Reading Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Life After Life, I am seduced by its picture of English family life during and between the wars as well as, recurringly, just before the start of the first of them.
It is an enthralling and intricate book, proceeding in overlapping episodes, backwards and forwards in time, stalling and restarting as it brings seemingly dead and departed characters back to life. It has the ability to startle and keep you guessing about who is actually who, and why, and how.
Since Ursula, the main and most motivated character, whom we see growing up in the course of the story (after she has seemingly been stillborn, drowned in the sea, and fallen to her death from a roof - Atkinson does not deal in half measures) appears particularly prone to doom and disruption, it should not perhaps be wholly surprising to find her in the thick of the London blitz in one episode and simultaneously - like a sort of Mitford sister - living in Germany in the next with a Prussian husband and a friendship with Eva Braun in Hitler’s Berghof retreat. Then, after enduring the bombing of Berlin and swallowing a cyanide capsule, she is bewilderingly back in London as a member of a valiant wartime rescue squad.
Inevitably you find yourself thinking of the distinguished Edinburgh-born literary critic Karl Miller, who died last week, and of his obsession with doubles and split personalities. Atkinson’s book is both dizzying and dazzling in its ability to juggle fact and chronology, view the same person from different angles, repeat and revise, confuse and clarify, charm and shock. I cannot imagine how it ends, though I am not far from its denouement.
It has even evoked for me an episode in my own wartime experience. Brought up in Edinburgh, I saw nothing of the violence of the Second World War. Occasionally the sirens went and German aircraft passed overhead en route to Clydebank while we sat in a neighbour’s shelter. Then, having done their bombing, they passed back. Local artillery unsuccessfully opened fire. The all clear sounded and we returned to bed.
But once, at the age of ten, I was taken on holiday by my parents to Aberdeen. Having supper with friends near Rubislaw Quarry, we heard the sirens go and we ignored them. After supper we took a tram back through the quiet city to our hotel. Walking down Bon-Accord Crescent, we found ourselves suddenly amid a violent air raid, with planes swooping overhead along the line of the street - “that’s a Dornier,” I cried - with tracer bullets streaming and the rattle of gunfire.
My parents quickly pushed me into a doorway and held me close until danger had passed. Then we raced to our hotel, which was, ominously, No 13 with a green door. Unlucky though that seemed, it was on an adjoining house that all the shrapnel had fallen, with splinters of glass everywhere.
Next day we explored the damaged city, and read the details - Night of Fire and Destruction in Aberdeen - in the Press and Journal. Amid the debris, a church opposite the hotel where we had stayed the previous year lay flattened.
It was my only real incident of the war. But Kate Atkinson, writing of what befell her mysterious Ursula almost every night of the London blitz, has conveyed its onslaught to admiration.
29 September 2014
It is an enthralling and intricate book, proceeding in overlapping episodes, backwards and forwards in time, stalling and restarting as it brings seemingly dead and departed characters back to life. It has the ability to startle and keep you guessing about who is actually who, and why, and how.
Since Ursula, the main and most motivated character, whom we see growing up in the course of the story (after she has seemingly been stillborn, drowned in the sea, and fallen to her death from a roof - Atkinson does not deal in half measures) appears particularly prone to doom and disruption, it should not perhaps be wholly surprising to find her in the thick of the London blitz in one episode and simultaneously - like a sort of Mitford sister - living in Germany in the next with a Prussian husband and a friendship with Eva Braun in Hitler’s Berghof retreat. Then, after enduring the bombing of Berlin and swallowing a cyanide capsule, she is bewilderingly back in London as a member of a valiant wartime rescue squad.
Inevitably you find yourself thinking of the distinguished Edinburgh-born literary critic Karl Miller, who died last week, and of his obsession with doubles and split personalities. Atkinson’s book is both dizzying and dazzling in its ability to juggle fact and chronology, view the same person from different angles, repeat and revise, confuse and clarify, charm and shock. I cannot imagine how it ends, though I am not far from its denouement.
It has even evoked for me an episode in my own wartime experience. Brought up in Edinburgh, I saw nothing of the violence of the Second World War. Occasionally the sirens went and German aircraft passed overhead en route to Clydebank while we sat in a neighbour’s shelter. Then, having done their bombing, they passed back. Local artillery unsuccessfully opened fire. The all clear sounded and we returned to bed.
But once, at the age of ten, I was taken on holiday by my parents to Aberdeen. Having supper with friends near Rubislaw Quarry, we heard the sirens go and we ignored them. After supper we took a tram back through the quiet city to our hotel. Walking down Bon-Accord Crescent, we found ourselves suddenly amid a violent air raid, with planes swooping overhead along the line of the street - “that’s a Dornier,” I cried - with tracer bullets streaming and the rattle of gunfire.
My parents quickly pushed me into a doorway and held me close until danger had passed. Then we raced to our hotel, which was, ominously, No 13 with a green door. Unlucky though that seemed, it was on an adjoining house that all the shrapnel had fallen, with splinters of glass everywhere.
Next day we explored the damaged city, and read the details - Night of Fire and Destruction in Aberdeen - in the Press and Journal. Amid the debris, a church opposite the hotel where we had stayed the previous year lay flattened.
It was my only real incident of the war. But Kate Atkinson, writing of what befell her mysterious Ursula almost every night of the London blitz, has conveyed its onslaught to admiration.
29 September 2014
When growing up in my home town of Aberdeen, the P&J as it was known locally was a regular at our breakfast table. Its content was always mostly parochial. An example was the oft-quoted tale of the paper's banner headline following the sinking of the Titanic - "North East Man lost At Sea". Sadly it was proved just a couple of years ago not to be true!
ReplyDelete