Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "kate-atkinson"
Kate Atkinson: "Life After Life" and "A God in Ruins"
When I had read reviews of Kate Atkinson’s “Life After Life” published in 2013, I had been unaware of her previous books and her renown as a writer of detective fiction. “Life After Life” sounded as if it addressed one of my life-long fascinations with “what if”: what if history, personal or planetary, took a slight turn away from the known road we are traveling on? The developments in theoretical physics over the last decades played beautifully into this obsession: what if there were, indeed, multiple universes in which all possible scenarios played out and there were alternative doppelgangers of us all in uncounted numbers following fates slightly, or entirely, different than the ones we know? “Life After Life” proposes just such a scenario: multiple times its heroine, Ursula Todd, dies in one iteration of her life but survives and continues in alternative ones. In fact at the very beginning of the novel Ursula’s life story ends on page 8 when she is born -- or rather not born -- in February of 1910, when the umbilical cord suffocates her while the doctor expected to attend the birth is mired in a snowstorm. A very short novel it would have made indeed. But Ursula has alternative lives. What if she didn’t die at birth? Or at age five did not fall to her death out of a window? Or as a young woman she did not succumb to the influenza epidemic? What if she survived the blitz in London? The entire history not only of herself, but everyone associated with her would have taken an entirely different direction. Ursula, the surviving versions of her, has a disturbing, vague feeling of having lived other lives, senses things about to occur and attempts to forestall events, unsuccessfully most of the time for her sixth sense is treated as a mental aberration needing therapy. The novel covers the period from Ursula’s birth (and presumed multiple survivals) to the end of the Second World War, and abounds in multiple fascinating characters, including the five Todd siblings, among them Teddy, the next-to-last child of Hugh and Sylvie Todd and much beloved by one and all.
It is Teddy who is the central character of “A God in Ruins”. Teddy, who, in Ursula’s story, had broken all hearts when he is assumed to have crashed in the plane he was piloting during the war, and yet who provides the uplifting moment, the provisional, partial “happy ending” by re-emerging in 1945 having in fact survived the crash, been taken prisoner in Germany and now returning to England. It is his subsequent life we are reading about in “A God in Ruins”. There are no alternative lives here: this is Teddy’s life. And what an eventful, long one it is: Teddy lives well into his nineties; in essence the novel covers a century, from Teddy’s birth in 1914 to his death in 2012, a period that produced unfathomable changes in the world as we know it. Needless to say, many of the people we met in “Life After Life” re-appear, for they are, to varying degrees of importance and permanence, part of Teddy’s life as well; in fact Ursula becomes a minor character, as if in one of her alternative lives. A central section of the book takes place while Teddy is a fighter pilot flying bombing missions over Germany: paradoxically it is that part of his life in which he feels most alive and most competent. While we follow him in the post war period to witness his marriage, fatherhood, grandfatherhood and struggles in trying to adjust to the changes encroaching on his world, he remains the warm center of the novel where the world of the next generations become increasingly alienating.
And at the very end, there is a twist, one I didn’t expect at all but in hindsight I should have. It is Kate Atkinson’s world after all. You will feel compelled, as I did, to return to “Life After Life” after you closed the last page of “A God in Ruins”, to double check details of Teddy’s life there. You will find that the prism changed again and light falls differently each time.
It is Teddy who is the central character of “A God in Ruins”. Teddy, who, in Ursula’s story, had broken all hearts when he is assumed to have crashed in the plane he was piloting during the war, and yet who provides the uplifting moment, the provisional, partial “happy ending” by re-emerging in 1945 having in fact survived the crash, been taken prisoner in Germany and now returning to England. It is his subsequent life we are reading about in “A God in Ruins”. There are no alternative lives here: this is Teddy’s life. And what an eventful, long one it is: Teddy lives well into his nineties; in essence the novel covers a century, from Teddy’s birth in 1914 to his death in 2012, a period that produced unfathomable changes in the world as we know it. Needless to say, many of the people we met in “Life After Life” re-appear, for they are, to varying degrees of importance and permanence, part of Teddy’s life as well; in fact Ursula becomes a minor character, as if in one of her alternative lives. A central section of the book takes place while Teddy is a fighter pilot flying bombing missions over Germany: paradoxically it is that part of his life in which he feels most alive and most competent. While we follow him in the post war period to witness his marriage, fatherhood, grandfatherhood and struggles in trying to adjust to the changes encroaching on his world, he remains the warm center of the novel where the world of the next generations become increasingly alienating.
And at the very end, there is a twist, one I didn’t expect at all but in hindsight I should have. It is Kate Atkinson’s world after all. You will feel compelled, as I did, to return to “Life After Life” after you closed the last page of “A God in Ruins”, to double check details of Teddy’s life there. You will find that the prism changed again and light falls differently each time.
