…and then we reach a kind of turning-point. She dies from the virulent Spanish flu, picked up from Bridget, the maid, who has contracted it at the Armistice celebrations in London. She falls from a roof, then she doesn’t, having somehow foreseen that to go on to the roof will be dangerous. She drowns at the seaside, then is rescued. Once she’s survived, she stays alive, so she cheats death time and time again. So far, any death she suffers is almost always followed, sometimes almost immediately, by an alternative scenario in which she survives. Ursula, if the reader hasn’t guessed already, is the name given to the child who survives her own birth. But this first time, we don’t know that the ominous phrase ‘Darkness fell’ that ends the chapter is to become Atkinson’s shorthand way of telling us that Ursula has just been killed. Is this an attempt on the life of Hitler? Descriptive details point to it being exactly this and seem to be confirmed when, levelling the pistol at him, the woman calls him ‘Fuhrer’. It’s typical in that the circumstances are confusing and sensational at the same time. The first time around, the arrival of her premature death is presented from the dying infant’s point of view: ‘Darkness fell.’ This is a form of words we recognise from the opening chapter, which is a typical Kate Atkinson-style preamble: in Germany in 1930 a woman called Ursula attempts to assassinate a well-known figure. Atkinson unaccountably finds this sort of wordplay irresistible.) There are several interlocking time-lines in the life of this character this girl will grow into, stretching as far ahead as 1947. (Literally, as he points out himself while holding up the scissors he used. This time the doctor, who had been caught in the snow in the first version, arrives to cut the cord in the nick of time. Then, a chapter or so later, the same little girl is born alive. In 1910 a child is strangled at birth by the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck.
I knew beforehand – and every reader knows it after a handful of pages – that the game she’s playing here is the one where the author offers alternative outcomes. When reading any Kate Atkinson novel you know you’re dealing with a player of games.
A lovely novel.The first quarter – to Ursula’s day out with Izzie The historical content is excellent – the warm nostalgia of pre-Great War England and life in the 1920s through to World War Two has that compelling sense of legitimacy which comes with excellent writing. Secondly, Kate Atkinson uses the plot device to demonstrate how the choices we make, even those that seem wholly marginal and insignificant, can have such a profound impact upon one’s life and the lives of many others, and how happiness on earth can depend upon the fulcrum of seeming minutiae. There is a considerable amount of dry, understated humour, together with a highly literate content. Firstly, it is narrated in such a superbly engaging way that the reader is wholly absorbed into the plot and the characters. But the novel works beautifully, for two main reasons. The plot is clearly fantastical, and the premise initially seems rather dubious, given that the reader is taken back on numerous occasions to new starts in Ursula’s existence and the different trajectories that her life takes. Ursula lives through two world wars, and the tragedies and joys of her large family, together with her active involvement as an adult in the Second World War, form the foundation of the storyline.
#Life after life novel how to
As she grows up, Ursula becomes vaguely aware of these past experiences her sense of déjà vu is very strong, and she learns how to avoid certain warning signs that caught her out before and plunge her back to reset her life. But Ursula is indeed a very singular female, in that she has been given the dubious privilege of her life re-starting if, and whenever, her previous existence ends in discomfort and death. Ursula Todd is born in February 1910 to a comfortable middle class family in the ease and seemingly unending stability of England’s Edwardian era.