Life After Life

“Yet we must hold fast to what is good and true. But it all seems so random. One wonders about the divine plan and so on.”
“LIFE AFTER LIFE” a book by Kate Atkinson

“On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly, history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.”

This book is unlike any other that I have read before. It’s a blend of endless combinations: historical fiction and time travel, light and dark, calm and chaotic, straightforward and bewilderingly open to interpretation. This novel truly is a fascinating, captivating, and thought-provoking reading experience.

Some of my favorite parts of this novel were when Atkinson was simply discussing the average, everyday lives of the Todd family. All of the members of Ursula’s family have such distinct personalities that it’s hard to imagine they’re all fictional.

The cyclical plot structure actually enhanced the character development in this case, particularly in regard to how Ursula gradually realizes what happens when she dies and how she has the potential to change things.

The theme of reincarnation is my favorite aspect of this novel because it’s something that you rarely see in historical fiction novels. It’s challenging enough to write a story based on a historical event in another time period, let alone one that incorporates elements of reincarnation! I loved the anticipation that this plot structure builds, and I give Atkinson all the credit in the world for embarking on such an undertaking of writing Life After Life this way.

The war is thus depicted in terms of its consequences on the lives of civilians. The First World War is seen from a distance through the Todd female household at Fox Corner, servants included, in the countryside as Hugh, the father, has joined up.

The narrative repeatedly says they are in a frenzy of knitting ‘to keep their men warm’ (Atkinson 61). The repetition of the activity (Atkinson 64, 85) underlines their narrow range of action. The narrative shows how they are affected by their male relations. If the father of the Todd family returns unharmed, their cook, Mrs. Glover, sees her son fatally injured in a gas attack (Atkinson 74). As for their servant Bridget, after the death of her first fiancé (Atkinson 75), she becomes engaged after the war with another local young man whose face is half hidden by a tin mask. He is depicted through the perspective of the child Ursula: ‘The mask had one wide-open eye painted blue to match the real one. ‘Enough to frighten the horses, isn’t it?’ he said and smiled. She wished he hadn’t because his mouth wasn’t covered by the mask. His lips were puckered and strange as if they were an afterthought, stitched on after he was born (Atkinson 80). With this minor character, Atkinson briefly evokes the situation of the men facially disfigured in the war as well as the (few) masks created by Francis Derwent Wood.

Life After Life evokes the changes more or less rapidly met by women after the war through Izzie, Hugh’s single, fashionable, reckless, and selfish sister. An ambulance driver during the war, Izzie then adopts a bobbed haircut and declares: ‘The modern woman must fend for herself without the prospect of the succor of hearth and home’ (Atkinson 153). Izzie’s somewhat hyperbolic phrasing, mixing the literary and the clichéd, makes her sincerity somewhat doubtful. At the same time, Hugh and Sylvie’s conservative and hostile reactions indicate the reception met by this change in attitude at the time.

Life After Life contributes to giving visibility to the very diverse ways in which ordinary women experienced the war years. At the time of WWII, Ursula’s sister Pamela becomes a resilient, motherly but politically-conscious figure along with Sylvie who turns to breeding animals and growing vegetables. They represent different types of nurturers while Ursula lives through the Blitz, dying in the rubble or working as an ARP warden. If Atkinson believes that women ‘had exciting times in the war’ and that she depicts it in Life After Life through the female characters’ various lives, she does not minimize the gender restrictions at work then and later but denounces them through irony. Thus, about Ursula, the narrator caustically reports.

Life After Life is remarkable for its combination of history and fantasy or the anti-mimetic. Ursula’s unexplained ability to be born again every time she dies disrupts the verisimilitude expected by the reader and introduces a strong element of fantasy. There is no (rational) explanation for Ursula’s succession of lives and the enigma remains unresolved. However, Life After Life does not depict the counterfactual history and as Ursula’s multiplicity of lives is the only way in which the narrative really contravenes the rules of the real world, we will put aside the word ‘fantasy’ that tends to suggest alternative worlds, for the adjective ‘antiemetic’ which Brian Richardson uses for represented events that ‘do not copy or extend but rather violate some of the laws of everyday existence; these events cannot happen in real life’.

Over these narratives that repeat themselves with significant variations, it appears that Ursula manages to live longer each time as she learns to steer away from events with disastrous consequences.

Life After Life could thus be argued to be a novel of self-realization as Ursula is shaped and formed into an adult by the events she encounters and overcomes, gradually learning to survive a little longer each time by making the right decision.

However, rather than offering just one development from A to B (even allowing for errors and obstacles), Life After Life offers several developing processes that cancel each other in their coexistence.

None is privileged over the other. In this respect, Life After Life is like an anti-Bildungsroman as the multiplicity of possible lives suggests a rejection of temporal linearity which is associated with masculine time: what Julia Kristeva identifies as a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival-in other words, the time of history

It is indeed a view commonly held that ‘high levels of readerly self-consciousness tend to be incompatible with effective involvement’. As Vera Nünning reminds us, ‘Readers’ emotions and feelings of empathy with the characters are closely connected to the degree of immersion’. In Life After Life, the multiple endings and breaks in the narrative, and the unrealistic re-enacting of Ursula’s life with significant differences rupture the reader’s immersion and could lead to a lack of concern and involvement in the fate of the character. In a contradictory novel like Life After Life, Richardson admits: ‘Our immersion is interrupted, dissolved, and largely restored, though in a diminished form’.

To sum up, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life can be read as an illustration of the contemporary renaissance or rebirth of historical fiction in that it confronts its reader with a representation of the past which invites the reader to experience the past but also somehow to reflect upon it. The forking-path narrative structure complements the historical record as it enables multiple versions of women’s lives during and in between the two world wars. Its challenges to, and constant interruptions of, traditional historical narration, however, do not destroy the reader’s interest all the more so as it is coupled with techniques that solicit the reader’s empathy and ‘alignment’.

Overall, despite my few complaints I couldn’t help but love this clever, brilliantly written story. Life After Life is an impressive work that readers will not soon forget.