Through Ursula, Atkinson engages one of the great counterfactual what-ifs: Could someone stop Hitler before he destroyed Europe? Ursula's experiences as an air raid warden in London go on my favorite shelf with Connie Willis' "Blackout" for their depictions of the everyday heroism of the English during the bombing of London. In the notes for her novel (which contain spoilers), Atkinson writes that it is about "not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imagination." Part of her motivation, she writes, is bearing witness to life in England during World War II.
Once she imagines her headstone reading, "Ursula Beresford Todd, stalwart to the last." That would fit her, possibly in a way nobler than she realizes. Her lives through the interwar years and the Blitz of London demonstrate how narrow women's roles and options could be then, but smart, pretty and determined, she makes her way. She's victimized but no eternal victim, and doesn't make the same mistake twice. and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn't read herself." In different incarnations, she's raped and becomes pregnant, marries and is physically abused. "She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavory types. Forms strong friendships with sister Pamela, childhood neighbor Millie. It's complicated with her mother, Sylvie. While different choice points lead to some dramatically different outcomes, Ursula's personality is fairly consistent. Only Ursula knows she's saving the maid from a trip that will lead to death from influenza. In "Life After Life," Ursula keeps re-spawning after each death, eventually gaining some ability to return to life at a key checkpoint and make a different choice.Īs her sequential lives pile up, Ursula lives uneasily with the powerful déjà vu that prompts her into actions inexplicable to others: As a girl, she knocks the family's Irish maid down the stairs, breaking her arm. With its second-person narration, Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" reads like a text-based role-playing game. "Life After Life" is the second literary novel I've read this year that reflects gaming structures, consciously or otherwise, in depicting the joys, vicissitudes and choices of a life. More rebirths, longer lives, more deaths. She drowns in the ocean as a little girl, but is born again on that snowy day in 1910, only to fall to death as a girl trying to rescue a doll her older brother tossed out the window.
But then she is born again, and acquires her name. In Kate Atkinson's compelling new novel, "Life After Life," the baby girl who might have been Ursula Todd is born dead on a snowy 1910 day in England, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. "Time is like a palimpsest," Ursula Todd tells her former psychiatrist, comparing her life to a page that's been scraped, but with traces of the old writing blending with the new.
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