Book #8 of 2016:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Todd Family #1)

I normally love the premise of characters reliving moments from their lives over and over again, but this novel was just so frustrating. To start with, the rules for how each go-through differs are never made clear. Sometimes it seems like the heroine is remembering a previous lifetime, if only vaguely, and using that knowledge to sidestep disasters that she’s met before. So far, so good, although I would like it better if she had full knowledge of her earlier selves instead of just vague deja vu that doesn’t always happen.

But some of the lifetimes vary by things she clearly didn’t do any differently. Instead, some other character will behave differently in a way Ursula could never have affected, with at least one of these differences happening before her birth in that timeline. And sometimes the narrative picks up a lifetime substantially well into it, so although there are characters and events that we recognize, we have no real attachment to them because we have no clue how their life story differs from any of the ones we saw them experience before.

And there’s never any explanation of why these lifetime repeats are happening for Ursula, if that even is what’s happening. (I’m assuming based on the title of the book and the way this trope usually goes that these are true repeats, not just simultaneous branches of a splitting multiverse, but even that is far from clear. At the very least, though, the order in which the lives are presented in the narrative does seem to show some sort of vague, faltering progression of Ursula’s knowledge of her other lives. It’s a messy trendline, but it’s there.) The first chapter begins with a flashforward of her pulling a gun on Hitler, and I guess we’re supposed to assume that’s what the story is building to, but then even after she finally reaches that point, the lifetimes go on. And… I guess that’s the punchline? That the repeats weren’t building to anything after all? It’s all so bizarre: understated and ambiguous and definitely feeling more like a sour joke than any sort of thematic or narrative resolution.

And honestly… it’s all kind of boring. Ursula doesn’t really do very much in many of her lifetimes, but she also changes so much from life to life it’s hard to remember what each version of her has gone through and what she hasn’t, making it very hard to get invested in her story. The premise should easily lend itself to excitement and introspection, but mostly I was just bored, over and over again.

★☆☆☆☆

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