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“Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.”

 

Budapest street life. Hungary, April 2018.

I thought that I'd mark my return to this blog with a book review. Where better than to start with Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.

So often, experimental fiction doesn’t quite work. Interesting ideas become irritating, constantly shifting patterns or characters get annoying, and little showy quirks become ostentatious, pretentious and boring in longer form.

These are the risks that Kate Atkinson has taken in Life after Life. In constructing the novel in a series of repeated loops back in time (each loop triggered by the death of our heroine Ursula Todd), the author frees her creative hand in exploring a multitude of alternative possible lives that play out for a girl born into an upper-middle-class family in 1910’s Buckinghamshire.

While this may have resulted in a neat little exercise in authorial flamboyance that soon becomes tiresome, I found it a riveting device and one that Atkinson utilises to great effect. The gradual introduction of prescience into Ursula’s many lives and the nifty use of a Jungian psychologist lets the reader explore concepts like reincarnation, mysticism and parallel universes without forcing the issue.

In creating the domestic humdrum of life so beautifully, our investment in the many versions of Ursula (and her family) is used to supreme effect, granting the author a genuinely interesting and effective chance to explore how fiction works and how it may choose to impact readers. Moreover, it never felt forced or obtrusive (in the way that Calvino has always left me cold).

There’s an emotional elegance here that at once allows the author to show us her inner workings – Ursula’s existence as a fictional construct is consistently reinforced – but it is done in such a sensitive and compelling way that I could not resist the pain of losing her again and again.

I really loved it and have noted that many appear to take issue with the conclusion. Sure, it is a mind-fuck, but a mind-fuck that remains faithful to a novel that so exquisitely pushes against and extends the literary form.

It’s going to be hard for another book to top this one this year and having read this back-to-back with the masterful Shuggie Bain, I almost feel sorry for the next crop of books on my 'to read' list.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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