A baby is stillborn in the winter of 1910. Time rewinds and the baby is born again in 1910, this time surviving until she's a toddler, when she drowns. Back to 1910 again, and another birth, and a different set of life events. The baby is Ursula Todd, and the book follows her as she lives through alternate possible lives.
The description might make the book sound a bit gimmicky, and at the start I was a little bit worried that this might be all there was to it, because the first few chapters all play out the same period of time over and over (from the 1910 birth scene) which seemed like it would be interesting but maybe not enough. But as the book progresses, and the lives become longer, the alternate lives thing seems to become less relevant as you become more wrapped up in the characters.
In fact, the more you read, the harder it is to remember which events happened in which "life". Ursula is the same person in each story: she doesn't develop different character traits, and so her constant presence means that her "past" becomes a not unpleasant blur of events which all seem relevant. On top of this, Ursula herself experiences a form of deja-vu which suggests she does have some kind of memory of her alternate life stories. There's are sort of Cloud Atlas type moments where events from one storyline are reflected in another - where Ursula may not notice, but we spot that she's seeing the same event but from a different perspective.
You might assume that the book's message is that life is futile and death inevitable, but death is made to seem like not such a bad thing, when it's simply a prelude to being able to have another chance at life. I suppose that more interesting is that life can take very different courses from a single starting point.
The writing was excellent, and didn't feel contrived or forced at all (which I guess means Atkinson probably spent a lot of time on it) - it was just really easy and pleasant to read. The sort of book you want to carry on for ever.
Re-read in 2019:
I had remembered the repeat sections being more repetitive than they are and that every time she was born you would repeat (with variations) everything you’d had in the last life. But In fact after she dies in eg 1914 the next section has a small para about her birth in 1910 again and then resumes in 1914 in the alternate path that would have happened if she’d not died.
By about half way through the book it’s hard to remember which things happened in which lives especially when there are so many echoes of alternate lives in each story. Eg one has Ursula coming round in the rubble after a bomb hit her house in London and talking to an arp warden trying to help her. In a later section she is one of the rescuers of a woman who’s trapped in bomb wreckage. The warden is the same person saying some of the same things. Ursula thinks she knows the woman in the wreckage and I can’t remember if she really does or whether that’s because she knew her in an different timeline. That’s presumably the intention: although there are many lives it is difficult for us and for Ursula (who does have deja Vue about stuff) to tease them apart
Towards the end in particular things blur over the different narratives in an altogether pleasingly bewildering way.
Completed : 31-Dec-2013
Completed : 19-Dec-2019