It’s an unsettling experience reading Kate
Atkinson’s latest book if, like me, you’re a Henny Penny, always expecting the
sky to fall on your head. Life After Life (Doubleday, $36.99)
looks at how a person’s fate can turn on the slightest of decisions or smallest
of events. It’s about the fragility of life, how close death is to us, how
easily it might come in a moment. Oh and it’s devastatingly good.
Ursula Todd is born on a freezing winter’s
night in 1910. The doctor is stuck in the snow, the cord is wrapped round the
baby’s neck and she dies without drawing a single breath. But what if on that
same cold night the doctor sets out earlier and manages to get through before
the snow closes the roads? Snip, snip with a pair of surgical scissors and
bonny baby girl Ursula lives.
This is how the novel progresses throughout
the course of Ursula’s life. As she makes choices big and small, and is caught
up in world events she can’t control, sometimes she dies, and sometimes she
lives. It sounds a bit like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, which I suppose it is, except this is something more
layered and cleverer. Chapter by chapter Atkinson vividly colours the world she
has created and every turn Ursula’s life takes seems credible – even the most
incredible ones
Ursula has an idyllic childhood in a
rambling old house with a beautiful mother, a loving father and a gaggle of
siblings. And yet still potential disaster awaits her in the corridors and
country lanes: sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, the death of a friend. But
Ursula has what the rest of us lack – the chance to relive her life time and
again until she gets it right at last.
This is a contrivance that has the
potential to be irritating but instead it’s compelling to begin on each new
telling of her story wondering if this time darkness will fall or if Ursula
will somehow make it through. It helps that she lives in tumultuous times, with
two wars and a Spanish flu epidemic rich in possibilities for random death.
Quite a chunk of Life After Life is given to Ursula’s wartime experiences during the
Blitz in London…but also, thanks to her parallel lives, in Germany where she
draws close enough to Hitler to change the course of history. This is a period
you can read about in many novels; but with Atkinson you are there, living and
breathing it, whether Ursula is sheltering in a cellar with bombs raining down
or volunteering as an Air Raid Warden.
Some might say the line between good and
bad writing is just as easily crossed as the line between life and
death…Atkinson takes bold risks with this novel but seems not to put a foot
close to it nevertheless. This is an extraordinary piece of fiction, bleak and
yet life affirming, brilliantly engineered and inventive. It’s the must-read of
the year so far – too good to miss even if you are one of life’s chronic
worriers.
About the reviewer. Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on Sunday 3 March 2013.
About the reviewer. Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on Sunday 3 March 2013.
Her latest novel When In Rome is set in 1950's Italy and was published in September 2012. Her next novel, The Food Of Love Cooking School, will be published later this year
Footnote:
The Bookman reckons Nicky Pellegrino is right on the money with her assessment of this novel. It is a hugely complex work and I think that there will be some, like me, who will initially be confused by the story. I was nearly a quarter of the way through the novel before I realised the author's contrivance in giving the protagonist several lives. It is though a brilliant piece of writing. I thought the description of life in London during the Blitz totally compelling.
Further Footnote:
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa)
Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind
The Scenes At The Museum and has been a critically acclaimed
international author ever since. Her bestselling novels featuring the former
private detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will
There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, have been adapted
into a successful BBC TV series. She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen's
Birthday Honours List.
Footnote:
The Bookman reckons Nicky Pellegrino is right on the money with her assessment of this novel. It is a hugely complex work and I think that there will be some, like me, who will initially be confused by the story. I was nearly a quarter of the way through the novel before I realised the author's contrivance in giving the protagonist several lives. It is though a brilliant piece of writing. I thought the description of life in London during the Blitz totally compelling.
Further Footnote:
Kate Atkinson will appear in a special 75 minute In Conversation event on Saturday
18 May at 7.15pm as part of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. This event will be one of the Festival highlights I reckon.
Tickets on sale from 21 March.
About Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa)
Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind
The Scenes At The Museum and has been a critically acclaimed
international author ever since. Her bestselling novels featuring the former
private detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will
There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, have been adapted
into a successful BBC TV series. She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen's
Birthday Honours List.
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