800th entry: Life After Life, Book After Book

the book: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

published 2013

Pamela liked to dress Bosun up in an old bonnet and shawl and pretend that he was her baby, although they had a real baby now – a boy, Edward. Everyone called him Teddy. Their mother seemed taken by surprise by the new baby. ‘I don’t know where he came from.’ Sylvie had a laugh like a hiccup. She was taking tea on the lawn with two schoolfriends ‘from her London days’ who had come to inspect the new arrival. All three of them wore lovely flimsy dresses and big straw hats and sat in the wicker chairs, drinking tea and eating Mrs Glover’s sherry cake. Ursula and Bosun sat on the grass a polite distance away, hoping for crumbs. Maurice had put up a net and was trying, not very enthusiastically, to teach Pamela how to play tennis. Ursula was occupied in making a daisy-chain coronet for Bosun. She had stubby, clumsy fingers. Sylvie had the long, deft fingers of an artist or a pianist. She played on the piano in the drawing room (‘ Chopin’).

observations: There was originally a faint disappointment that Kate Atkinson hadn’t produced another Jackson Brodie book, but now, not a word of complaint about this superbly clever novel: inventive, compulsively readable and beautifully worked-out - an ideal choice to mark 800 entries on the blog.

The set-up is well-known now (and instantly obvious once you start reading) so this is not a spoiler: the book tells the story of Ursula, born into middle-class comfort in 1910. But Atkinson imagines many different lives for her – so she dies (‘darkness fell’) and then we hear another version of her story, where she may live longer, or for less time. The threads are woven together – as the chapter ends you have to check where the next one will put Ursula, which version of the story this is. But I didn’t find any difficulty with that at all – there was the odd unresolved moment (what about that gold cigarette case?) and a few questions left over at the end (who was Angela?) but that was fine. It seemed as though Atkinson had done all the work, so we could enjoy the end result. And also, enjoy the jokes, the subversive comments, the hints and allusions. Lines like this: ‘Sylvie was pleasantly surprised by her elder daughter’s capacity for monotony. It would stand her in good stead for her life to come.’ The little boy ‘hunched against the weather, a small, stalwart Knight Templar in his knitted grey balaclava.’ The characters, despite all the changes in their fates, are real and knowable.

Ursula sometimes has glimpses of her other lives, and these sections are particularly compelling, as she tries to change the future, without really knowing what she is doing.

She might be like Unity Mitford (both have a sister called Pamela) – a friend of Hitler. And like Jessica Mitford, who had a plan to kill Hitler. There are memories of Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman who lived in Germany throughout the Second World War. The descriptions of the war – in Berlin and in London – are astonishing, they carry complete conviction, and surely must be the result of considerable research. (The first floor lounge of the Charing Cross Hotel was obviously a feature of those days - I had recently been reading about it in Matthew Sweet’s The West End Front).

Altogether, a stunning book, highly recommended.

And as Ursula has many lives, a few pictures of garden tea-parties seemed justified. Bottom to top: by Edward Cucuel (who painted a lot of women in a lot of gardens), by Frederick Frieseke (featured before on the blog here and here),  and by Wilson Henry Irvine (as blog friend Lucy Fisher said here recently, ‘Those American three-name painters are so good, aren't they!)’ Surprisingly hard to find straw hats in pictures of the right era – they may not have known about melanoma, but did they not want pale complexions?