In Life After Life Ursula dies, over and over, and in many ways. If that sounds gruesome, well in some instances it is, and in some it isn’t, but it is always an end of life.
The story (stories) begins in 1910, with Ursula’s birth in the middle of a February snow storm. Sylvie, her mother, already has two children, Maurice and Pamela. Sylvie married Hugh while young and the first part of the book is as much Sylvie’s story as Ursula’s. She is smart and she was brought up in one of those unconventional artistic households that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century. You get the impression her own household is unconventional too, with the children running wild in the English countryside and Bridget, the Irish maid, and Mrs Glover, the indomitable cook, forming a family within a family.
Ursula, grows older. The tone shifts. Ursula is dimly aware that she has been here before and she starts trying to alter the future. Sylvie takes her to a psychiatrist, who becomes a good friend to Ursula, but from now on Ursula is center stage and Sylvie feels like a much less likeable character.
Ursula’s many lives span the first half of twentieth century Europe, those blood soaked years that took so many lives in first one horrific conflict and then another. The First World War, the Great War, takes place off stage but its returning, and not returning, soldiers loom large in Ursula’s life. The Second World War is her war, and is the heart of the book.
Atkinson tells the story of the Blitz from the point of view of the ARP (Air Raid Precaution service). Those are the people remembered for patrolling the streets yelling, “Turn that bloody light off!”. They did more than that. They pulled people out of bombed buildings, dead or alive. Atkinson takes you right with them.
‘They had to know the occupants of every building in their sector, whether they had a shelter of their own or whether they went to a public one or whether they too were fatalists and didn’t bother at all. They had to know if anyone had gone away or moved, married, had a baby, died. They had to know where the hydrants were, cul-de-sacs, narrow alleyways, cellars, rest centres.’
It is dangerous work, this work on the home front. Ursula works in London, as a civil-service clerk by day and an air raid warden by night. There are many ways to die.
‘The ground shook and another voice, that of someone working on the mound, yelled, “Watch out!”. She heard something shifting and a noise like displaced scree rattling and rolling down a mountain, the harbinger of an avalanche. Rubble, not scree. And a mound of it, not a mountain. The rubble that comprised the mound was all that was left of a house, or rather, several houses all ground and mashed into each other now. The rubble had been homes half an hour ago, now those same homes were just a hellish jumble of bricks, broken joists and floorboards, furniture, pictures, rugs, bedding, books, crockery, lino, glass. People. The crushed fragments of lives, never to be whole again.’
So why would you read a book full of such horrors, apart from the fact that, unlike so many of the many books about the Blitz, it does actually convey the horror? Well one reason is that the writing is masterly. Scene after scene unfolds seamlessly. The same scenes, but different. At one point Ursula tells her psychiatrist that her deja-vue sensations are a palimpsest, old parchment that’s been reused and retains traces of what it was before. This whole book is a palimpsest and it challenges you to decipher it.
The Todd family, Ursula’s family, is like the families that inhabited children’s fiction of the first half of the twentieth century. The children live in the world of The Railway Children and Swallows and Amazons; a world where siblings have a special bond and a depth of love not found elsewhere. A world where neighbouring children are both a given part of the environment and mysteriously other. A world of adventure.
But this is a book for adults and we get to know the parents too.
‘ “Do you hear something?” Sylvie asked. She was propped up on pillow, reading an early Forster. “The baby perhaps?”
Hugh cocked his head to one side. For a moment he reminded Sylvie of Bosun.
“No,” he said.
The baby slept all through the night usually. He was a cherub. But not in heaven. Thankfully.
“The best one yet,” Hugh said.
“Yes. I think we should keep this one.”
“He doesn’t look like me,” Hugh said.
“No,” she agreed amiably. “Nothing like you at all.” ’
Is Teddy the son of the handsome ploughman Sylvia lusts after in some versions of her life? We will never know. Atkinson doesn’t take us all the way down every intriguing turning. Sometimes the palimpsest is indecipherable. The infinite ways in which a story can unfold can exist in the reader’s imagination as well as in the writer’s.
Life After Life is the history of England in the first half of the twentieth century. A somewhat patrician history of a clever, educated and well-heeled family with a large house in the home counties, a solid source of funds, two servants and a sense of duty. It is a history where the women achieved the right to be educated, and to work independently, but not to rise to the top, or be free of repression and assault by men. You can rise in your profession or you can have a family, not both. Ursula’s older sister, Pamela, a trained scientist, settles for a family of four boys and a girl. Her eldest brother is a top civil servant. Her two younger ones fight in the war, officers of course.
Ursula? Ursula has many lives. But only one ends the book.
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