Title: Life After Life Author: Kate Atkinson
Published: April 2, 2013
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 531
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. 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 a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?
In Life After Life, Kate Atkinson shows an impressive talent in her ability to conduct and control a complex plot. This nonlinear, time-travel/parallel-universe type story is presented with extreme skill, as each nonconsecutive section becomes one piece of the puzzle of Ursula Todd’s lives. I admire Atkinson’s prowess, but, aside from that, Life After Life honestly didn’t do much for me.
Sure, it was a point of interest to find out how the opening scene, in which Adolf Hitler is assassinated in 1930, connects with the seemingly mundane middle-class English life of Ursula Todd. Finding out the specific details of this connection was what kept me reading Life After Life—so as hooks go, I guess that opening scene was excellent, though I don’t think the rest of the novel sustained that initial moment of interest.
The truth is, Life After Life took a long time to pick up momentum, and even then it was still fairly slow. The repetitive, circular structure of the book, as Ursula experiences the same events again and again with often minute variations, does not lend itself to a fast or particularly engaging reading experience. Atkinson takes a lot of time with every scene, which is certainly her prerogative, but I was constantly wondering when things would start to happen—even during moments of high tension, the pace felt glacial.
This issue is not all the author’s fault; it’s inherent in the concept of Life After Life itself. Every time Ursula Todd dies, she is sent back to the moment of her birth, fated to live her life over and over again. Naturally, she learns from past (future?) experiences and is able to alter her life a bit with each reincarnation. Yet though each of Ursula’s lives are different, the changes are often very small, and many times Ursula still ends up dying the same death in spite of an attempt to avoid it. The result is a very redundant narrative that forces readers to read the same scene several times from several different angles. If the book had been half as long as it is, this might have been okay, but as it is I felt trapped in a pointless, inescapable loop (which is probably also how Ursula felt).
Perhaps the one thing that could have saved this book was some form of reader-character bond. If I had been able to connect, Life after Life might not have felt so aimless. But there was something lacking in Atkinson’s prose, which is otherwise so technically proficient. In none of her incarnations did I find myself more than moderately curious in Ursula; she was neither intellectually nor emotionally stimulating, and I had no desire to invest in her well-being. I feel that Ursula was less the centerpiece of the story than she should have been—instead, the focus was on the plural lives and the different courses they took.
The “time loop” premise is really not a new one, and while Kate Atkinson is certainly skilled and was able to craft a plot of the necessary intricacy, I nevertheless found that there was nothing truly novel in this whole experience. Life After Life wasn’t quite a slog of a read, but it was a far cry from riveting or absorbing or any other adjective I like to use when talking about good books. To describe my thoughts about this book in a word: I am indifferent.
