Michael's Reviews > Life After Life

I love the perspective this book gave me on the meanings of mortality and clues about how to make sense of all the choices life is made of. I experienced a lot of difficulty over digesting what this book is “about” for the first 100 pages or so, but ultimately was glad I chose just to ride with it without worrying about what it “means”. The meaning part filtered in on my personal river.

Call it speculative fiction if you will, but the book involves an alternative reality plot I don’t mind calling science fiction (but like Atwood, I am sure Atkinson would not want her readership limited by shelving her book under that category). In the very first pages, Ursula dies at birth in the winter of 1910 in rural England, but then a second time around the doctor arrives before the snowstorm gets bad and she is saved. The very first scene in the book tells us that one fate involves Ursula trying to change history by killing an early Hitler in Bavaria in 1930. In between there are a number of other unfortunate ends and restarts, with many paths leading to long stretches in London and surrounds during the Blitz in World War 2. There it is common for Ursula to serve bravely as a volunteer in night-time bomb response squads while holding a day job as a government cleric in Bletchley Park processing data on bomb damage and casualties. Other life paths lead to alternative careers, married vs. unmarried situations, and places of residence, which in turn are associated with different fates for friends, lovers, and family members.

What to make of this odd form of reincarnation back into one’s own life? I like the philosophical playfulness Atkinson weaves around her premise. In a preface she quotes a Nietzsche passage which raises the question of whether being forced to relive one’s life would be a curse rather than a blessing of a god-like power. Another quote from Ursula’s brother begs the reader to ponder: What if we had a chance to do it again and again until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

At one point, Ursula’s trouble over all her déjà vu states leads her mother to take her to a shrink interested in Buddhism. Their work leads Ursula to consider how the flow of time back on itself can conform metaphorically to the Ouroborous icon of a snake eating its own tail. At another point, the ten-year old Ursula recognizes what is happening is more like a “palimpsest”, which a dictionary tells me is like recycling “parchment from which writing has been erased to make room for another text”. Other metaphors abound in the book. This one that had me scratching my head a bit: What is it Heraclitis says? One cannot step in the same river twice. The more accurate way of phrasing it would be ‘You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.’

Expectations some readers may get from the early sections that that they will be treated to a fantastical entertainment similar to the movie “Groundhog Day” or an alternative history thriller are not fulfilled. Instead, much of the book is a rich evocation of family life of the time. We learn much about Ursula as one of five kids in a well-to-do family of a banker, Hugh, and a loving mother, Sylvie, living at a rural estate outside of London. Later, during the Blitz coverage, it is the courage and resilience of ordinary people that dominate the stage with Ursula. But the realism typical of historical fiction is cast in an “otherworldly” light by Ursula’s effective power to cheat death. I ended up worrying less about her fate and relatively more about the friends, lovers, family, and even the strangers she seeks to save on emergency response squad.

I got some of the same extra dose of identification with the “contemps” in Connie Willis’ coverage of the Blitz in her “Blackout” and “All Clear” books about time travelling historians and a similar distancing sense over the reality of historians’ fate. In Willis’ books, some kind of barrier prevents any interventions from the future from changing history substantially, as common in time travel sci fi since H.G. Wells. With Atkinson’s book, Ursula’s choices seem open to effect large changes, but in practice there is some strong channeling along certain pathways in her life. The status of the reality left behind when her life is reset is unclear. I like to think her pathways through time reflect a portrayal of current physics theories of alternative universes splitting off at various choice points, although this possible interpretation is not raised in the narrative.

In another way, the book gave me some of that eerie sense of empowerment over fate I used to get with early role playing games. In particular, I got some nostalgia for a text-only game popular before computer graphics matured called “Trinity”, which required piecing together various clues to set history on a path to prevent a nuclear World War 3 from occurring. Each mistake led to “game over” and a chance to try again. Of course this analogy only goes so far. The big picture for me is that in the absence of any reset, we better play the game right in the first place. Carpe diem.