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Life After Life
by Kate Atkinson
There's a Margaret Atwood short story called "Happy Endings," which is actually a series of very brief stories in which two characters meet and eventually die, with different variations of events in between (no conflict, internal conflict, external conflict, and so on). It makes the point that the What of the plot of a story is not the most important aspect of it.
Life After Life seems to me to be a very long, very drawn-out version of "Happy Endings." We catch on quickly that the main character, Ursula Todd, is going to die -- dies, in fact, in the very first brief chapter -- and then we will get to see what happens if she didn't die and her life continued. At some point the story gets stuck -- it seems there is no way to avoid Ursula coming down with the Spanish flu -- and Ursula begins to take a hand in her own destiny through premonitions that guide her toward a survival path. She doesn't remember her former lives (except, possibly, toward the very end of the book), just has a sense of déjà vu about certain things that allows her to avoid danger the second or third time around.
In a way, it's a take on the idea that there are infinite universes, that every decision we make creates a branch in which a parallel universe is created, and we are reading each of these parallel universe plots. It's also like a Choose Your Own Adventure book in that every path eventually ends in death and you start over again, making different choices.
This plot device around which the book is built is at the core of both what I liked and what I hated about this book. Liked, because it provides an opportunity to see a number of different life paths that a woman born in 1910 to a wealthy family could have taken -- their variety and their limits -- without having a passel of characters to keep track of. (This was the downfall of The Glass Palace: In trying to show every viewpoint and every life path possible, the author created far too many characters.) Hated, because there was very little driving the book forward. Every section began a new game of, "OK, when/how is she gonna die this time," and it became hard for me to care about what her umpteenth life path would be. Presumably what was meant to drive the book forward was the opening chapter in which it appears that Ursula is (maybe) going to eventually kill Hitler, but this isn't revisited again until the very end of the book, which means there's a LOT of life paths to slog through in the meantime.
There are also a lot of unanswered questions left by the book. As I said after reading The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, I don't mind fantasy or magical realism or whatever you want to call supernatural elements in a book, I just want to be given some sort of internally coherent explanation of how they work. But this book offers no explanation or resolution. Even if Ursula kills Hitler, she's only saved the world from him in that particular timeline, and then she dies and her life starts all over again. Does she have to try to kill him in as many parallel universes as possible? Some discussion among characters implies that she may get to stop the merry-go-round once she "gets everything right," but we as the reader never get to know that for sure (unlike in Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray gets to stop reliving the same day once he learns certain life lessons).At the very end we see a version of her life in which she's managed to save both Teddy and Nancy, but the last chapter is another "Snow" chapter, implying that she's been reborn yet again.
I will give Atkinson props that, from a prose perspective, the book is easy to read, even when there's a lack of plot-driven motivation to do so. She also manages to jump back and forth in time constantly without getting the reader too lost (at least, I wasn't), which is an impressive trick to pull off. In the end, it wasn't a terrible book -- it provided some food for thought about life, decisions, and so on -- but I personally have a hard time understanding how Entertainment Weekly crowned it the best novel of 2013 and Goodreads readers the best Historical Fiction of the year. Maybe if it had been half as long it wouldn't have seemed such a chore to read.
Life After Life seems to me to be a very long, very drawn-out version of "Happy Endings." We catch on quickly that the main character, Ursula Todd, is going to die -- dies, in fact, in the very first brief chapter -- and then we will get to see what happens if she didn't die and her life continued. At some point the story gets stuck -- it seems there is no way to avoid Ursula coming down with the Spanish flu -- and Ursula begins to take a hand in her own destiny through premonitions that guide her toward a survival path. She doesn't remember her former lives (except, possibly, toward the very end of the book), just has a sense of déjà vu about certain things that allows her to avoid danger the second or third time around.
In a way, it's a take on the idea that there are infinite universes, that every decision we make creates a branch in which a parallel universe is created, and we are reading each of these parallel universe plots. It's also like a Choose Your Own Adventure book in that every path eventually ends in death and you start over again, making different choices.
This plot device around which the book is built is at the core of both what I liked and what I hated about this book. Liked, because it provides an opportunity to see a number of different life paths that a woman born in 1910 to a wealthy family could have taken -- their variety and their limits -- without having a passel of characters to keep track of. (This was the downfall of The Glass Palace: In trying to show every viewpoint and every life path possible, the author created far too many characters.) Hated, because there was very little driving the book forward. Every section began a new game of, "OK, when/how is she gonna die this time," and it became hard for me to care about what her umpteenth life path would be. Presumably what was meant to drive the book forward was the opening chapter in which it appears that Ursula is (maybe) going to eventually kill Hitler, but this isn't revisited again until the very end of the book, which means there's a LOT of life paths to slog through in the meantime.
There are also a lot of unanswered questions left by the book. As I said after reading The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow, I don't mind fantasy or magical realism or whatever you want to call supernatural elements in a book, I just want to be given some sort of internally coherent explanation of how they work. But this book offers no explanation or resolution. Even if Ursula kills Hitler, she's only saved the world from him in that particular timeline, and then she dies and her life starts all over again. Does she have to try to kill him in as many parallel universes as possible? Some discussion among characters implies that she may get to stop the merry-go-round once she "gets everything right," but we as the reader never get to know that for sure (unlike in Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray gets to stop reliving the same day once he learns certain life lessons).
I will give Atkinson props that, from a prose perspective, the book is easy to read, even when there's a lack of plot-driven motivation to do so. She also manages to jump back and forth in time constantly without getting the reader too lost (at least, I wasn't), which is an impressive trick to pull off. In the end, it wasn't a terrible book -- it provided some food for thought about life, decisions, and so on -- but I personally have a hard time understanding how Entertainment Weekly crowned it the best novel of 2013 and Goodreads readers the best Historical Fiction of the year. Maybe if it had been half as long it wouldn't have seemed such a chore to read.