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.” 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. “She had married a Casaubon, she realized.” Eventually, Ursula discovers that her husband’s book is basically nonsense, and comes to the conclusion that fans of “Middlemarch” will already have reached. 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. Here’s a partial list of writers alluded to in these pages: Austen, Byron, Keats, Eliot (George and T. So many excellent books are read and quoted by its characters that the novel could provide a useful bibliography. “Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.”Ītkinson 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. “It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe,” the doctor explains. 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. 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. 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. 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. In several of her lives, Ursula attends secretarial school in London and travels in Continental Europe.Ītkinson’s juggling a lot at once - and nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming confusing. 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. And there are several relatively still points around which the whirling machinery turns. The mostly brief chapters, dated by month and year, keep us oriented amid the rapid chronological shifts backward and forward. Romances begin and end, then begin again, taking different trajectories. A bullying first marriage is endured, and its ensuing tragedy wiped clean from the slate. 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. But each turn in her story is, like the end(s) of her life, subject to revision.
#Life after life novel serial
Her serial and parallel existences take her through two brutal world wars and well into the 1960s. The novel begins with a scene in which she assassinates Hitler.
#Life after life novel series
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.Ī 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. She is killed during the German bombing of London in World War II and ends her life in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. Later, she commits suicide and is murdered. As a child, she drowns, falls off a roof and contracts influenza. She dies when she is being born, on a snowy night in 1910. Its heroine, Ursula Todd, keeps dying, then dying again. But the one-time-only nature of death is anything but self-evident in Kate Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life.” “After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote.