Life After Life can be read as a book about writing (very fashionable) and about

how the author, who holds all the cards, can manipulate the characters. To prove
the point, Kate Atkinson gives many of the characters a second chance. So the book
starts with Ursula Todd, the protagonist, assassinating Hitler in 1930 in a Munich
cafe with her father's Great War revolver; the SS draw their pistols and aim them
at Ursula. Darkness falls. Soon after, Atkinson reverts to Ursula's birth in 1910
in the Todd family home, Fox Corner. The umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck.
The family doctor, Dr Fellowes, is unable to be present because of a heavy snowfall
and baby Ursula dies when no one can find a suitable pair of scissors to cut the
cord: "The little heart. A helpless little heart beating wildly. Stopped suddenly
like a bird dropped from the sky. A single shot. Darkness fell."

But Ursula has another chance, and the story does a volte-face: this time, Dr
Fellowes is on hand and he cuts the cord, and all is well. He even gets his
customary piccalilli as a reward.
This is the pattern of the novel; there are many deaths or near deaths – the cat
falls asleep on baby Ursula's face and suffocates her, but, inventing mouth-to
mouth-resuscitation, her mother Sylvie saves her; the dead or near dead are granted
another life. So Ursula, in the toddler version, is swept away by a tide in
Cornwall, never to be seen again, but later she reappears in the narrative. These
near deaths, I think, represent the deep anxieties of family life and what could
have happened.

The Todd family is comfortably wealthy and lives just beyond the leafy edge of
north London, in a large house called Fox Corner. While the genial Hugh does
something in the City, the more waspish Sylvie, his wife, produces children and
casts a sardonic eye over the family, but particularly over Hugh's sister, Isobel,
or Izzie, who is the most erratic of the family, and blessed with a wild talent for
self-invention. It is she who helps Ursula have an illegal abortion after she is
raped by a visiting American. Later, it seems the rape did not happen; the boy
kissed Ursula rather vigorously as a goodbye gesture.

Ursula suffers horribly at the hands of two men – one who treats her casually, one
who abuses her physically. This relationship with a liar and conman is an awful,
violent, episode.

Meanwhile, Teddy, the beloved younger brother, dies, but re-emerges as a second
world war pilot who narrowly escapes death before being held in a German POW camp
for two years. During the war, Ursula works during the day in one of the
ministries, and at night she is on fire watch. The description of the Blitz and the
devastation it causes is utterly believable: this is Ursula, stunned (or killed?)
by the shockwave of a bomb: "Her name was Susie, apparently. She had no idea, she
really couldn't reFlannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a
middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels?
Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and
then another beginning, plus several more middles ... and why not have a beginning
again?

What she's done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what
makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the
progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even
harder to produce: a fully-realized world. Atkinson not only invites readers in but
also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and
instead accept what a novel can be.

When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep
going. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me — maybe I was just
dumb. In the opening pages, in a German cafe in November 1930, a woman raises a gun
and shoots Adolf Hitler. Gamely anticipating the consequences of that action — even
if they held the possibility of Twilight Zone cheesiness — I turned the page, only
to find that there were no consequences, at least not yet, for the clock had turned
back 20 years and the action had moved to another locale.

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Now it's England in February 1910, and a baby is about to be born, but the doctor
hasn't arrived yet: " 'Dr. Fellowes should have been here,' Sylvie moaned. 'Why
isn't he here yet? Where is he?' ... 'Yer man'll be stuck in the snow, I expect,
ma'm,' " says Bridget, the maid. And then, moments later: " 'Oh, ma'am,' Bridget
cried suddenly, 'she's all blue, so she is.' "

The death of a baby, of course, is an unbearably sad thing, and surely the fallout
of that death will come in the next chapter. The grieving parents, the lost
possibilities. But no. Because, in the next chapter, the road is open, and Sylvie,
who has just given birth, asks, "A girl, Dr. Fellowes? May I see her?" To which he
replies, " 'Yes, Mrs. Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl.' Sylvie thought Dr.
Fellowes might be over-egging the pudding with his alliteration. He was not one for
bonhomie at the best of times."

Kate Atkinson is also the author of Started Early, Took My Dog.

Courtesy Hachette Book Group
But the exaggerated buoyancy of the doctor is meant to contrast with the gloom of
the previous version of the delivery. This is arch but serious stuff, and for a
while there, it's hard to know how Atkinson wants her readers to feel about it.

But I kept on reading because I suspected, this being Kate Atkinson, that it would
transform itself, and it certainly did. Ursula Todd — who happens to be the woman
in the cafe, as well as the baby turning blue, and the baby not turning blue — is
the novel's main character. In a sense she's meant to be you — just another soul
who has the misfortune of being born, living and getting caught in the dangerous
machinery of history.

And the dangers abound. Ursula is raped and impregnated — unless, wait, she isn't
raped and impregnated at all. For in another version she manages to rebuff her
would-be attacker, and in yet another version, the moment between her and this same
man turns out to be merely lightly amorous. At one point, Atkinson places Ursula in
prewar Germany, where she befriends a young Eva Braun; and then, during the war,
she's seen working in London on a rescue unit, grimly coping with its everyday
shocks and horrors. In an alternate reality, Ursula works in wartime intelligence.
What impresses me about this flip book of nonstop scenarios — in wartime and
peacetime — is not only how absorbing they are, but how brave Atkinson is to have
written them. After all, there really isn't much recent precedent for a major,
serious yet playfully experimental novel with a female character at its center.
Good for her to have given us one; we needed it.

Life after life grind on for Ursula and all the members of her family, who, though
their outcomes change, remain roughly the same people throughout the book. Maurice,
the horrible brother no one can stand, is horrible in every version of this story.
And Ursula, while not a world-beater except perhaps in her big Hitler moment, is
always human and readable.

In real life, people inevitably have to make choices about how to live. (You can't
live all ways.) But Kate Atkinson didn't choose one path for Ursula Todd, and she
didn't need to. Instead, she opened her novel outward, letting it breathe
unrestricted, all the while creating a strong, inviting draft of something that
feels remarkably like life.

Meg Wolitzer is the author of The Interestings, which comes out in April.member
anything. A man kept calling her out of the darkness, 'Come on Susie, don't go to
sleep now,' and 'How about we have a nice cuppa when we get out of here, eh,
Susie?' She was choking on ash or dust. She sensed something inside her was torn
beyond repair."

This is a wonderful book, but I found myself asking certain questions: did Ursula
remember all the versions of her own story, and did she regret not shooting Hitler
when she had the chance? I understood, of course, that Atkinson is making various
points about human life – that they hang by a thread and that our identities are
not necessarily fixed (and could easily have been other); that our destiny is
uncertain; that writers control their characters and can produce many versions of
them – but this isn't sufficiently compelling to intrude into a truly great family
saga. The virtuoso creation of home-counties domesticity and the wide-ranging
sensitivity of Atkinson's mind – ever alert to voice, to changing times, to the
faltering class system, to the horrors of war, to changing styles of dress, and to
housekeeping and much more, the literary allusions – really don't require the
tricksy bits.

Maybe Atkinson was wary of writing something that might be recognisably a family
novel – too ordinary. If that was the case, she had no need to worry. There is no
question that Atkinson is a superb writer and this Costa prize-winner is remarkable
– joyful, moving, perceptive and quietly funny.

Flannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end,
though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to
believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning,
plus several more middles ... and why not have a beginning again?

What she's done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what
makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the
progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even
harder to produce: a fully-realized world. Atkinson not only invites readers in but
also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and
instead accept what a novel can be.

When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep
going. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me — maybe I was just
dumb. In the opening pages, in a German cafe in November 1930, a woman raises a gun
and shoots Adolf Hitler. Gamely anticipating the consequences of that action — even
if they held the possibility of Twilight Zone cheesiness — I turned the page, only
to find that there were no consequences, at least not yet, for the clock had turned
back 20 years and the action had moved to another locale.

Sign Up For The Books Newsletter

Get book recommendations, reviews, author interviews and more, sent weekly.
E-mail address
What's your email?
SUBSCRIBE
By subscribing, you agree to NPR's terms of use and privacy policy.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of
Service apply.
Now it's England in February 1910, and a baby is about to be born, but the doctor
hasn't arrived yet: " 'Dr. Fellowes should have been here,' Sylvie moaned. 'Why
isn't he here yet? Where is he?' ... 'Yer man'll be stuck in the snow, I expect,
ma'm,' " says Bridget, the maid. And then, moments later: " 'Oh, ma'am,' Bridget
cried suddenly, 'she's all blue, so she is.' "

The death of a baby, of course, is an unbearably sad thing, and surely the fallout
of that death will come in the next chapter. The grieving parents, the lost
possibilities. But no. Because, in the next chapter, the road is open, and Sylvie,
who has just given birth, asks, "A girl, Dr. Fellowes? May I see her?" To which he
replies, " 'Yes, Mrs. Todd, a bonny, bouncing baby girl.' Sylvie thought Dr.
Fellowes might be over-egging the pudding with his alliteration. He was not one for
bonhomie at the best of times."

Kate Atkinson is also the author of Started Early, Took My Dog.

Courtesy Hachette Book Group
But the exaggerated buoyancy of the doctor is meant to contrast with the gloom of
the previous version of the delivery. This is arch but serious stuff, and for a
while there, it's hard to know how Atkinson wants her readers to feel about it.

But I kept on reading because I suspected, this being Kate Atkinson, that it would
transform itself, and it certainly did. Ursula Todd — who happens to be the woman
in the cafe, as well as the baby turning blue, and the baby not turning blue — is
the novel's main character. In a sense she's meant to be you — just another soul
who has the misfortune of being born, living and getting caught in the dangerous
machinery of history.

And the dangers abound. Ursula is raped and impregnated — unless, wait, she isn't
raped and impregnated at all. For in another version she manages to rebuff her
would-be attacker, and in yet another version, the moment between her and this same
man turns out to be merely lightly amorous. At one point, Atkinson places Ursula in
prewar Germany, where she befriends a young Eva Braun; and then, during the war,
she's seen working in London on a rescue unit, grimly coping with its everyday
shocks and horrors. In an alternate reality, Ursula works in wartime intelligence.
What impresses me about this flip book of nonstop scenarios — in wartime and
peacetime — is not only how absorbing they are, but how brave Atkinson is to have
written them. After all, there really isn't much recent precedent for a major,
serious yet playfully experimental novel with a female character at its center.
Good for her to have given us one; we needed it.

Life after life grind on for Ursula and all the members of her family, who, though
their outcomes change, remain roughly the same people throughout the book. Maurice,
the horrible brother no one can stand, is horrible in every version of this story.
And Ursula, while not a world-beater except perhaps in her big Hitler moment, is
always human and readable.

In real life, people inevitably have to make choices about how to live. (You can't
live all ways.) But Kate Atkinson didn't choose one path for Ursula Todd, and she
didn't need to. Instead, she opened her novel outward, letting it breathe
unrestricted, all the while creating a strong, inviting draft of something that
feels remarkably like life.

Meg Wolitzer is the author of The Interestings, which comes out in April.

The novel has an unusual structure, repeatedly looping back in time to describe
alternative possible lives for its central character, Ursula Todd, who is born on
11 February 1910 to an upper-middle-class family near Chalfont St Peter in
Buckinghamshire. In the first version, she is strangled by her umbilical cord and
stillborn. In later iterations of her life she dies as a child - drowning in the
sea, or when saved from that, by falling to her death from the roof when trying to
retrieve a fallen doll. Then there are several sequences when she falls victim to
the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 - which repeats itself again and again, though she
already has a foreknowledge of it, and only her fourth attempt to avert catching
the flu succeeds.

Then there is an unhappy life where she is traumatized by being raped, getting
pregnant and undergoing an illegal abortion, and finally becoming trapped in a
highly oppressive marriage, and being killed by her abusive husband when trying to
escape. In later lives she averts all this by being preemptively aggressive to the
would-be rapist. In between, she also uses her half-memory of earlier lives to
avert the neighbour girl Nancy being raped and murdered by a child molester. The
saved Nancy would have an important role in Ursula's later life(s), forming a deep
love relationship with Ursula's brother Teddy, and would become a main character in
the sequel, A God in Ruins.

Still later iterations of Ursula's her life take her into World War Two, where she
works in London for the War Office and repeatedly witnesses the results of the
Blitz including a direct hit on a bomb shelter in Argyll Road in November 1940 -
with herself being among the victims in some lives and among the rescuers in
others. There is also a life in which she marries a German in 1934, is unable to
return to England and experiences the war in Berlin under the allied bombings.

Ursula eventually comes to realize, through a particularly strong sense of deja vu,
that she has lived before, and decides to try to prevent the war by killing Adolf
Hitler in late 1930.[1] Memory of her earlier lives also provides the means of
doing that: the knowledge that by befriending Eva Braun - in 1930 an obscure shop
girl in Munich - Ursula would be able to get close to Hitler with a loaded gun in
her bag; the inevitable price, however, is to be herself shot to death by Hitler's
Nazi followers immediately after killing him.

What is left unclear - since each of the time sequences end with "darkness" and
Ursula's death and does not show what followed - is whether in fact all these lives
actually occurred in an objective world, or were only subjectively experienced by
her. Specifically, whether or not her killing Hitler in 1930 actually produced an
altered timeline where the Nazis did not take power in Germany, or possibly took
power under a different leader with a different course of the Second World War.
Though in her 1967 incarnation Ursula speculates with her nephew on this "might
have been", the book avoids giving a clear answer.

new
“After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote. How obvious, one
might think. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in
Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life.”

Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. She dies when she is being
born, on a snowy night in 1910. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and
contracts influenza. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. She is killed
during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins
of Berlin in 1945. Each time Ursula dies, Atkinson — a British writer best known
here as the author of “Case Histories,” the first in a series of highly
entertaining mysteries featuring the sleuth Jackson Brodie — resurrects her and
sets her on one of the many alternate courses that her destiny might have taken.

A great deal of experience, and 20th-century history, transpires in the intervals

separating Ursula’s sudden and often violent exits from the world of the living.
The novel begins with a scene in which she assassinates Hitler. Her serial and
parallel existences take her through two brutal world wars and well into the 1960s.
But each turn in her story is, like the end(s) of her life, subject to revision. As
a teenager living at Fox Corner, her family home in the British countryside, she is
raped and becomes pregnant, but in another version the encounter with her American
attacker involves little more than a stolen kiss. A bullying first marriage is
endured, and its ensuing tragedy wiped clean from the slate. Romances begin and
end, then begin again, taking different trajectories.

Ursula learns about her father’s death in a letter she receives in Germany, where
she has been trapped by the outbreak of World War II, and where she befriends Eva
Braun and visits the Führer at his mountaintop retreat. But in a different
rendition, she is in England when her father succumbs to a heart attack, and with
her family for his funeral. A murdered child turns out not to be dead. Or is she? A
dog named Lucky makes cameo appearances that the reader can’t help seeing through
the scrim of the transient but critical roles that the dog has already played in
the plot.
The mostly brief chapters, dated by month and year, keep us oriented amid the rapid
chronological shifts backward and forward. And there are several relatively still
points around which the whirling machinery turns. Sylvie, Ursula’s mother, remains
dependably snobbish and caustic, just as Ursula’s free-spirited Aunt Izzie
continues to provide shelter, help and the example of nervy rebelliousness for
which such aunts are created in fiction and film. In several of her lives, Ursula
attends secretarial school in London and travels in Continental Europe.

Atkinson’s juggling a lot at once — and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from
becoming confusing. Even so, reading the book is a mildly vertiginous experience,
rather like using the “scenes” function on a DVD to scramble the film’s original
order. At times “Life After Life” suggests a cross between Noël Coward’s “Brief
Encounter” and those interactive “hypertext” novels whose computer-savvy readers
can determine the direction of the story.The first few reverses are startling, but
after a while it begins to seem quite normal (if still pleasantly jolting) when a
character who, we think, has left the narrative forever reappears in another guise
or is seen from a new perspective. And the surprise of what happens is less intense
than the unexpectedness of what doesn’t happen: what seemingly irreversible damage
is repaired with the “delete” key.

In theory, this narrative method should violate one of the most basic contracts a
writer makes with the reader: the promise that what happens to the characters
actually does (insofar as the author knows) happen to the characters. But it’s
interesting to note how quickly Atkinson’s new rules replace the old ones, how
assuredly she rewrites the contract: we will stay tuned as long as she keeps us
interested and curious about what all this is adding up to. Each tragedy continues
to surprise and disturb us, even as we learn to expect that the victim will be all
right in the morning.
Inevitably, metaphysics creeps in. We travel and return to the psychiatrist’s
office where Ursula’s parents take her, at age 10, for sessions in which the
conversation touches on reincarnation and the nature of time. When Dr. Kellet
suggests that the moody, spacey Ursula may be remembering other lives and asks her
to draw something, she produces a snake with its tail in its mouth. “It’s a symbol
representing the circularity of the universe,” the doctor explains. “Time is a
construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.”

Atkinson is having fun with this, as she often seems to be in the novel, which is
as much about writing as it is about anything else. So many excellent books are
read and quoted by its characters that the novel could provide a useful
bibliography. Here’s a partial list of writers alluded to in these pages: Austen,
Byron, Keats, Eliot (George and T. S.), Dante, Dickens, Donne, Marvell, D. H.
Lawrence, Ibsen and Marlowe.

It crosses one’s mind that Ursula’s marriage to the controlling and bullying Derek
Oliphant, fervently at work on his textbook about the Tudors and the Plantagenets,
seems familiar. Eventually, Ursula discovers that her husband’s book is basically
nonsense, and comes to the conclusion that fans of “Middlemarch” will already have
reached. “She had married a Casaubon, she realized.”

Ursula takes “The Magic Mountain” with her when she goes up to the Berghof with Eva
Braun, only to be informed, by a “nice” officer in the Wehrmacht, that Mann’s novel
is one of the books that have been banned by the Nazi Party. And one of the dark
plot threads running through the weft of the novel — the disappearance of a little
girl — recalls Atkinson’s own “Case Histories.”

“Life After Life” makes the reader acutely conscious of an author’s power: how much
the novelist can do. Kill a character, bring her back. Start a world war or prevent
one. Bomb London, destroy Berlin. Write a scene from one point of view, then
rewrite it from another. Try it this way, then that. Make your character perish in
a bombed-out building during the blitz, then make her part of the rescue team that
(in a scene with the same telling details) tries unsuccessfully to save her.

One of the things I like most about British mystery novels (including Kate
Atkinson’s)is the combination of good writing and a certain theatrical bravado.
Their authors enjoy showing us how expertly they can construct a puzzle, then solve
it: the literary equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. “Life After Life”
inspires a similar sort of admiration, as Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the
apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page,
and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like
life, singular and final.