Reviews with content warning for Suicide - Life After Life

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Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

31 reviews

emtees's review

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

This book starts with a major spoiler. In the first chapter, the heroine, Ursula Todd, takes an action that should have major consequences for not only herself, but the entire world:

she kills Hitler

. I call that a spoiler instead of just the start of the plot because after that event, the book flashes back twenty years to Ursula’s birth, and if you didn’t have that first chapter telling you that the book was leading up to Ursula playing such a huge role in the world, you would never guess that’s where her life was going. But that’s because, at first, it’s not.

In the second chapter, Ursula is born in 1910 and dies almost immediately. In the third chapter, she is born again, but this time, rather than being stuck in a snowstorm, the doctor arrives in time to save her life. But tragedy strikes again a few years later, and then Urusla is born for a third time, and lives and dies, and so on, for over a dozen different lives. The lives she lives are all a little different, but there are common notes; a few times she manages to veer off in an entirely new direction, such as the two lives in which she marries and her husbands take her off to very different, tragic ends, but for the most part Ursula grows up in the English countryside in a large, typical family and then, if she survives her childhood, she goes to London and lives through the Blitz. At first, these lives seem unconnected from each other, different variations on the same woman’s life, but as the book progresses it slowly becomes clear that Ursula is living these lives one after the other, and while she doesn’t really remember her previous lives, the buried memories of them begin to effect her. In one stretch of the book, she dies in a nearly identical way for several lives in a row, and with each new life she becomes more aware of the danger and more desperate to stop it, even if she doesn’t fully understand where that premonition of danger comes from. Her family sees her as afflicted with deja vu, something that gets worse in each subsequent life, as Ursula encounters more and more reflections of events that have already happened. Eventually she begins to take action directly based on these premonitions, not only to stop her own deaths but to help others, culminating in the event from the first chapter.

The plot wasn’t really the strength of the book for me. The idea of reincarnation over and over into the same life, and the possibility of actually changing things, is interesting, but I wasn’t totally satisfied with how it ended up and I found the end of the book a little confusing. (I think I figured out what happened in the final lives, but at was based on some leading questions in the author’s note at the end of the book; otherwise I would have been totally lost.). But the strength of the book was really in the themes and characters. The theme of the book is “what if you could live your life over and over until you got it right?” But the book questions what “getting it right” would look like. Ursula is happier in some lives than in others; she accomplishes more good in some than others; there are lives where things don’t work out great for Ursula but circumstances are better for her loved ones. The life in which she dies the most miserable death, and make the worst decisions, is also arguably the one where she experiences the greatest love. Which of these lives is the one where she “gets it right?” As Ursula becomes more aware of what is happening to her, she has more opportunities to make conscious choices about how to live her life, but how is she supposed to know which choices are the right ones? Who defines right?

With each life, the story revisits the same mundane circumstances of Ursula’s usually very ordinary life, and so we get to see it over and over from different angles. I came to really appreciate Ursula’s family after seeing them through so many lives. Relationships get examined from different angles because the circumstances change slightly from life to life. Meanwhile, Ursula herself seems to change from the experience of reincarnation. A great part of the book is seeing the subtle ways her experiences in one life shape her in the next; an event that traumatizes her one time around is faced with strength in the next and bemused equanimity in the one after. The Ursula of the early chapters is a bit of a blank slate but by her last life she is bold, decisive and fearless.

Content Warnings

shibaunited's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

Content Warnings

battysbooks's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Content Warnings

julianship's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

4.5 stars. This book took me two months to read, through no fault of its own- every time I picked it up I fell into Atkinson's deft prose and neatly nested storytelling. Because the book is so dense with detail, all of which matters because of Ursula's branching, subtly different lives, it is hard to get back into when you put it down, and thus here I am in November finishing a book I began around Labor Day.
I say this as a compliment, but this book feels like playing a particularly difficult video game with no save points. Ursula successfully navigates all the mundane ways to die that surround her early years, only to be murdered by a husband, or hit by a car, or crushed by a wall in the Blitz, and then we're back to the start again. I found myself clutching the book and mentally hissing at Ursula as though I were in a horror movie.
Luckily, the Fox Corner periods of the book are full of a particularly English drawing room sniping I do enjoy reading, mixed with lush descriptions of countryside and food, and also after the first three or four Atkinson doesn't linger too much.
The character portraits are a real strength; nearly everyone we meet is terribly human, full of flaws and foibles, and they scrape up against each other excellently. No one in this book is uncomplicatedly good, although many people do good things, which is refreshing to read in a novel that spends a large amount of its second half in the Blitz.
My only qualm is that Atkinson's style uses comma splices constantly as an apparent stylistic choice, which I should not care about but unfortunately I can't turn the proofreading part of my brain off even though it hasn't been my job for a year and a half now.
This was a rec from a friend, and I'm excited to see that Atkinson has a new book out, because I liked this one so much I'd like to read more of hers! Would highly recommend for anyone who likes intricate/nested stories, stories about stories, unreliable narrators, and messy British families.

Content Warnings