“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.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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