This wonderful novel was recommended to me by a friend so, as well as enjoying the story, I enjoyed imagining why she had so loved it. Because it is inventive and about so many things. I am late to this novel: it is already serialised on BBC2. But, in case you missed it, its narrative device is the many lives and stories of Ursula Todd. Whilst she is always born on 11 February 1910 at Fox Corner somewhere in south Bucks, she leads many different lives and has thus to die on many occasions.: Life after Life.
At the heart of the novel is the idea of progress towards a goal: her life is teleological. Her first few lives are about getting out of the womb alive since, during birth, the umbilical cord gets trapped around her neck, and, because of the heavy snow outside, neither Dr Fellowes, nor Mrs Haddock, the midwife, is able, in Ursula’s early incarnations, to attend the birth. Ursula is, however, finally born alive and begins further lives after lives. A life that ends too soon, drowning, for example, on a Cornish beach, precedes a life where a hobby painter from Birmingham, seeing her distress, rescues her from the sea.
And, Ursula begins to learn from her mistakes, In one very dismal life, she is raped by, Howard, one of her brother’s friends, becomes pregnant and has a backstreet abortion that engenders feeling of shame and failure that blight her life leading her into an abusive relationship with the dreadful Derek Oliphant who, after she flees him, tracks her down and bludgeons her to death, in front of her brother Teddy, in her aunt Izzie’s house, with her aunt’s heavy onyx ashtray. In a subsequent life, she sees off Howard and thus avoids Oliphant and that particularly brutal death.
What does her life progress to? While her early lives are about saving herself, learning to avoid the hazards that have seen off earlier versions of her, her later lives become about saving others, such as pushing their servant down the stairs so she doesn’t go to London for Armistice celebrations because in an earlier life she had caught Spanish Flu, brought it back to Fox Corner and caused the death of beloved family members.
After learning how to save herself and then her loved ones from adversity, she progresses to trying to prevent World War II by killing Hitler before he comes to power. In this, she is partly trying to save her beloved younger brother Teddy who dies over Germany piloting a Halifax bomber, and whose death prompts her mother’s suicide. She is, mostly though, trying to spare England, and Europe, from the suffering of war. The longest and most compelling life is the one Ursula leads as an air raid warden, bearing witness to the appalling death, suffering and destruction of the Blitz.
As the Author’s Notes confirm, if the book is about anything, it is about World War II and England’s place in it. Kate Atkinson grew up in the aftermath of the war born to a father whose own mother had, on the eve of war, persuaded him to leave the Merchant Navy and return to the mines. Growing up in the austere aftermath of war, she is divided about how she feels about it. One the one hand, she felt that the war years had been England at its best and so felt cheated to have missed it. On the other hand, she was grateful to have avoided war’s horror and wondered about “What if?” it might have been avoided.
What were my reflections? On the question of sex (as in identity, not the activity), I felt that male violence looms large. It obviously looms largest in war. But the life where she is raped by Howard and ends up with Oliphant is particularly bleak. The description of the rape is not too harrowing. Poor innocent Ursula doesn’t really know what is happening and is detached. But what follows becomes darker and darker culminating in the painful twist that she is brutally murdered just when you think she has escaped. And, earlier in her life, there is the paedophile who sexually assaults and then murders poor Nancy Shawcross. The treatment of this male violence was descriptive not judgmental. It was a thing that Ursula had to navigate and, where she could, pre-empt.
With this, I thought the treatment of male and female characters was different. For me, besides Ursula, the two richest characters are her mother, Sylvie, and paternal aunt, Izzie. Both have attractive and unattractive traits. By contrast, the men tended to be good or bad. Her father Hugh is a saint, as too are her brothers Teddy and Jimmy. Her older brother, Maurice, by contrast, is simply dreadful along with the appalling Derek Oliphant. I felt I noticed most clearly the differing depth of the male and female characters when Ursula is staying at Hitler’s Berghof, Eva Braun gets more attention from the author, is more richly described and has more depth than Hitler, of whom the portrayal is rather flat, and what is portrayed is a boring windbag.
On the question of reincarnation, I was struck, rather against my will, by the video game dimension of Ursula’s repeated incarnations, and incarnations where she brings with her some of the learning of earlier lives. Ursula is the avatar in a multi-level video game. Every time she dies, she is respawned wiser. Each time she respawns she knows what she needs to do to get to the next level. As the novel nears the end, she knows clearly what she has to do. She has to get to Germany so that she can befriend Eva Braun, while she is still a shopgirl, so she is Eva’s friend when Hitler falls in love with her, allowing her to become part of his circle so that, with her father’s old service issue revolver, she can kill Hitler before he comes to power and destroys Europe.
On the topic of war in Europe, Atkinson does show empathy for German suffering, whether deserved or not. In one life, Ursula finds herself in Berlin as the war is ending, the widow of a German, with a young German daughter, awaiting the awful fate of the arrival of the Red Army. It is the only life that ends in suicide. Ursula takes her own life and that of her child in order to spare themselves what the Russians will bring.
All this said, I found it a hopeful story. It is about design, purpose and progress. While there is hardship and suffering, it is not nihilistic. I was left wondering what was Ursula’s best life and the author lets us know that we have not reached the end of Ursula’s story. In the penultimate chapter, during a VE celebration, Ursula, by chance in a pub in London, meets her beloved Teddy who, it turns out, did not die when his plane was hit. But there had still been a war. So had she managed to kill Hitler. And then the final chapter takes us back to 11 February 1910 when, presumably, Ursula is born again.
Is there a broader message? I was left reminded that, in life, you cannot move forward without leaving something behind. To be changed and transformed is not to be the person that you were before. Death and rebirth, albeit more metaphorical than actual, happens through our lives.
The Oblique View 