Book Review: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Life After Life 
By Kate Atkinson

Published by Reagan Arthur Books and distributed by Hachette, 2013

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

The first Kate Atkinson novel I ever read was Human Croquet (1997).  I checked it out from the library at my undergrad with no idea what it was going to be about (it was a hardcover with a plain red cover; my undergrad took off the dust jackets) because I liked the title.  I loved the book and sought out more Atkinson.  I haven’t yet read A God in Ruins (the companion volume to Life After Life) or Started Early, Took My Dog (the last Jackson Brody), but I’ve read all her others, with Emotionally Weird (2000) as my favorite.

I mention this because readers primarily familiar with Atkinson’s Jackson Brody novels might find Life after Life to be a departure for Atkinson, while to me it seems like a return to her previous topics and style.  Life After Life tells the story of Ursula Todd, who is born on a snowy night in 1910.  She dies at birth, but the novel immediately takes us to a different version of the story in which Ursula survives… for awhile.  Essentially, we get different versions of Ursula’s life, spanning the years from 1910 to 1967 with a particular focus on the various ways in which Ursula might live out World War II.  In one version, she marries a German man and mingles with Eva Braun; in another, she’s an air raid warden in London.  There are others, too, and in the various versions of her life Ursula lives anywhere from a few minutes to fifty-seven years.

Both Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird explore the possibilities for different outcomes based on minor differences in events, and Life After Life follows this pattern.  Unlike the previous two novels, however, it does so overtly.  Also, Ursula’s repeated rebirths are part of the events of the story.  That is, she sometimes makes decisions based on a feeling that she’s lived this particular life before, and at a couple of points she sees a psychiatrist for episodes of what she calls déjà vu.  We’re definitely supposed to believe that Ursula is reborn; it’s not just an academic exercise of telling the same story over and over with different endings.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this book.  I always enjoy Atkinson’s writing; she has a love of language that’s constantly evident in the way she uses words and, in Life after Life, in her characters’ love of poetry (after sex, for example, Ursula quotes Donne, prompting her paramour’s puzzlement; he has a more prosaic perception of the act and prompts a meditation by Ursula on a certain four-letter word).  Once Ursula manages to reach adulthood and once the birth story mostly goes away, Life after Life is well-paced, and I kept wondering how the next version of the story would allow her to survive her adventures (or not).  However, it took me forever to get into this book.  I kept picking it up and putting it down, largely because it gets kind of repetitive, especially at the beginning.  Yes, okay, Ursula was born in a snowstorm—we get it.

But perhaps the most compelling them in Life After Life has less to do with accidents of individual stories and individual choices than with the accidents that propel history.  At one point late in the novel, middle-aged Ursula says to her history-professor nephew, “But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?”  The possibility of a world without Hitler is one Ursula pursues—we see her pursuing it the novel’s opening chapter, in fact—but she only has the opportunity to pursue it, and only knows she should pursue it, because she has lived the war years multiple times.  In the same conversation, she quotes her friend Klara, who in one version of Ursula’s life tells her “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing…  If we all had it there would be no history to write about.”  Ursula has a lot of hindsight… or is it foresight?  In any case, Life After Life provides a compelling glimpse into how history affects individual lives and a compelling meditation on how individuals might affect history.

Review: The Gates of Rutherford by Elizabeth Cooke

The Gates of Rutherford

By Elizabeth Cooke

Published by Berkeley, September 1, 2015

Purchased and Read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

The Gates of Rutherford is the third in Elizabeth Cooke’s series of novels about the fictional English estate Rutherford Park.  Like Rutherford Park (2013) and The Wild Dark Flowers (2014), it takes us into the world of the aristocratic Cavendish family, their servants, and others with whom they come in contact during the tumultuous years surrounding World War I.

I was very excited for the release of this novel.  I’ve been waiting for it since last summer, when I read the sample in the back of The Wild Dark Flowers (Note to publishers: if you’re going to keep your readers waiting for a year, skip the sample—it’s just mean!).  For some reason, though, this book fell flat.  Maybe too much time has passed since I read the last book or maybe my expectations were just too high, but I was disappointed.

I think the problem lies in the (lack of) depth in both plot and characterization; there are many characters and plotlines in this book.  The most compelling story centers on the younger Cavendish daughter Charlotte, who rushes into marriage, regrets it, and discovers important truths about herself.  We also spend considerable time with various characters on the warfront in France and see how the war impacts sweethearts and prisoners on the homefront in England.  In one way or another, the stories all connect via Rutherford, but some of them, such as the German prisoner’s story, aren’t tied in very thoroughly.  Because there are so many characters, we don’t spend much time with any of them, so some of the stories are not well fleshed-out.

How much I enjoy a book usually comes down to how much I care about the characters.  In The Gates of Rutherford, I cared about Charlotte, but I suspect that’s because I got to know her in the earlier books, not because of Cooke’s characterization here.  This was even more true for Charlotte’s brother Harry and family retainer Jack Armitage, both of whom are fighting in the war.  Harry was frequently annoying here and we learned little about Jack except that he cares for horses and for Louisa Cavendish (Charlotte’s sister).  Had Gates been my only encounter with either character, I would have little reason beyond basic human decency to care whether they lived or died.

Ultimately, I liked learning more about what happened to the Cavendishes and their household, and I would certainly read another book in this series, if only to find out how Charlotte’s story progresses and how the family handles a major event at the end of Gates.  For Cooke’s existing fans, this was a good if not stellar entry in the series.  I doubt, however, that it will draw a lot of new readers to the series.