wars
and different reincarnations see Ursula
working as an ARP warden in London
and taking tea with Eva Braun. The
subject-matter is grim; the descriptions
of the Blitz and the devastation it causes
are utterly believable and some of the
most vivid scenes focus on the rescue
teams dragging bodies from the rubble.
One of the things I liked most about this
novel was the author’s control over the
characters’ changing destinies. In one
chapter Ursula is raped by her brother’s
friend, leading to a downward spiral of
poor decisions; in the next chapter the
encounter is nothing more than a stolen
kiss. I never knew what was coming
next and couldn’t trust what had just
happened to be true. Will Teddy’s plane
be shot down? Will Ursula marry the
violent and abusive man she meets on
the street? Will she shoot the Fuhrer
when she has the chance? I became so
addicted to seeing how Ursula’s different
decisions and experiences shaped her
family that I couldn’t put this book down.
The underlying message is clear; our
existence hangs by a thread and a
seemingly small event can change the
direction of a life completely. Sometimes
we are dealt the cruellest of blows, left
reeling by the horror of human life and
it follows that we must savour the good
times when disaster is averted and
all is well with the world. Life is full of
moments which change the direction
a person travels in and we have all
wished we could go back and change
something, or do it over again in a
different way. Life After Life explores
this theme intricately, with sympathy,
compassion and superb writing and
plotting. It was one of the best books
I read last year and I would thoroughly
recommend it.
By Gail Waller