Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)
Sep. 10th, 2014 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseLife After Life (Kate Atkinson) (2013): Mainstream "kill Hitler" time loop novel. Protagonist Ursula Todd is born, lives, dies - and is born again on the same snowy night in February 1910.
The 11th hour twist - Ursula's mother Sylvie might have (or have acquired?) the same timey-whimeyness - explains a lot about the mother's depression and temporally consistent suicide. The half-eleven twist - the protag's brother who consistently dies lives, evinced when gets the last word in the novel - elevated this from a two sentence review of disgust - hundreds of pages to decide to kill Hitler? Seriously? - to a long digression on narrative structure.
The novel starts in media res with an attempt on Hitler's life, then loops back to the protagonist's birth. That opening scene hovers through the loops through 1910 and the struggle to be born, several rounds of childhood mishaps, branchings through teen and twentysomething travails, and unending slogs through the Blitz. Imagine the Perils of Pauline meets Connie Willis. Ugh. Ursula's final choice to Do Something was a relief, especially as it marked another page closer to the end of the novel. So she kills Hitler - and dies again - and there's still three chapters left. Those last pages completely change the game. The penultimate chapter reveals that Ursula's mother has learned something in all this looping; in the final chapter, Ursula's brother, generally lost during WW2, survives.
They suggest there is an entirely different and much more interesting novel about two timey-wimey characters consciously or unconsciously manipulating their life-plan, including the other timey-whimey's options, in the service of their goal(s).
So why not write that novel?
I'm thinking part of it is worldbuilding, incluing, and tropes. As someone absolutely soaked in science fiction, I'm used to parsing certain genre conventions. The target audience of Atkinson's novels, maybe not so much. The story needs to establish the nature and limits of Ursula's life-loops before pushing the limits of the mechanism. That might also tie into the historical era: as came up when I was ranting to people offline, Hitler and the Third Reich are an easy least common denominator Evil. The story doesn't need to spend much time establishing the significance of WW2, or why assassinating Hitler might seem like a good idea. I think it's sloppy and lazy, and not that interesting of a story. But the very end of the novel shifts the focus, makes me reconsider the writing goal: the scope of London's destruction in the Blitz, upheaval in Europe, and vague invocations of the Holocaust are the backdrop for the final Sylvie and Teddie twists.
The multiple timelines, and the way the narrative breaks out, reminds me just a bit of Jo Walton's My Real Children. Partly it's Mark and Derek, the unhappy abusive schoolmaster husbands; partly it's the expectations of women's behavior. Ursula was born in 1910 and Patricia in 1926, but both struggle with bad marriages that are difficult to escape from. Partly the repetition of time, in Ursula's loops, and in the flips between Patricia's two timelines. Possibly a structural artifact; there's only so many ways to organize a timey-whimey narrative.
It also reminded me of a lot of Groundhog Day TV episodes: Monday, White Tulip, Window of Opportunity. (Okay, maybe not Window of Opportunity. Too comedic.) Some of the best uses of the trope say something about the human condition. Maybe what I'm missing is the intent to use a lens of history and repetition focusing attention to Ursula's - and by extension Sophie's - lived experiences, a moment in the human condition, and what that person does when she has the choice to keep trying until she gets life "right". The narrative spends half the novel ground-looping through WW2, there must be a reason. The tendency for Ursula to die in the Blitz means there aren't many timelines that make it to 1945, but Sylvie consistently commits suicide on VE Day in those handful of loops. It could be the distraught act of a psychologically overtaxed grieving widow, but how much more interesting if there's a second story, something she knows the protagonist and the reader aren't aware of.
In some ways, it's an infuriating novel: long sections meandering through Ursula's life, especially her childhood and Blitz experiences, clicking together at the very end in a fashion where the reader is torn between turning back to the first page to reread with new knowledge and throwing Life After Life across the room at the thought of subjecting yourself to all that again. Is this a mainstream thing? It reminds me strongly of the quotidian slog of Possession, turning into something much more interesting most of the way through, with a brilliant wonderful ending.
The 11th hour twist - Ursula's mother Sylvie might have (or have acquired?) the same timey-whimeyness - explains a lot about the mother's depression and temporally consistent suicide. The half-eleven twist - the protag's brother who consistently dies lives, evinced when gets the last word in the novel - elevated this from a two sentence review of disgust - hundreds of pages to decide to kill Hitler? Seriously? - to a long digression on narrative structure.
The novel starts in media res with an attempt on Hitler's life, then loops back to the protagonist's birth. That opening scene hovers through the loops through 1910 and the struggle to be born, several rounds of childhood mishaps, branchings through teen and twentysomething travails, and unending slogs through the Blitz. Imagine the Perils of Pauline meets Connie Willis. Ugh. Ursula's final choice to Do Something was a relief, especially as it marked another page closer to the end of the novel. So she kills Hitler - and dies again - and there's still three chapters left. Those last pages completely change the game. The penultimate chapter reveals that Ursula's mother has learned something in all this looping; in the final chapter, Ursula's brother, generally lost during WW2, survives.
They suggest there is an entirely different and much more interesting novel about two timey-wimey characters consciously or unconsciously manipulating their life-plan, including the other timey-whimey's options, in the service of their goal(s).
So why not write that novel?
I'm thinking part of it is worldbuilding, incluing, and tropes. As someone absolutely soaked in science fiction, I'm used to parsing certain genre conventions. The target audience of Atkinson's novels, maybe not so much. The story needs to establish the nature and limits of Ursula's life-loops before pushing the limits of the mechanism. That might also tie into the historical era: as came up when I was ranting to people offline, Hitler and the Third Reich are an easy least common denominator Evil. The story doesn't need to spend much time establishing the significance of WW2, or why assassinating Hitler might seem like a good idea. I think it's sloppy and lazy, and not that interesting of a story. But the very end of the novel shifts the focus, makes me reconsider the writing goal: the scope of London's destruction in the Blitz, upheaval in Europe, and vague invocations of the Holocaust are the backdrop for the final Sylvie and Teddie twists.
The multiple timelines, and the way the narrative breaks out, reminds me just a bit of Jo Walton's My Real Children. Partly it's Mark and Derek, the unhappy abusive schoolmaster husbands; partly it's the expectations of women's behavior. Ursula was born in 1910 and Patricia in 1926, but both struggle with bad marriages that are difficult to escape from. Partly the repetition of time, in Ursula's loops, and in the flips between Patricia's two timelines. Possibly a structural artifact; there's only so many ways to organize a timey-whimey narrative.
It also reminded me of a lot of Groundhog Day TV episodes: Monday, White Tulip, Window of Opportunity. (Okay, maybe not Window of Opportunity. Too comedic.) Some of the best uses of the trope say something about the human condition. Maybe what I'm missing is the intent to use a lens of history and repetition focusing attention to Ursula's - and by extension Sophie's - lived experiences, a moment in the human condition, and what that person does when she has the choice to keep trying until she gets life "right". The narrative spends half the novel ground-looping through WW2, there must be a reason. The tendency for Ursula to die in the Blitz means there aren't many timelines that make it to 1945, but Sylvie consistently commits suicide on VE Day in those handful of loops. It could be the distraught act of a psychologically overtaxed grieving widow, but how much more interesting if there's a second story, something she knows the protagonist and the reader aren't aware of.
In some ways, it's an infuriating novel: long sections meandering through Ursula's life, especially her childhood and Blitz experiences, clicking together at the very end in a fashion where the reader is torn between turning back to the first page to reread with new knowledge and throwing Life After Life across the room at the thought of subjecting yourself to all that again. Is this a mainstream thing? It reminds me strongly of the quotidian slog of Possession, turning into something much more interesting most of the way through, with a brilliant wonderful ending.