Life After LIfe

Life After Life – by Kate Atkinson

I enjoy playing video games.  Quite often, when I start playing a game, and am doing particularly poorly, I’ll “cheat” and quickly press the Reset button and start all over again.  I’ve often wondered what life would be like if we could do the same thing.  I know I’m not alone in having such thoughts, and author Kate Atkinson does an absolutely marvelous job of telling such a tale with this book.

Ursula Todd is born on a cold, stormy winter night in 1911.  Because of the hazardous conditions, the doctor doesn’t make it on time to deliver the baby, so the baby dies.  End of story.  Right?  Not quite.  It seems that the author has invented/imagined a universe where “do overs” are possible.  So Ursula is born again in an alternate universe, and this time she survives.  Well, this time she only survives for a few days.  So the reset button is pressed again.  And again, and again, and again.  It can get confusing because these “lives” that we are reading about aren’t necessarily linear.  One life she may live until her twenties, the next life, she lives until her teens.  Then, we’re immediately transferred to, say life #6 where she’s in her thirties.  Then, we go back to life #3 where she’s still a schoolgirl.  It can get mightily confusing.

Yet somehow Kate Atkinson makes the whole thing work quite brilliantly.  This book is quite a remarkable achievement in how we can keep going back and forth, yet still be able to somewhat keep track of Ursula and her family.  Her “family” changes a bit as well from life to life, since such events (such as death) can radically change the cosmos, so to speak.  It might be beneficial to read this book with a tally sheet and a notebook handy.

The most interesting part of this book was during the days of World War II.  In one “life”, Ursula is a civil servant working in London (all of Atkinson’s books take place in England) helping the ravaged city cope through Hitler’s 1940 persistent bombing.  In “another” life, Ursula is a German citizen during the major conflict, and is actually close friends with Eva Braun.  Talk about a stretch.  Again, though, all of this works quite well.

After living so many lives, Ursula begins to have frequent bouts of déjà vu and “second sight”.  She goes through many episodes during her lives where she feels as though she’s “been here before”.  We, of course, know that this is true, but Ursula is nervously going through her lives wondering how and why she’s able to “predict things”.  If one pays close attention, you can actually see that she’s able to clearly choose the paths of her last two lives.  By then, her déjà vu is so strong, that she knows that her decisions that she makes can alter the course of history.  I confess that I didn’t quite “get it” until I read the “questions for discussion” section at the very end.

I’ve stated in other reviews that Kate Atkinson’s books aren’t for everybody.  Her style is quite anomalous, and probably won’t appeal to those who like to read straight-forward, meat and potatoes, stories.  In fact, this was the book that made Atkinson known to the masses after someone conducted an interview with Stephen King and he stated that this book was one of his favorites.  When Stephen King plugs your book, well…….. 

Her style of writing is par for the course compared to her other books.  Believe it or not, I actually found this book to be the least depressing of her catalog (and her books can be mightily depressing.) A pretty strong statement when the main character literally keeps dying all the time, but in a strange way, it gives us some sort of hope, in a bizarre, twisted way.  I would bet that 99% of the characters in her other books would have loved to have a reset button during their lives as well.

This was definitely one of a kind – and such a book could have ended up a garbled mess, yet the author manages to create wonderful, bizarre, strange story.