Equally moving and equally marvellous in the cleverness of its construction - not just at the level of the repeating and interleaved time periods that it covers, but also in the neatness of how things bridge and foreshadow across them and the way that this carefully both reveals and conceals and serves the novel's purposes - on this second pass.
The jumping backwards and forwards, when it occurs, is used to support the unavoidable linearity of the reader's experience - the first time we reach 1947 and the desolation of survival in that cold flat, for example - and the building urgency of Ursula's growing awareness of the cycle that she is in, life after life, is modulated to perfection, from the dark intimations that increasingly creep over her at crucial moments (gaining an extra charge from the way that we all have such seemingly irrational presentiments of doom from time to time) to her sense, the first time she chooses death over life, that "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed", to 'the end of the beginning' amidst the electrifying realisation, seemingly fully conscious for the first time.
(first time)
The jumping backwards and forwards, when it occurs, is used to support the unavoidable linearity of the reader's experience - the first time we reach 1947 and the desolation of survival in that cold flat, for example - and the building urgency of Ursula's growing awareness of the cycle that she is in, life after life, is modulated to perfection, from the dark intimations that increasingly creep over her at crucial moments (gaining an extra charge from the way that we all have such seemingly irrational presentiments of doom from time to time) to her sense, the first time she chooses death over life, that "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed", to 'the end of the beginning' amidst the electrifying realisation, seemingly fully conscious for the first time.
'It's a terrible thing,' Pamela said to her. 'But you're not responsible, why are you behaving as though you are?'
Because she was. She knew it now.
Something was riven, broken, a lightning fork cutting open a swollen sky.And then the lyricism - what feels like a culmination, at the end of that section in which everything seems to race towards its end.
It's time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.
She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.And you follow this progression, by now seemingly teleological, to what must be the best version of that practice towards perfection. Only, to learn in those final pages, it's not - and what is instead (or at least the version of it with which Atkinson, although perhaps not Ursula, chooses to end, is more poignant by far.
He shouted something to her across the pub but his words were lost in the hubbub. She thought it was 'Thank you,' but she might have been wrong.Other thoughts: Sylvie remains elusive, those sighting in London with another man in 1923 and her familiarity with the imperial hotel in Vienna ultimately unexplained despite the perspective into her inner life and agency that we're granted; Hugh's kindness is a kindness to the reader; it's a clearly feminist book in its rendition of the many violences that Ursula suffers at the hands of men and the ways that her choices lead down better paths; and there's empathy everywhere and not least in the sections in bombed-out Berlin.
(first time)
