Book Report: Life after Life

14. Kate Atkinson, Life after Life (2013) (8/5/19)

I bought this book in Toulouse, for the long flight home (a toss-up with Fight Club). In the end, though, I found myself glued to the screen in front of me, binge-watching The Wire, with a dessert of Casablanca. Sometimes reading is just too much work.

But I'd gotten a slight start in the airport, and it was enough to intrigue me as the main character, Ursula, is born on page 21, and again on page 25, then on 49, and 113, and 129—and a few more times over the novel's 611 pages and 30 sections (several of which comprise multiple time-stamped chapters). In between all these births, she gets killed off: at birth, a few years later by drowning, by falling out a window, by influenza (over and over and over, until finally she sees a way free), during the London blitz—etc.: Atkinson's quiver is full of interesting ways to do a person in by natural causes.

But the births and deaths aren't the point, so much as the life/lives lived in between, as Ursula unconsciously, subconsciously, accrues déjà vu moments of wisdom, which occasionally allow her to act in ways she doesn't entirely understand but that have real, positive consequences.

As Atkinson explains in an author's note, if the book is "about" anything, it's about being English and also about what we are in our own imaginations. It is also an act of "bearing witness to the past," since much of the story, which begins in 1910, takes place during WWII, in both England, during the blitz, and Germany, in the company of Eva Braun and Hitler himself. It's a historical novel, but more than that, it is a novel of imaginings: imagined futures, imagined possibilities.

And Atkinson is a wonderful writer—playful, funny, a skillful weaver-together of disparate times, scenes, characters, details. Here's one sample, from Ursula's seventh or eighth life (post-influenza), when her mother, Sylvie, sends her to see a psychiatrist:

"Reincarnation," Dr Kellet had said to her. "Have you heard of that?" Ursula, aged ten, shook her head. She had heard of very little. Dr Kellet had a nice set of rooms in Harley Street. The one that he showed Ursula into was half panelled in mellow oak, with a thick carpet figured in red and blue on the floor and two large leather armchairs either side of a well-stoked coal fire. Dr Kellet himself wore a three-piece Harris tweed suit strung with a large gold fob watch. He smelt of cloves and pipe tobacco and had a twinkly look about him as if he were going to toast muffins or read a particularly good story to her, but instead he beamed at Ursula and said, "So, I hear you tried to kill your maid?" (Oh, that's why I'm here, Ursula thought.)
  . . . He had trained in Vienna ("where else?") but trod, he said, his own path. He was no one's disciple, he said, although he had studied "at the feet of all the teachers. One must nose forward," he said. "Nudge one's way through the chaos of our thoughts. Unite the divided self." Ursula had no idea what he was talking about.
 "The maid? You pushed her down the stairs?" It seemed a very direct question for someone who talked about nosing and nudging.
 "It was an accident." She didn't think of Bridget as "the maid," she thought of her as Bridget. And it was ages ago now.
 "Your mother is worried about you."
 "I just want you to be happy, darling," Sylvie said after she had made the appointment with Dr Kellet.
 "Aren't I happy?" Ursula puzzled.
 "What do you think?"
 Ursula didn't know. She wasn't sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever-present and yet almost impossible to pin down.
 "As if there is another world?" Dr Kellet said.
 "Yes. But it's this one as well."
 ("I know she says the oddest things, but a psychiatrist?" Hugh [Ursula's father] said to Sylvie. He frowned. "She's only small. She's not defective."
 "Of course not. She just needs a little fixing.")

About three-quarters of the way through the book I confess I wasn't sure I was enjoying not knowing quite where the book was headed. By then, I thought, I should have at least had an idea. But the finish proved quite satisfying, so I forgive the author for frustrating her readers.