Reading: Life After Life

I’ve written about books about books and metafiction here before. And now, thanks to the wonderful Kate Atkinson and her book Life After Life, I do so again. The premise of the new book is this: what if a character could live her life over and over, until she gets it right? In this case, the main character, Ursula, born to an upper class English family in 1910, dies at birth, is rescued at birth, drowns and then doesn’t drown, and so on. Atkinson is such a good writer that the retelling of Ursula’s life–the different choices she makes, the nuanced repetition and subsequent changes in dialogue–are fascinating and enjoyable. We get tragedy and then relief.

Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking about the fleeting, random quality of life that governs us all. How a single incident, a single moment, being in the wrong place at the right time or the right place at the right time, changes your life. Atkinson has addressed some of this before, the randomness of life. The fact that coincidence is part of life. But never so clearly as this project.

What is so “meta” about all this, is how present the storyteller is in the construction of all the events. By starting over, by rearranging events, this is a book that consistently refers to itself and makes it hard not to think about the storyteller, the string pulling author. What is she up to her? Playing with the form of the novel, retelling the story, mashing up time, ignoring the rules of life? And yet, the story-telling and the voices and observations are so sharp and compassionate, you get sucked right into the heroic Ursula and her huge family as if it were a great English classic.