Life After Life

I stumbled onto this book pretty randomly, so I had no idea what I was getting into. The premise was interesting. The prose was phenomenal. The sense of history, superb. The characters were pretty good.

But then the plot and the ending. Given the stellar quality of the writing, I can’t wrap my head around the ending. Did I miss something? It just seemed to peter out.

About Life After Life

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can – will she?

~ Synopsis from goodreads

My Review

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The premise is interesting.

If you could live your life multiple times over – sometimes with some foreknowledge of future events, and sometimes not – what would someone be able to achieve? What are the different forks in the road? This premise has frequently been explored (a famous example is Sliding Doors).

Kate Atkinson takes this premise to the next level, having our protagonist, Ursula, have multiple deaths and multiple lives, each with different outcomes. Placing this scenario bang in the middle of the two world wars is another brilliant choice, ramping up the tension and the consequences of each small decision Ursula makes. Even small decisions, like staying overnight at her sister’s house vs going back home vs going to a boyfriend’s during London’s wartime Blitz, are life-or-death decisions.

I was fascinated by Ursula’s myriad lives, and Kate’s writing is fantastic. That said, there was a lot of repetition. Just Ursula’s different birth stories alone were exhausting.

And there is a whole section on Ursula’s life in Germany during wartime that felt tacked on, just to show the other side of the war and the suffering of the German people. By this time, I was fully vested in Ursula’s life in London, so being taken out of this place and plonked into Germany, where she’s friends with Eva Braun and dines with Hitler, was completely jarring.

I also recall feeling completely unsettled by the ending. I loved Ursula as a character, but I also wanted to know definitively what happened to her and which path she took, and I didn’t feel like I got that from the ending. The ending is elusive, and overall, this book is very sad. Most of Ursula’s lives are unhappy, and the ending seems to indicate that Ursula is going to begin again with yet another cycle of life.

So, yes, beautiful writing, characters, and setting. I loved the Englishness of the story, but would have liked it more if it had been a bit shorter, maybe fewer lives, and with a more definitive ending.