Kate Atkinson - Life After Life

I am a Kate Atkinson fan. I love her funny insights into the way her characters think. She brings them to life from the inside. I love all the novels featuring Jackson Brodie, even though I don't understand why she gives him such a hard time, and in the last book he quoted from the poems of Emily Dickinson like a postgraduate in English Literature, and he is supposed to be ex-military, ex-policeman. I mean, if he was keen on poetry, it would hardly be that of the fey Emily Dickinson, would it? Really?

Anyway, Life after Life. It is a long book. It's like a computer game where the central character dies and then comes alive again! and this time makes other choices and therefore does not die in the same way. On subsequent lives, the other choices may be better and lead to a happier life and fewer deaths in the cast of characters, or may be worse and lead to an awful life and a worse death and a worse outcome for other characters. However, she is always born in 1910, which means she is always 29 when the 2nd world war breaks out, and much of the action takes place in the Blitz. It's very unpredictable, even when the same things happen in subsequent lives, the central character (Ursula Todd) may or may not be involved in the same way.

I think the reader's understanding may be supposed to be informed by other literature of the same period, for example, the Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Or any biography of the Mitford sisters. Literature now bounces off other literature and telly programmes you may have read or seen, and this may have once been serendipitous, but now there is consciousness on the part of the writers, who have read the theory of this, originating with the writings of a Russian called Mikhail Bakhtin, who put forward the theory of the polyphonic novel. To give more detail:

 "The French psychoanalytical theorist Julia Kristeva has argued that all texts are interdependent and that every individual work is actually a tissue of quotations and cross-references, allusions and rewriting." . 

From "The Popular and the Canonical, Debating Twentieth-century Literature 1940-2000, ed by David Johnson, p 181

Then there is a pattern of Foxes and Woolfs and of course, Ursula means bear which is supposedly significant but I could see no significance in this at all. But I don't mind reading the whole thing again when I have more time. I had to keep putting the book down and thinking of job-related things so I lost the thread - lost the plot, in fact.

Of necessity, the view this book takes of life has to be the long view, and the characters have to come across strongly but in a kind of shorthand. Therefore they seem a bit stereotypical, similar to characters in other novels from the same time. The story told and retold and told again takes the power away from any single version of the story. Events are all-important. And for me now, at this time in my life, it doesn't feel like something I can relate to. I find I like focusing on feeling or listening. I concentrate on the tiny moments that make life sensual. So for me this book is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope (- but who's to say which is the right end?)