What Book to Read?

Kate Atkinson started her writing career with novels best described as social satire; you can read my review of one of them here. She then wrote a series of four books featuring Jackson Brodie, an ex-policeman turned private detective, though in my opinion, they are best characterised just as ‘novels’ rather than crime stories. You can see why I think this from my reviews – here, here, here and here.  A TV series, based on the first three books, is reviewed here. I can see that Atkinson wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed as a crime writer, and with this book, she has certainly struck out on a different path. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the Jackson Brodie ones.

The structure of the story seems to me something like a cross between parallel universes and the road not taken. (There are lots of literary references in the story, but I didn’t notice one to Robert Frost). The story follows the life of Ursula Todd and her family, but not in a linear way; it constantly jumps back and forward in time. This is because Atkinson continually diverts into alternate paths of what might have happened if things had been slightly different. This involves, for example, going back several times to Ursula’s birth in 1910; each version is different. And so are the versions of what else happens to her, and to others in the story. Sometimes events come full circle, other times the outcome is totally different.

Not surprisingly, since the characters don’t know that they are existing in multiple versions, there are lots of references to the inevitability of things as they are. (There is an exception to this, which I’ll talk about later.)  A career suggestion not taken leads Ursula to the thought: ‘That would have been a quite different life, perhaps a better one. Of course, there was no way of knowing these things.’ ‘One cannot look backwards, only forwards. What has passed has passed for ever,’ says another character. ‘No point in thinking,’ Ursula says briskly, ‘you’ve just got to get on with life …. We only have one, after all’. But that’s not the case here; this is a game that Atkinson is playing, and which she invites the reader to share.

A book called Life After Life is inevitably going to have a lot about death in it, and several of the characters die in various of the scenarios, though they avoid it in others. Comments that are innocuous at first sight thus assume a greater significance in the light of what the reader knows, such as ‘And life can be very short’. It certainly can in this story. ‘Such a fine line between living and dying.’ ‘Part of him died during the war. This was just the rest of him catching up.’ Comments like these, spoken in passing by the characters, form a kind of backdrop to the action – especially as some of it takes place during times of war. The author constantly juxtaposes the natural ignorance of the characters as to their fate with other versions of what becomes of them – or rather what the author choses will become of them. So when she says of an unpleasant character ‘He didn’t belong in Holland Park, but rather in some dark place of the imagination’, that imagination is of course her own.

The exception I mentioned above is that Ursula herself is sometimes dimly aware of ‘seepage’ from other scenarios. On one occasion, ‘A wave of something horrible washed over her, a great dread’, and she acts to avert what has happened in another scenario. Afterwards, she is ‘overwhelmed by a relief as inexplicable as the panic’. ‘Don’t you sometimes wonder,’ she says, ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean’, and this speculation leads to one of the more dramatic events in the book. She thinks she has been places before, and remembers details apparently unrelated to her present life. These are dismissed by others as ‘déjà vu’. ‘It’s a trick of the mind,’ says her mother. It’s also a trick of the author.

The problem for me is that I don’t know what all this adds up to. Atkinson offers one possible explanation of Ursula’s perceptions through the psychiatrist, Dr Kellet, who says in response to her déjà vu that ‘Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now’. He also introduces Nietzsche’s concept of ‘amor fati’: ‘that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.’ But Ursula has her own alternative suggestion: ‘Time isn’t circular … It’s like a palimpsest’ (ie where the older version might show through the new one). The blurb on the book’s cover suggests that you might learn from having lived before, asking ‘What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?’ There are some indications that this is what Atkinson is testing out, arising partly from the structure she gives to the fragments of experience, and by the reiteration of the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’. But the seepage is minimal; I can’t see that the story is about ‘getting it right’. It’s certainly not groundhog day.

I accept that postmodern novelists play around with ideas about time, and emphasise the artifice that constitutes fiction. I know it doesn’t have to ‘add up’ to anything. I can also see that Atkinson may well have wanted to write something that was not bound by the need to resolve everything neatly at the end that characterises crime fiction. I still like the way she writes. But I wish that she’d made it a bit easier for me.

You can read more about Kate Atkinson here.