“It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe,” the doctor explains. Kellet suggests that the moody, spacey Ursula may be remembering other lives and asks her to draw something, she produces a snake with its tail in its mouth. We travel and return to the psychiatrist’s office where Ursula’s parents take her, at age 10, for sessions in which the conversation touches on reincarnation and the nature of time.
At times “Life After Life” suggests a cross between Noël Coward’s “Brief Encounter” and those interactive “hypertext” novels whose computer-savvy readers can determine the direction of the story. Even so, reading the book is a mildly vertiginous experience, rather like using the “scenes” function on a DVD to scramble the film’s original order. In several of her lives, Ursula attends secretarial school in London and travels in Continental Europe.Ītkinson’s juggling a lot at once - and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing. Sylvie, Ursula’s mother, remains dependably snobbish and caustic, just as Ursula’s free-spirited Aunt Izzie continues to provide shelter, help and the example of nervy rebelliousness for which such aunts are created in fiction and film. And there are several relatively still points around which the whirling machinery turns. The mostly brief chapters, dated by month and year, keep us oriented amid the rapid chronological shifts backward and forward. Or is she? A dog named Lucky makes cameo appearances that the reader can’t help seeing through the scrim of the transient but critical roles that the dog has already played in the plot. A murdered child turns out not to be dead. But in a different rendition, she is in England when her father succumbs to a heart attack, and with her family for his funeral. Ursula learns about her father’s death in a letter she receives in Germany, where she has been trapped by the outbreak of World War II, and where she befriends Eva Braun and visits the Führer at his mountaintop retreat. Romances begin and end, then begin again, taking different trajectories. A bullying first marriage is endured, and its ensuing tragedy wiped clean from the slate. As a teenager living at Fox Corner, her family home in the British countryside, she is raped and becomes pregnant, but in another version the encounter with her American attacker involves little more than a stolen kiss. But each turn in her story is, like the end(s) of her life, subject to revision.
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Her serial and parallel existences take her through two brutal world wars and well into the 1960s. The novel begins with a scene in which she assassinates Hitler.
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Each time Ursula dies, Atkinson - a British writer best known here as the author of “Case Histories,” the first in a series of highly entertaining mysteries featuring the sleuth Jackson Brodie - resurrects her and sets her on one of the many alternate courses that her destiny might have taken.Ī great deal of experience, and 20th-century history, transpires in the intervals separating Ursula’s sudden and often violent exits from the world of the living. She is killed during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and contracts influenza. She dies when she is being born, on a snowy night in 1910. Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life.” “After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote.
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