Life After Life
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By Kate Atkinson
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4 reviews
This is the winner costa novel award. What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
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We found that the start of this book was very difficult to get into as it was , by necessity, very start stop as the main protagonist dies quite regularly. Once we got past this part of the story there were only a few starts and stops as she dies and then starts her life over again. We felt that most of the different lives followed on logically, with each one getting her just that little bit further on in age. But there was one which appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the book that caught us all by surprise and seemed not to link in with the rest of the story.
The reading style of this book is very easy, it seems to flow as you're reading it. The writing style was very sparse, making very complex and disturbing elements seem very simple and almost beautiful. However, the starting and stopping and the differences between the different lives can make it difficult to remember the story line. It was also found that some of the storylines that were started just suddenly stopped and weren't gone into with as much detail as we as readers would have wanted.
We had a short discussion about whether the protagonist was aware of the way she was living her lives, sometimes she seemed to know more than others that she had lived this particular bit of her life before. It seemed like a really interesting premise for a story. We wondered whether if we were able to live our lives over and over again, firstly, would be accept that gift, or would we prefer to just do it the once. Secondly, if we accepted the gift would we want to be aware of living our lives over and over again or would we prefer to not know. We also wondered if making changes would make our lives any better, or any worse, or even affect those around us detrimentally. This led onto whether we actually are doing the second option and we just don't know that we're living our life over and over, and also whether anyone else in the book was doing this or just the main protagonist. At this point we started to feel confused and a little uncomfortable.
We all enjoyed the bits about the Second World War, epecially as it was shown from both sides of the divide and various different places. As we've already read some books about the war, mostly from the English or French viewpoints, it was a revelation to see if from the German perspective. Although some elements felt a little far-fetched, but this may be due to our own lack of knowledge of that side of the war.
Overall we gave this book 6 out of 10. The view was that the original story idea was good, and it went along quite well but the ending wasn't as good as we felt it could have been.
I picked up this book one slow evening after dinner, vaguely curious. I don't recall putting it down until the early hours of the morning. It completely ensared me, in the most delightful of ways. Life After Life is beautifully written, poignant yet witty, an absolute treat. I can't believe I did not read it sooner. There's nothing quite as lovely as sitting down with a book and becoming completely unaware of everything else, even the passage of time, in favour of that which you are reading. It is a true treasure. Life After Life depicts the story of young Ursula Todd, from her birth to her death... or rather, from all of her births to all of her deaths. Ursula, when darkness falls and the black bat claims her, is born once again. Each lifetime is marked by terror, a terrible deja-vu that plagues her to correct the mistakes of her past life. The wonderful thing is that Atkinson does not bore the reader - she somehow manages to make each chapter brilliant, despite the fact they are repetitions of the other. Overall it was a fantastic read and I can't wait to recommend it to others!
An excellent and thought provoking read. It described WW2 in such a way that made me think differently about the experience of living through it! The character's new lives and how she lived through each one was a very effective tool to explore many issues of the blitz, London bombings, rationing and the day to day experience of war.
