Life After Life (2013)
Kate Atkinson
Reagan Arthur Books #
9780316176484
* *
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
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