Book Review -Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

“One wonders about the divine plan and so on.”

“More of a shambles than a plan,” Ursula agreed.

What if you could live your life again? What if you could revisit those small moments when seemingly inconsequential decisions led you down the wrong path. What if you were given the opportunity to live your life over and over again and again … until you got it right?

This is the premise behind Kate Atkinson’s widely lauded new book, Life After Life. It begins with a scene in a cafe in November 1930. A woman draws out “her father’s old service revolver from the Great War” and takes aim. The narrative leads away from and up to this point. Ursula Todd is born, dies and is reborn. Again and again from 11 February 1910 to 11 February 1910, Ursula Todd lives and dies over and over. She lives through the ‘Great War’, the inter-war years, the blitz, post-war rationing, the misery and tedium of an abusive marriage, Germany in the 1930s. She lives right up to retirement from the civil service in 1967 until she finally has the strength of will to carry out the deed she comes to realise she is born to do.

For me, three things stand out:

1- three-dimensional characters whose names and lives evoke the time periods they live through – names, such as, Ursula, Teddy, Sylvie, Hugh, Izzie, Bridget the housekeeper and Mrs Haddock the midwife- even Maurice is a name perfectly suited to the brother whom no one likes. They live and breath each era through the particularity of things, from the idea of Englishness in the family home, “Fox Corner”, “jam roly poly and custard” for pudding, “a Radiant” gas fire, “Sam Brown … singing ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’ “, “a good woollen frock for eight pounds”, a solitary supper of “Welsh rarebit – off a tray on her knee” , the blitz:

a figure in the dark who went with her as far as Hyde Park. Before the war you would never have dreamed of hooking arms with a complete stranger – particularly a man – but now the danger from the skies seemed much greater than anything that could befall you from this odd intimacy.

2- rich with descriptive imagery and quotations from (amongst many) Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, and Stevenson, that add texture and philosophical depth to the story. “the headache that had begun before dinner as a dull ache was a crown of thorns by now”, “Ursula’s lungs felt as if they were full of custard, she imagined it thick and yellow and sweet”. Miss Woolf, the leader of a London air-warden rescue group, midst the horror of the blitz looks beyond the war, and wonders about “how much German music we listen to” which leads her to conclude that “great beauty transcends all.” Ursula reflects on life, her life, and the meaning of life.

A buttery, unseasonal sun was trying hard to nudge its way through the thick velvet curtains. Why dost though thus,/Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? she thought. If she could go back in time and take a lover from history it would be Donne. Not Keats, the knowledge of his untimely death would colour everything quite wretchedly. That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility)- one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.

3. a complex yet soothing narrative structure. I normally can’t follow stories that rely on flash back and dual or parallel stories – I get bored when structure gets in the way of story, but the way Life After Life is constructed is very readable, easy to follow, compelling and yet highly complex. The structure is the story. The story returns again and again to November 1910 so that it becomes a touchstone. We know that life begins again for Ursula, that she will have the chance to live past the event which closed her immediate past life -that moment when “the black bat unfolded his wings”, “when darkness falls” is not an ending but a beginning. Atkinson leads us through the story with dated chapter headings and section titles, such as,”A Lovely Day Tomorrow” and “Armistice”, “A Long Hard War” and “The End of the Beginning”, and these act as flagposts to the way the story develops and prevents us from getting lost in the circular story.

Life After Life is really good. It’s a story to return to as a writer as well as a reader – to learn from as well as to enjoy.

Become such as you are, having learned what is

… Life wasn’t about becoming was it? It was about being.

Life After Life is out now everywhere- Kate Atkinson’s website is the best place to find details of how and where to buy a copy.

She’s got a very interesting Pinterest for Life After Life on the go that’s worth a look too.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013 – Longlist

The Orange Prize has transformed into The Women’s Prize for Fiction and they announced the longlist yesterday. It’s a good list full of strong voices, including debut authors and award-winners, although, strangely missing, like the poor fairy at the Christening scene in Sleeping Beauty, is THE big book of 2012. Mantel is there, of course, proving that they don’t really need a women’s prize to promote women’s fiction – they should just pay Mantel to write more books instead of awarding her £30,000 and a bronze ‘Bessie’.

Faber Cover Image Flight Behaviour

For me, though, the most pleasing name on the list is Barbara Kingsolver. Would she expect to win a second time? In all the fuss over Mantel’s nomination she’s been overlooked by the press. The Lacuna is a magnificent, career-making book, but her latest is just as good – if not better.

Her fourteenth book is a compelling story of global warming set in the backwoods of Tennessee on the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. It’s warm, funny, completely in tune with the modern sensibility but gets to the heart of the issues on global warming without preaching to us– how can we live, invent, use technology, build homes, eat, and not destroy the planet?

Some of the best scenes in Flight Behaviour locate global problems in common, everyday experience. Shopping in the dollar store for food and Christmas presents, the protagonist, 27year-old Dellarobia Turnbow and her dopy husband Cub argue about what their children want and what they should give them, how much to spend and what they can afford. It’s an age-old argument but Kingsolver draws out nuances that resonate beyond Dellarobia’s desire to encourage her young son’s sudden interest in science.

‘If you want them to have a computer and stuff, we need the logging money. Or,’ he spread his hands – ‘we can keep our trees. And be hicks.’

‘Right. We cut down the trees and get ourselves buried in mud like a bunch of hillbillies, because we’re afraid of raising our kids to be dumb hillbillies. Really you’re saying we just do it because that’s who we are,’ she said too loudly. ‘Who are we?’

Indeed … who are we?

You can read my complete review of Flight Behaviour over on The EarthLines Review.

WPF Longlist >> The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2013

Review: Lost Bodies, by David Manderson

Lost Bodies front cover David Manderson’s “remarkable” debut novel, Lost Bodies (Kennedy & Boyd) has a rare quality which takes it into two camps that critics usually keep apart- it’s both a literary novel and a compelling page turner and well worth adding to your reading pile if, like me, you’re beginning to turn away from genre-defined fiction and looking at new ways of telling stories.

In the Guardian Review last August in the pre-publicity surrounding Umbrella, Will Self generated a good debate about “the failure of modernist fiction” and wrote about his anxiety in finding the right form. He ought to add Lost Bodies to his TBR pile.

I reviewed it for Northwords Now literary magazine – Autumn/Winter 2012 issue [here's a link to the full text in the additional review section ].

and here’s a link to David Manderson’s Blog.

Wishing BookRambler’ readers a very Happy New Year.

Book Week Scotland #6

A personal rake through my favourite books for Book Week Scotland

Book 6: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; with a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by The Editor, by James Hogg (1824)

Title Page of Confessions I haven’t put up a cover image of one of my most favourite books because none of the versions I have do justice to the contents – they don’t quite get the tone or the image across of how I read the book. There are 77 versions of this book listed on Good Reads - nowadays, it’s a popular 19th-century novel. Popular, because different people find different things to like/admire/enjoy. One of the oft-criticised things about Hogg’s writing is that he wrote too much, too quickly, too wide in his range – he’s hard to pin down. A romantic poet, historical novelist, cultural archivist, songwriter, dramatist, satirist, – all things to all men and nothing particularly brilliant because it’s watered down – so they say, those who ‘know’ about literature. I disagree and this book is the best evidence. No one has been able to pin it down, not because it’s bad but because of skilful plotting and ingenious, inventive storytelling.

I’ve blogged about this book once or twice before.

Book Week Scotland #5

A personal rake through my favourite books for Book Week Scotland

Book 5: A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh, 1997)

A History of Scottish Women's Writing front cover image

The first comprehensive critical analysis of Scottish women’s writing from its recoverable beginnings …

A magnificent work of recovery research and editorial scholarship, this book is a reminder of how literary history is skewed in favour of the male. Something to remember today – 30 November – Saint Andrews Day.

It’s a huge, thick book – 716 pages of Scottish women’s writing – running from Christian Lindsay c. 1560 to Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s present National poet – our Scots Makar. Packaged – recovered and brought to our attention. Every single woman in this book deserves her own book, her own study, her own prominence.

[extract] ‘From a Mouse’, by Liz Lochhead

Ploughman? That will be right! Heaven-taught?

He drank deep o The Bard, and Gray, and Pope – the lot.

I, faur frae the spontaneous outburst you thought,

Am an artifact.

For Man’s Dominion he was truly sorry? Not!

’T was all an act.

Burns, baith man and poet, liked to dominate.

His reputation wi the lassies wasna great.

They still dinna ken whether they love to hate,

Or hate to love.

He was ‘an awfy man!’ He left them tae their fate,

Push came to shove.

Couldnae keep it in his breeks? Hell’s bells, damnation,

I wad be the vera last to gie a peroration

On the daft obsession o this prurient Nation,

His amatory antics.

He was – beating them tae it by a generation –

First o th’ Romantics.

Arguably I am a poem wha, prescient, did presage

Your Twentyfirst Century Global Distress Age.

I’m a female mouse though, he didna give a sausage

For ma sparklin een!

As for Mother Nature? Whether yez get the message

Remains to be seen.

[extracted from SPL website version. Original published in Addressing the Bard: twelve contemporary poets respond to Robert Burns, edited by Douglas Gifford (Scottish Poetry Library, 2009)

Read the poem in full on the SPL website

Book Week Scotland – #4

A personal rake through my books for Book Week Scotland

Book 4: The Lecturer’s Tale, by James Hynes (1996; 2001; 2002; 2006)

Not a Scottish book, I know, it wasn’t published in Scotland and Hynes isn’t Scottish [so far as he's admitted] nor does he live in Scotland. But The Lecturer’s Tale says so MUCH about what’s wrong with Scottish literature and literary history and blasts the WESTERN LITERARY CANON apart – that, for me, it’s one of my favourite books. Hynes shows how to look away from the subject under discussion to highlight the glaring omissions. How could I not love this book?

Hynes doesn’t ‘lecture’ the reader. He makes his point with grace and wit and fun. The tale is steeped in the Supernatural and the Gothic [a clever, academically slanted Gothic and daft supernatural magic finger], sometimes, real laugh out loud guffawing humour. He plays stereotypical university types for big laughs (especially the leather-clad dominatrix!). I won’t spoil the fun by giving away the funniest moments (and also I wouldn’t know which ones to give you because they are in abundance) but, be warned, don’t read this book on a bus.

Above the industrial hum rose the steady murmur of lonely women in their thirties and forties, their cubicles lined up like sewing machines in a shirtwaist factory. … In each cubicle a thin woman in thrift shop couture sat earnestly tutoring some groggy student in a point of grammar or the construction of an argument, and each woman looked up at Nelson as he passed with the hollow-eyed, pitiless gaze of the damned. … They combined the bitter esprit de corps of assembly-line workers with the literate wit of the overeducated: They were the steerage of the English department, the first to drown if the budget sprang a leak. They were the Morlocks to the Eloi of the eighth floor.

The serious undercurrent is not over-bearing. Hynes’ novel came out just at the same time that the very serious topic of bringing out a collected edition of Hogg’s works was being discussed in literary circles -or rather, discussed by some but pointedly ignored and belittled by others. The project eventually took off [thanks to the late Douglas Mack, the founding General Editor] and the Stirling/South Carolina Research Edition will run to around 36 volumes when complete. Reviewers don’t mention this fact – which is so telling and deeply ironic, and makes me so angry. A key point is when the books written by authors within the English literary canon are tossed out of the library tower as it burns to the ground. Always on the periphery, Hogg isn’t in the canon and his books are amongst some of the precious few that are saved and form the basis of the new library.

Crossing the Quad on a Halloween Friday, as the clock in the library tower tolled thirteen under a windy, dramatic sky, Nelson Humboldt lost his right index finger in a freak accident. Someone called his name three times out of the midday press of students, and as he turned to answer, Nelson stumbled over a young woman stooping to the pavement behind him. Falling backward, he threw his hand out to catch himself, and his finger was severed by the whirring spokes of a passing bicycle.

Only minutes before, in the shadowy office of Victoria Victorinix, the English Department’s undergraduate chair, Nelson had lost his job as a visiting adjunct lecturer. He had sat on the far side of Professor Victorinix’s severely rectilinear desk, his hands tightly clutching his knees, while she told him with a cool courtesy that the department was forced by budget necessities to terminate his appointment at the end of the semester, only six weeks away.

[grabbed from The NYT ] which has the whole of the first chapter & a link to their review – read them both for a glimpse into Hynes’s joyously absurd book.

Book Week Scotland – #3

A personal rake through my favourite books for Book Week Scotland

Book 3. Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture, by Cairns Craig (Polygon, 1996)

… is a thin book but it had a profound impact on the way I think about history and narrative. It is a collection of seven connected essays, ‘Prologue: Peripheries’, ‘the Body in the Kit Bag’, ‘Out of History’, ‘Absences’, ‘George Orwell and English Ideology’, ‘Being Between’, ‘Epilogue: Posting Towards the Future’ – which examine how and why Scotland has been and is out of UK history. It is a bold and imaginative piece of writing – challenging and iconoclastic – which made me question the way I read English and Scottish literature and literary history.

Where are we in history? Ask first whose history, what are its limits. Take your eyes from the stage: listen for the voices from the dark, listen to the mingling of the voices in and out of history. (p. 225)