Life After Life, review: a Groundhog Day period
drama that makes you care about its characters
Kate Atkinson's 2013 bestseller has been gorgeously
adapted for TV with almost everything intact
4 / 5 stars
By
Anita
Singh,
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
19 April
2022 • 10:00pm
It’s BBC
period drama time. Adopt the brace position. What crimes against historical
accuracy are we about to witness? Which 21st-century preoccupations will be
shoehorned into the script? Will Olivia Colman be in it?
With great
relief, I can tell you that none of the above applies to Life After Life. It is
a gorgeously-realised and entirely faithful adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s 2013
bestseller. The fact that it is a modern book, with a female author and
protagonist, means that nobody has felt the need to tinker with the story. It
has been transferred from page to screen with almost everything intact,
including lines from the novel narrated here by Lesley Manville.
Voiceovers
can often be an ominous sign in television, signalling a director who lacks
confidence in their own power of storytelling. But here it works fine. If you
are a fan of the book - and millions are - this drama should be pleasing.
The story
is a fantastical one. Ursula Todd is stillborn on February 11, 1910, the
umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and only a young housemaid by the
mother’s bedside. But then we cut to the same scene, and Ursula lives - this
time a doctor is present.
A few years
later, she drowns while playing at the seaside. Then we spool back, live those
few years again, and this time an artist painting seascapes spots the little
girl in distress and rescues her from the waves. And so it goes on, with Ursula
dying many times but being born again.
Somehow,
she begins to intuit that death is around the corner and takes decisions that
affect her life chances. “The world was a dangerous place but she was not
powerless - quite the opposite,” the narrator informs us, although it does take
Ursula several attempts to survive the Spanish ‘flu.
Essentially,
this is a literary version of Groundhog Day. It spans two world wars, and will
eventually bring Ursula face to face with Hitler in a moment that could change
the course of history. There is a danger of the story - structurally, it can
never be more than a collection of vignettes - appearing lightweight or
gimmicky. But the quality cast prevents this from happening.
In future
episodes, Thomasin McKenzie will take over from the child actors Eliza Riley
and Isla Johnston as Ursula. In episode one, the most striking role is that of
Ursula’s mother, Sylvie, played by Sian Clifford.
So often in
period dramas, mothers are gentle figures - Lady Bridgerton in Netflix’s
blockbuster series is just the latest example, channelling Little Women’s
Marmee. But Clifford brings a welcome spikiness - the producers surely had her
performance as Fleabag’s sister in mind when they cast her. Sylvie is
short-tempered, undemonstrative, and unable to treat her daughter with
uncomplicated affection. “You’re too old for that,” she tells Ursula, when the
girl tries to curl up on her lap.
The purest
love, in this first episode at least, is between Ursula and her younger
brother, Teddy. It’s curious how affecting these scenes can be when you know
that any tragedy that befalls them is likely to be erased in the next lifetime.
James
McArdle plays Sylvie’s husband, Hugh. His frequent absences are better
explained in the book than they are here, and in the course of this first
episode we were told precious little about him. Yet when he hugged his children
before going off to war, I had a lump in my throat. It is a drama that makes
you care about the lives of its characters, however many times you meet them.
Life After Life review – a thoroughly addictive
weepathon
This adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel about a woman
who keeps on dying and being reborn is so full of grief it can feel
overwhelming – but the anguish is irresistible
The show’s main priority is apparent from the start:
to make you cry … Life After Life.
Rachel
Aroesti
Tue 19 Apr
2022 22.00 BST
Ursula Todd
can’t stop dying. That’s the premise of this devastating drama, a four-part
adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel, which documents its protagonist’s
many demises – each as distressing as the last. Born to a wealthy middle-class
family in 1910, Ursula dies almost instantly, strangled by her umbilical cord.
But, then again, she survives – a fact relayed to us by Lesley Manville’s
equanimous narrator. It’s a pattern that repeats throughout Ursula’s many
comfortable childhoods: there’s a drowning incident, a fall out of a bedroom
window, multiple battles with Spanish flu. And then, suddenly, she is back,
being born, and doing it all over again – but this time with self-protective
instincts she can’t quite account for. It’s The Butterfly Effect meets
Groundhog Day (or rather “Groundhog Life”), only with none of the latter’s
droll cosiness.
There’s not
a huge amount to laugh about in Life After Life (BBC Two). The show’s main
priority is apparent from the start: making people cry. If you like the feeling
of being overwhelmed by vicarious trauma and grief then you’re in for a treat.
And the anguish is thoroughly addictive. It’s what makes Life After Life
incredibly compelling, binge-worthy even, despite being practically plotless
from one episode to the next.
The tragedy
of Ursula’s life is amorphous and inevitable and not particularly personal; it
has no through-line besides the fact that the story is set during a uniquely
dangerous time in British history. That’s no accident: it’s what makes her
incessant dying entirely plausible. Although the first world war doesn’t
directly affect her bucolic childhood, it still kills her (her father
volunteers to fight, which then leads to the window fall). The 1918 influenza
pandemic is harrowing – unbelievably so, from the Todds’ perspective,
especially given the timing. “Hasn’t there been enough suffering?” is the
dismissive response of Ursula’s steely, capable mother, unconvinced that there
is a threat until it’s far too late.
Yet it’s
when the action moves into the second world war that the universe darkens more
profoundly. Until this point, Ursula’s lives have got longer and generally
better. Now that progress stalls: she cannot avoid news of her beloved little
brother Teddy’s death, however many times her life reboots. Her wartime
experiences vary wildly – from a glittering civil service career to family life
in Germany that descends into hellish starvation – but they are all deeply
disturbing, the latter almost nauseatingly so.
In one
sense, Life After Life has found a dramatic cheat code. Killing off a
protagonist – especially such a sweet, thoughtful, young one – is a shortcut to
brutal emotional impact. Surely a drama almost entirely made up of that moment,
or the promise of it happening imminently, is an easy way to get viewers on
tenterhooks? And yet it soon begins to feel miraculous that we are never inured
to the awfulness of Ursula’s deaths. You can’t mourn her when you know you’ll
be seeing her in the next scene, and yet you still do.
That’s not
so much because of a particular affection for Ursula (Thomasin McKenzie)
herself. She’s not a hugely distinctive personality, something necessary to
accommodate all the twists her life takes. It’s not even really because of the
convincing nature of the show’s world, though it does a brilliant job of making
period archetypes – the grumpy servant, imperious mother, gadabout maiden aunt
– seem three-dimensional (thanks mainly to the stellar cast: Jessica Hynes,
Fleabag’s Sian Clifford and Jessica Brown Findlay, respectively). What makes
Life After Life so upsetting is that it feels real in a broader way. Whether
these deaths have actually befallen the fictional Ursula is beside the point.
Their historical grounding means we know they happened to somebody, somewhere,
at some time.
Keep
watching Life After Life to make sense of its central mystery – or, indeed, its
central protagonist – and you will be disappointed. Ursula never gets close to
unravelling a purpose behind her predicament. “I don’t know why we live – all
we do is die,” she mourns on a blitz deathbed of rubble and dust towards the
end of the series, still completely mystified by the meaning of her multiple
lives.
Usually,
such drama pulls strings in order to wrap things up with a cheap,
life-affirming glow, but Ursula gets only glimmers of comfort from others. Her
journalist aunt Izzie – a 1920s Carrie Bradshaw – advocates viewing life as an
adventure. Her avuncular psychiatrist quotes Nietzsche on amor fati – embracing
your own fate. Her father, meanwhile, offers more banal words about human
kindness.
Really, it
is less about the content of their advice than the love implicit in it, which
is a powerful consolation for death. That love radiates from Ursula after the
conversation with her father as she boards the train back to wartime London
with a heartbreaking spring in her step, ready to die all over again.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – review
Themes of fate, family life and renewal are
brilliantly explored in this story of a life lived in wartime Britain
Alex Clark
Wed 6 Mar
2013 10.54 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/06/life-after-life-kate-atkinson-review
Kate
Atkinson's new novel is a marvel, a great big confidence trick – but one that
invites the reader to take part in the deception. In fact, it is impossible to
ignore it. Every time you attempt to lose yourself in the story of Ursula Todd,
a child born in affluent and comparatively happy circumstances on 11 February
1910, it simply stops. If this sounds like the quick route to a short book,
don't worry: the narrative starts again – and again and again – but each time
it takes a different course, its details sometimes radically, sometimes
marginally altered, its outcome utterly unpredictable. Atkinson's general rule
is that things seem to get better with repetition, but this, her
self-undermining novel seems to warn us, is a comfort that is by no means
guaranteed, either.
She begins
as she means to go on, and at the very beginning. (In fact, even this is not
quite true: a brief prologue shows us Ursula in a Munich coffee shop in 1930,
assassinating Hitler with her father's old service revolver.) At the start of
the novel "proper", Sylvie Todd is giving birth to her third child,
her situation given a fairytale atmosphere by the encroaching snow which also,
alas, cuts her off from outside help in the form of Dr Fellowes or Mrs Haddock,
the midwife. Ursula is stillborn, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her
neck, her life unsaved for want of a pair of surgical scissors. Fortunately,
though, she is allowed another go at the business of coming into being; in take
two, Dr Fellowes makes it, cuts the cord and proceeds to his reward of a cold
collation and some homemade piccalilli (it might be too fanciful to notice that
even the piccalilli repeats).
Ursula's
childhood is to be punctuated with such near-misses: the treacherous undertow
of the Cornish sea, icy tiles during a rooftop escapade, the wildfire spread of
Spanish flu. Each disaster is confirmed by variations on the phrase
"darkness fell", and each new beginning heralded by the tabula rasa
that snow brings. Ursula carries within her a vague, dimly apprehended sense of
other, semi-lived lives, inexpressible except as impetuous actions – such as
when she pushes a housemaid down the stairs to save her from a more terrible
ending. That misdemeanour lands her in the office of a psychiatrist who
introduces her, in kindly fashion, to the concept of reincarnation and to the
roughly opposing theory of amor fati, particularly as espoused by Nietzsche: the
acceptance, or even embrace, of one's fate, and the rejection of the idea that
anything could, or should, have unfolded differently.
Amor fati
is tough to take, of course, if you are a drowning child, or a battered wife,
or a shell-shocked young man, or a terrified mother calling for your baby in
the rubble of the blitz, all of whom and more besides make up the lives
captured, however fleetingly, in Life After Life. It's equally tough if you are
a novelist, and put in the powerful but invidious position of controlling what
befalls your characters. Are their futures really written in their past? Can
you tell what's going to happen to them simply from the way you started them
off? Even sustaining your creative engagement could prove tricky: perhaps that's
why one catastrophe is tagged with the exhausted words "Darkness, and so
on" and why yet another recitation of Ursula's birth is reduced to a mere
five lines.
The reader
is similarly implicated in this continual manipulation of narrative tension and
the suspension of disbelief. We want a story, but what kind of story do we
want: something truthful or something soothing, something that ties up loose
ends or something that casts us on to a tide of uncertainty, not only about
what might happen, but about what already has? In Atkinson's model, we can have
all of the above, but where does that leave us, with multiple tall tales
clamouring for our attention?
Sometimes,
it appears we are being offered a straight choice between happy and unhappy
endings. On the one hand, there is Fox Corner, the Todd family home in what is
still, although perhaps not for long, a wonderfully bucolic England. There are
gin slings and tennis on the lawn and bees buzzing their "summer afternoon
lullaby"; there is the reliable accumulation of children – Ursula is the
third of five – and servants that are either touchingly steadfast or humorously
difficult; there are beloved family dogs and treasured dolls and troublesome
aunts whose bad behaviour can just about be absorbed.
Outside in
the lane, however, lurks an evil-minded stranger, his story the more powerful
for never being brought into the light; and sometimes intruders arrive under
the cloak of friendship. When Ursula is molested, and then raped, by a pal of
one of her brothers, her exile from Fox Corner begins; her subsequent pregnancy
and illegal abortion give way to a lonely London life, solitary drinking and
then, most awfully, to a violent husband who shuts her up in a mean little
house in Wealdstone, far from her family.
Ursula's
marriage to the vile Derek Oliphant – himself a constructor of false personal
history – would never have happened if she had managed to evade her teenage
abuser. In the next iteration, she does; and she is liberated once more, to
plunge on to lives made perhaps even more divergent by the schism of the second
world war. And the reader is perplexed once more: what to make of a character
so chameleon-like that we can watch her excavating bomb sites on one page,
stranded in a dystopian, war-torn Berlin on another and (in what admittedly
requires the biggest leap of faith) being entertained by the Führer at
Berchtesgaden on yet another?
This
description of Atkinson's looping, metamorphosing narrative inevitably makes it
sound tricksy, almost whimsical. Structurally, it is, but its ceaseless
renewals are populated with pleasures that extend beyond the what-next variety.
She captures well, for example, the traumatic shifts in British society – and
does so precisely because she cuts directly from one war to the next, only
later going back to fill in, partially, what happened in between. She
demonstrates an extraordinary gift for capturing peril: the sections in which
influenza tears through Fox Corner are truly menacing, and the descriptions of
Ursula's work in a bombed-out London are masterpieces of the macabre ("'Be
careful here, Mr Emslie,' she said over her shoulder, 'there's a baby, try to
avoid it.'").
The texture
of daily life is beautifully conveyed, particularly in its domestic details,
which often verge on the queasily visceral. An ineptly poached egg is "a
sickly jellyfish deposited on toast to die"; shortly after Sylvie's
confinement, Mrs Glover, the crosspatch cook, "took a bowl of kidneys
soaking in milk from the pantry and commenced removing the fatty white
membrane, like a caul". On another occasion, she thumps slices of veal
with a tenderiser, imagining "they're the heads of the Boche". But
alongside these minutiae is set the author's fascination with the intricacies of
large families, and in particular with sibling relationships.
The
so-called family saga is, of course, where Atkinson's career as a novelist
began, with the Whitbread-winning Behind the Scenes at the Museum, itself a
story that refused to proceed in linear fashion, invoking the spirit of
Tristram Shandy in its digressive portrayal of the life of Ruby Lennox. Neither
book, of course, can really be contained by such a constricting label, just as
Atkinson's four Jackson Brodie novels refuse to fit neatly into the genre
marked crime. Behind the Scenes and Life After Life both co-opt the family –
its evolution over time, its exponentially multiplying characters and
storylines, its silences and gaps in communication – and use it to show how
fiction works and what it might mean to us. But what makes Atkinson an
exceptional writer – and this is her most ambitious and most gripping work to
date – is that she does so with an emotional delicacy and understanding that
transcend experiment or playfulness. Life After Life gives us a heroine whose
fictional underpinning is permanently exposed, whose artificial status is never
in doubt; and yet one who feels painfully, horribly real to us. How do you
square that circle? You'd have to ask Kate Atkinson, but I doubt she would give
you a straight answer.
_cover_image.jpg)
Life After Life is a 2013 novel by Kate Atkinson. It is the first of two novels
about the Todd family. The second, A God in Ruins, was published in 2015. Life
After Life garnered acclaim from critics.
The novel
has an unusual structure, repeatedly looping back in time to describe
alternative possible lives for its central character, Ursula Todd, who is born
on 11 February 1910 to an upper-middle-class family near Chalfont St Peter in
Buckinghamshire. In the first version, she is strangled by her umbilical cord
and stillborn. In later iterations of her life she dies as a child - drowning
in the sea, or when saved from that, by falling to her death from the roof when
trying to retrieve a fallen doll. Then there are several sequences when she
falls victim to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 - which repeats itself again
and again, though she already has a foreknowledge of it, and only her fourth
attempt to avert catching the flu succeeds.
Then there
is an unhappy life where she is traumatised by being raped, getting pregnant
and undergoing an illegal abortion, and finally becoming trapped in a highly
oppressive marriage, and being killed by her abusive husband when trying to
escape. In later lives she averts all this by being pre-emptively aggressive to
the would-be rapist. In between, she also uses her half-memory of earlier lives
to avert the young neighbour Nancy being raped and murdered by a child
molester. The saved Nancy would play an important role in Ursula's later
life(s), forming a deep love relationship with Ursula's brother Teddy, and
would become a main character in the sequel, A God in Ruins.
Still later
iterations of Ursula's life take her into World War II, where she works in
London for the War Office and repeatedly witnesses the results of the Blitz,
including a direct hit on a bomb shelter in Argyll Road in November 1940 - with
herself being among the victims in some lives and among the rescuers in others.
There is also a life in which she marries a German in 1934, is unable to return
to England and experiences the war in Berlin under the allied bombings.
Ursula
eventually comes to realise, through a particularly strong sense of deja vu,
that she has lived before, and decides to try to prevent the war by killing
Adolf Hitler in late 1930. Memory of her earlier lives also provides the means
of doing that: the knowledge that by befriending Eva Braun - in 1930 an obscure
shop girl in Munich - Ursula would be able to get close to Hitler with a loaded
gun in her bag; the inevitable price, however, is to be herself shot dead by
Hitler's Nazi followers immediately after killing him.
What is
left unclear - since each of the time sequences end with "darkness"
and Ursula's death and does not show what followed - is whether in fact all
these lives actually occurred in an objective world, or were only subjectively
experienced by her. Specifically it is not clear whether or not her killing
Hitler in 1930 actually produced an altered timeline where the Nazis did not
take power in Germany, or possibly took power under a different leader with a
different course of the Second World War. Although in her 1967 incarnation
Ursula speculates with her nephew on this "might have been", the book
avoids giving a clear answer.
Critical
reaction
Alex Clark
of The Guardian gave Life After Life a positive review, saying that domestic
details of daily life are conveyed beautifully, and that traumatic shifts in
British society are also captured well "precisely because she cuts
directly from one war to the next, only later going back to fill in, partially,
what happened in between." Clark argued that the novel "[co-opts] the
family [...] and [uses] it to show how fiction works and what it might mean to
us [...] with an emotional delicacy and understanding that transcend experiment
or playfulness. Life After Life gives us a heroine whose fictional underpinning
is permanently exposed, whose artificial status is never in doubt; and yet one
who feels painfully, horribly real to us." The Daily Telegraph's Helen
Brown likewise praised it, calling it Atkinson's best book to date.[3] The
Independent found the central character to be sympathetic, and argued that the
book's central message was that World War II was preventable and should not
have been allowed to happen.
Janet
Maslin of The New York Times Book Review praised Life After Life as Atkinson's
"very best" book and "full of mind games, but they are
purposeful rather than emptily playful. [...] this one connects its loose ends
with facile but welcome clarity." She described it as having an
"engaging cast of characters" and called the depiction of the British
experience of World War II "gutsy and deeply disturbing, just as the
author intends it to be."[4] Francine Prose of The New York Times wrote
that Atkinson "nimbly succeeds in keeping the novel from becoming
confusing" and argued that the work "makes the reader acutely
conscious of an author’s power: how much the novelist can do."
The Wall
Street Journal's Sam Sacks dubbed Life After Life a "formidable bid"
for the Man Booker Prize (though the novel was ultimately not longlisted). He
said the high-concept premise of "Ursula [contriving] to avoid the
accident that previously killed her [...] blends uneasily with what is
otherwise a deft and convincing portrayal of an English family's evolution
across two world wars [...] all the other characters seem complexly armed with
free will." He found the resolution related to the prologue as
"rushed and anti-climactic". But Sacks also said that "she
[brings] characters to life with enviable ease", referring to the erosion
of Sylvie and Hugh's marriage as "poignantly charted". Also, like
Maslin, he lauded the novella-length Blitz chapter as "gorgeous and
nerve-racking".
In NPR,
novelist Meg Wolitzer suggested that the book proves that "a
fully-realised world" is more important to the success of a fiction work
than the progression of its story, and dubbed it a "major, serious yet
playfully experimental novel". She argued that by not choosing one path
for Ursula, Atkinson "opened her novel outward, letting it breathe
unrestricted".
The
Guardian's Sam Jordison expressed mixed feelings. He commended the depiction of
Ursula and her family, and Atkinson's "fine storytelling and sharp eye for
domestic detail". He argued, "There is real playfulness in these
revisited moments and repetition never breeds dullness. Instead, we try to spot
the differences and look for refractions of the same scene, considering the
permutations of what is said and done. It can provide an enjoyable and
interactive experience." He criticised the portions outside Britain,
however, and said overall that the book has "an abundance of human warmth,
but it just isn't convincing. There is much to enjoy – but not quite enough to
admire."
In 2019,
Life After Life was ranked by The Guardian as the 20th best book since 2000. It
was written that the "dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such
emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully,
joyously real." The novel was 20th in Paste's list of the 40 best novels
of the 2010s, with Alexis Gunderson arguing, "No one gets to live as many
lives and have as many second chances to get the next step right as protagonist
Ursula Todd. But in a decade where the real world swung between wars and
elections, there are few more clarifying literary escapes than Life After Life.
[...] Atkinson’s sage weaves a heartbreaking, frightening and beautiful journey
that’s written with tenacity and grace."
It was
listed as one of the decade's top 10 fiction works by Time, where it was billed
as "a defining account of wartime London, as Ursula experiences the
devastation of the Blitz from various perspectives, highlighting the senselessness
of bombing raids. The story of her multiple lives is both moving and
lighthearted, filled with comic asides and evocative language about life’s many
joys and sorrows." Entertainment Weekly ranked it second, with David
Canfield arguing that Life After Life "seamlessly executes an
idiosyncratic premise [...] and contains a seemingly endless capacity to
surprise", but that it "will stand the test of time for its
in-between moments — its portraits of wartime, its glimpses into small domestic
worlds, its understanding of one woman’s life as filled with infinite
possibilities." The novel was among the honourable mentions on the
Literary Hub list of the 20 best novels of the decade.
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