He even gets his customary piccalilli as a reward. Darkness fell."īut 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. Stopped suddenly like a bird dropped from the sky.
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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. The umbilical cord is wrapped around her neck. Soon after, Atkinson reverts to Ursula's birth in 1910 in the Todd family home, Fox Corner. 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. To prove the point, Kate Atkinson gives many of the characters a second chance. Thank you to Random House Canada for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.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.
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However, the story failed to live up to the promise of its concept. Also to be fair, Atkinson is a talented writer, and even with the concerns I pointed out, I was compelled to keep reading. To be fair, I don’t know what else Atkinson could have done with the story that I would have liked better. Life After Life has an interesting, and admittedly ambitious, premise. After all, and understandably, when the protagonist lives over and over again, how can you end it with a satisfying climax? What began as Ursula’s very personal, private story shifted to a more public sphere, and to me, it felt tacked on. I’ve suspended my disbelief throughout many of her lifetimes, as she learns each time and improves her next incarnation, but this just seemed not to fit. The superhero/avenging angel twist is jarring, particularly after the quotidian nature of Ursula’s earlier experiences through her multiple lifetimes. Worse, the narrative then suggests that Ursula is born over and over in order to fulfill a purpose, and until she accomplishes this purpose, she is doomed to keep repeating the cycle. At one point, when Ursula was trapped in an abusive relationship - a horrible situation, and one that would normally get me all worked up - all I could think was, how long until she dies in this life and starts again? Each vignette is compelling, sometimes tragic, on its own, but knowing there’s the safety net of reincarnation made it difficult to care. Unfortunately, this also diminishes much of the emotional impact. And despite Ursula’s limited understanding of her situation, she instinctively knows enough, for example, to discourage an overly aggressive man from kissing her the first time. This, of course, is part of the conceit - the whole point of being able to live the same life over and over again is the ability to rectify your errors from the previous attempt. Atkinson as well allows Ursula to live a bit longer each time, developing a bit more complexity and depth with each succeeding narrative. She doesn’t completely understand it, but she does sense there’s something more going on than ordinary deja vu. The story does pick up around the halfway mark, when Ursula herself becomes somewhat aware of her situation. There are moments I caught myself waiting for her to die, and I groaned when we returned to the moment of her birth - not again! On one hand, I do sympathize - Atkinson reveals how tired Ursula feels, as if she had “lived a hundred years.” On the other hand, reading about her string of reincarnations is wearying as well. In a later scene, another character asks Ursula how she thought it would be like living your life over and over (look! clever meta moment!), and she responded that it sounded exhausting. It is not so much unbelievable as it is predictable.
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The story starts off slow - in order to establish Ursula’s unique situation, Atkinson gives her the unluckiest childhood ever - accidents and ailments befall her over and over again, only to have “darkness fall” over her, and loop us right back into that cold, snowy night in 1910 when she is born again. Unfortunately, the concept behind this novel is much more compelling than the novel itself. She lives a few years, then dies in an accident. The narrative loops back a few hours earlier, again, we see Ursula being born, and this time, she survives. Flash backwards about twenty years, and Ursula is just being born in a quiet English town. What if you could live your life over and over, until you got it right? This intriguing premise informs Kate Atkinson’s new novel Life After Life, which begins with a woman named Ursula in November 1930, shooting Adolf Hitler.