Book review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

By Kate Atkinson. Reagan Arthur Books, $28.

Kate Atkinson’s new novel opens with a jarring display of violence. The year is 1930; Ursula Todd approaches Adolf Hitler with a gun and fires. However, she herself is killed—and the narrative returns to the moment of Ursula’s birth, in 1910. This time, though, she is stillborn. The novel then repeats the event, but now Ursula’s birth yields jubilation rather than sorrow. As Ursula is born and dies again and again, different lurking dangers present themselves: riptides, an influenza epidemic, the Blitz. Slowly, Ursula becomes aware of her unique existence; from lifetime to lifetime, she endeavors to discover the reasons behind this condition.

Some of Ursula’s lives are brutally short. Sometimes she is able to effect change within her own life via premonitions; in others, a character new to the narrative alters Ursula’s history or our own. Certain timelines, e.g., one in which Ursula is trapped in a nightmarish marriage with a violent academic, land with a sickening power. Other passages evoke Patrick Hamilton’s sharply drawn novels of prewar London; Atkinson’s neatly drawn supporting characters and minor conflicts could power a suite of chamber dramas.

The surreal chronology of Life After Life has its antecedents: Ken Grimwood’s 1987 novel Replay and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five use disjointed chronology to explore the dizzying potential within a human life. At the core of Atkinson’s book is a very primal anxiety: missing out on those lives we imagine but never get the chance to live. Ursula Todd is blessed (or cursed) to circumvent this, but the weight of her situation—in which the best-laid plans might take repeated lifetimes to pull off—is impossibly saddening, a series of long games in which mortality is both a punishment and an obstacle to be dodged. At one point, the author notes that Ursula was “as happy as was possible in this life.” It’s a qualification that takes on more power, as Atkinson’s variations on histories political and familial march on, delicate bonds unravel, and buildings and lives crumble without warning.

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