The Best Version?

[mtvessel]

Mar 2017
Life after Life - Kate Atkinson - Black Swan, 2013
* * *
Uh oh, another mainstream writer has decided to write a book based on a science fiction idea. To be fair, however, it is a relatively unused one - Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. SF writers have, of course, been playing with this idea for years - however, I am hard pressed to think of a classic SF novel that specifically uses parallel versions of its characters in any meaningful way (by contrast, genre TV and movies from Star Trek's mirror universe onwards have used them so much that they are now cliche). So all credit to Kate Atkinson for at least giving the idea a go. But I wish she hadn't used it as the basis for what turns out to be yet another dreary novel about the Blitz.

A summary of the first few chapters will give you a feel for how it works. In the harsh winter of 1915, a child, Ursula Todd is born. The doctor cannot make it through the snow and she dies. In the next section, the doctor arrives and all is well, but during a summer holiday the five year old Ursula is swept out to sea and drowns. In the third section, a passing painter sees the drowning child and rescues her, but the eight year old Ursula falls off a roof during a game with her brother that goes horribly wrong.

And so forth. I should say that it is cleverly written and less mechanical than this precis makes it seem. Atkinson goes back to the start of Ursula's life at each reset, but this is never boring because she adds a few telling details each time. She also rings the changes - Ursula doesn't necessarily live longer with each reset, as the consequences of the fatal decision or event sometimes take a while to catch up with her.

Later on, Ursula develops a vague awareness that she has had previous lives, but that is about as far as the science fictional element of the story goes. It is a good device for exploring early- to mid-twentieth century life, and some of the alternative histories are quite interesting. I particularly liked the one where Ursula marries a German academic and ends up in the coterie surrounding Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler. But far too much of the book is set in wartime London, and I have read at least two other stories - Connie Willis' Blackout and All Clear and Sarah Waters' The Night Watch - which use time-twistiness as a way into the Blitz better than this one. Both those books had something to say and this one, I felt, didn't. At one point, Ursula asks the book's key question - "what if you could live your life over and over again until you get it right?" - but the final version of Ursula's life didn't feel right or satisfying to me.