I confess. As soon as I finish reading a novel, I have a need — almost a primal urge — to go behind the scenes. Is there a connection between the characters and the author? I have to know. Call it an innate reflex or a carryover from Lit 101. I’m addicted to the story of the story.
But try finding the autobiographical hook in fiction that offers alternate universes in spades and a protagonist whose identity never stops shifting. That was my happy challenge when I came to the end of Life after Life by the English author, Kate Atkinson. The heroine of the novel, Ursula Todd, is continually born, reborn and re-created in a timespan roughly covering World War I and II. In one chapter she moves from London to Germany, marries and has a child with a handsome German. In another scenario, she remains in London, childless, and recovers bodies from war-torn buildings during the Blitz. Elsewhere in the novel, Ursula is raped, becomes pregnant, has an abortion, and then marries a wife abuser. Which, if any, of these tantalizing bits was pulled from the author’s life? Will the real Kate Atkinson please stand up?
Interviews with Atkinson provide a wealth of autobiographical clues. Life after Life was conceived as a big war novel with a particular focus on the London Blitz. The fictional Ursula experiences World War II as a young woman. Atkinson, born in 1951, missed any direct contact with air raids and bomb shelters. However, her grandfather served in World War I and was killed by a stray bullet in World War II. The shadow of war was ever present and not present in her family, she told an interviewer. “It was there, but people didn’t talk about it.” What a perfect set up for a novelist. Enter imagination.
Still, I was curious about the structure of Life after Life with its hairpin turns and endless plot permutations. Why did such a gifted author need so many crafty maneuvers in which she scrambles timelines and rewrites scenes from different perspectives? One reviewer suggested that if Atkinson pushed the parallel lives premise any harder, the whole house of cards would collapse. Atkinson, however, does not shrink from this critique. She describes herself as a tireless explorer of what ifs, bifurcating roads and coincidences. Indeed, she says she is not finished with that construct yet, perhaps a reflection of her own unpredictable rise to literary stardom. Like the career trajectory of many women, Atkinson juggled parenthood and an assortment of jobs, including home aide to the elderly and legal secretary. Only after she failed the oral exam for her doctorate in literature and abandoned academia did she turn to writing fiction. If she had her way, she has said, all her characters would go down multiple paths.
I get that. When I finished reading Life after Life, I wanted to open the bottom drawer of my desk and dust off my unfinished doctoral thesis on the founder of modern economics in Britain. It would make great fantasy fiction.