Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life is a book much
written-about. Winner of the UK’s Costa Novel Award, it has been the focus of
attention for its intriguing technique that lies somewhere between
reincarnation and time travel. A tale
where there is one life after another, where the protagonist Ursula, a Briton
from a comfortably wealthy family, is born again and again and again, but in
the very same life, living it differently every time.
Everyone who’s talked about this book has obviously dwelt on
the novelty of the entire schema. However, I was struck by much more than this.
Yes, Atkinson gives her protagonist many different lives, but in doing so,
doesn’t she give the others different lives, too? How about the people Ursula saves
along with herself? Her sister Pamela, first, and then her brother Teddy, and
their maid Bridget from the epidemic of Spanish influenza? Ursula makes
numerous failed attempts, ultimately succeeding by pushing Bridget from the
stairs so that she is unable to attend the festivities in London where she’d
catch the flu in the first place.
But then, this poses a question, too. Is Ursula consciously
saving herself? Or is it just destiny? For instance, the second time she drowns
in childhood, she is saved by a stranger. That is obviously not an effort on
Ursula’s part. Or, when she has started living with Crighton, the army man, why
does she go back to the place where she died in a bomb raid? Why does she just
not stay away? The author doesn’t seem very clear about whether her protagonist
has conscious control, or is it just fate. Then again, the part where the end
catches up with the beginning—her shooting of Hitler to prevent the war from
taking place— since she dies again, the universe starts all over again and
nothing really changes. It’s a confusing and a rather silly kind of paradox…..
it’s not Ursula being born again and again, the entire universe is caught in a
time warp.
However, I believe this is just a foil to what Atkinson has
really written about, and that is life coupled with war. War features
throughout the novel, resplendent in its horror. Atkinson shows you myriad
views of misery, from every angle possible—the ground, the air, the savior, the
saved and the unsaved. There is no getting away from it. In fact, one of the
most brilliant parts of the narrative—and ironically, the part that most of her
British readers have found “unnecessary” is the life of Ursula in Nazi Germany,
after her marriage to a man who becomes a Nazi officer later. That is truly the
view from the other side, and hats off to Atkins for bringing that to us.
Rather than just focus on the grief of the British, she turns the focus to the
other side, showing the greater tragedy, the much greater disaster that befell
the ordinary German caught in the war.
In fact, she shows you how a different route might change the
place of people in your life. Such as the change in her mother’s behaviour, from
loving to downright acidic, when Ursula gets pregnant as a teenager, even
though it was the result of rape. And the capricious aunt Izzie, forever the
‘bad fairy’ but somehow always the one Ursula turns to in peril. It does, in
the end, make you think of what would have happened if your own life had
unfurled this way or the other… which suddenly destabilizes the world as you
know it. I suspect that was the plan all along.
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