Kate Atkinson's were the first novels that I can recall causing me to feel intensely at once sad and happy - or, at least, that prompted me to consciously articulate my responses in those terms. This would've been Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Human Croquet, both of which I blew through either late high school or some time very early in uni; I have a memory of standing in a bookstore with Kim, her excitedly handing one of the other of them to me (I can't remember which) to read its first pages. And there was also Emotionally Weird, which I'd clean forgotten till looking at old extemporanea entries was partly responsible for my decision to drop psychology after one semester and take up literature instead (good choice, 17/18 year old me) - I think maybe one of its more charismatic characters was a lit/philosophy major? And, a bit later, I read a couple of the Jackson Brodie ones and liked them too (1, 2)...
It's been a while since I read anything of hers, though, so discovering that Life after Life was a lovely, fluent, novel of ideas, characters, story and society was like discovering her anew, as well as being a wonderful reading experience in its own right. The concept - Ursula Dodds is born, lives and dies over and over, each time learning from the last - could easily have been distancing, gratuitous, naff, but instead it and Ursula feel real ... I felt the fragility and value of life, the enveloping presence of death, the inchoate and inarticulable terror that Ursula experiences when approaching pivotal moments in her multiple lives, as learned and dimly retained from past go-arounds.
The writing and the craft are important, and there's an easy allusiveness in Atkinson's wielding of her motifs (the snow amidst which Ursula's born in England 1910, the animals and especially foxes and dogs who appear everywhere in substance and in names) and rendition of settings and events (notably the London Blitz, in which Ursula dies over and over). And, as always, her writing affects me - the focus on death and its many forms is far from a structural or technical gimmick but rather integral to the profound thematic concerns of the book. And the ending is just right: Sylvie's practice makes perfect and the wider implications that it suddenly throws open; the re-take on what comprises a happy ending and the kinds of choices that an individual might make to reach one; and finally, Mrs Haddock, ever stranded in her pub, not going anywhere tonight.
It's been a while since I read anything of hers, though, so discovering that Life after Life was a lovely, fluent, novel of ideas, characters, story and society was like discovering her anew, as well as being a wonderful reading experience in its own right. The concept - Ursula Dodds is born, lives and dies over and over, each time learning from the last - could easily have been distancing, gratuitous, naff, but instead it and Ursula feel real ... I felt the fragility and value of life, the enveloping presence of death, the inchoate and inarticulable terror that Ursula experiences when approaching pivotal moments in her multiple lives, as learned and dimly retained from past go-arounds.
The writing and the craft are important, and there's an easy allusiveness in Atkinson's wielding of her motifs (the snow amidst which Ursula's born in England 1910, the animals and especially foxes and dogs who appear everywhere in substance and in names) and rendition of settings and events (notably the London Blitz, in which Ursula dies over and over). And, as always, her writing affects me - the focus on death and its many forms is far from a structural or technical gimmick but rather integral to the profound thematic concerns of the book. And the ending is just right: Sylvie's practice makes perfect and the wider implications that it suddenly throws open; the re-take on what comprises a happy ending and the kinds of choices that an individual might make to reach one; and finally, Mrs Haddock, ever stranded in her pub, not going anywhere tonight.
