Life After Life: Over Hyped and Under Realized

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Life After Life (2013)

Kate Atkinson

Reagan Arthur Books # 9780316176484

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Ursula Todd was born in 1909, but then “darkness fell” and she was gone before she ever lived. Ursula Todd was born in 1909 and was pronounced stillborn, until the umbilical cord was removed from her neck and breath was blown into her tiny lungs. To borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut: and so it goes.

What if we could live our lives over (and over and over) again? The assumption that it sometimes happens is at the center of Kate Atkinson’s new novel–one praised by a lot of folks, including some of my favorite authors, like J. Courtney Sullivan. Alas, I found Life After Life a novel more likely to impress writers than readers. I can see why they like it. What novelist hasn’t created a character and wished he or she could play out all the possible scenarios of that character’s life? Atkinson accomplishes that task by constructing parallel universes around her various Ursulas. For one Ursula, darkness falls and she dies; for another, death is cheated and a new narrative emerges. Is this reincarnation, or the butterfly effect? Déjà vu, or paths anew? Each of us makes thousands of choices in our lives, but what if just one would completely alter your trajectory? When, if ever, would you recognize that it was the single moment that altered the future? And what if we could choose again? It’s a promising set up; I wish the execution were better.

These fascinating questions are not original to Atkinson. They are old ideas that even figures such as Donne, Goethe, and Poe considered. Recent works that use the same pivots include Groundhog’s Day, The Cloud Atlas, and The Time Traveler’s Wife. For my money, each of these is superior to Life After Life. Why? Because Ursula is so passive. She is the child of easy-going Hugh and uptight Sylvie, the latter of whom used to be a lot of fun, but has melted into the impressions-obsessed boorishness common among pre-World War I English bourgeois housewives. Sylvie duly had a passel of children, including Ursula and her younger brother, the ne’er do well Teddy, but Sylvie’s only real joy lies in badmouthing Hugh’s bohemian sister, Isabel. “Izzy,” a prototypical 1920s “New Woman,” is easily the most interesting character in the book–sassy, promiscuous, avant-garde, and carefree. Alas, Ursula is the book’s main character, and she’s more like Hugh than Izzy.

The novel is allegedly constructed around Ursula’s “choices,” but she makes few. She is exactly the thing that drives me crazy about characters in novels from the Brontë sisters–you think you see some spunk in her, but she never does much with it. That is to say, she doesn’t make choices; she reacts to circumstances thrust upon her. Although we admire Ursula’s pluck in a World War II scenario in which she becomes a civil defense volunteer during the Blitz, everything that occurs seems happenstance rather than chosen. (In another scenario, a bomb delivers her demise; in still another–the book’s most-contrived and least believable thread–she has a German husband, befriends Eva Braun, and kills Hitler!) But whatever the situation, Izzy makes things happen; Ursula detachedly drifts whichever way the wind takes her.

I ultimately tired of Atkinson’s start/stop/start again structure. We are supposed to accept Ursula as an “old soul,” but for this to work, she needs to be more like a Star Trek Trill–a joined species whose outward bodies have short lives, but whose internal symbiants have multiple lives and retain the lessons learned from each. There is so little connection between the various Ursulas that they are like free-floating ions disconnected from a nucleic soul. Of Life After Life, one British reader remarked that it is “curiously empty.” Exactly!

Rob Weir