This novel is a slow burner. Usually, Kate Atkinson grabs me by the throat before I’m half-way down the first page, and doesn’t relent till the book is done.  Not so with <i>Life After Life</i>, but stick with it and you’ll be ridiculously rewarded. </p>

The novel follows the many lives of Ursula Todd: she suffers relentless deaths  but is reincarnated, as herself, to try again and again, finally scraping through childhood into her teenage years and beyond.</p> 

Ursula is only vaguely aware of her remarkable gift, which manifests itself in her ordinary life as flashes of déjà vu or maddening anxiety, provoking troubled trips to a psychiatrist.</p>

In one life, the family maid, Bridget, goes off to London to celebrate the end of the Great War but unwittingly brings the deadly flu back home on the train. In the subsequent reincarnation, Ursula is racked with terror at the thought of Bridget going off to London and so pushes her, spraining her ankle, and averting her destined contact with the flu-raddled crowds. Ursula is saved this time,  but death is always just around the corner, as is another go at living life.</p>

It takes several attempts for Ursula to dodge the dangers and diseases of an Edwardian childhood and it is only once she reaches her young adulthood that the novel takes flight. Until then, there is a tinge of frustration at always having the narrative reset to 1910 whilst Ursula makes another attempt at surviving her early years. So there is often scant sense of a story moving forward and the narrative fails to build up a head of steam. </p>

The structure also made it difficult to develop a sense of Ursula’s character, as we spend so much time seeing her as a baby or toddler trying to emerge unscathed from childhood. Also, in one life she may become a dreary suburban wife, but in another she is leading a glamorous existence in Weimar Germany.  So who is Ursula? It’s often hard to know, as she sprints off to so many different destinies.</p>

The novel finally sparks into life when Ursula arrives in London during the Blitz. Finally, she is grounded and solid and, though we have several versions of her life and death in this era, we are at last allowed to stay with her long enough, in the same frightening but familiar setting, to know her. The constant stop-starts are replaced by beautifully elongated snapshots of life. Instead of living a few seconds  before being strangled by her umbilical cord, or a few hours before being smothered by a cat, she steps into fuller life. Finally, we’re going somewhere! The constantly zig-zagging line of the narrative has now steadied and sharpened and is aiming towards a great finale. </p>

Kate Atkinson’s descriptive strengths are best displayed in these Blitz sections and we feel she too knows that this is the novel’s finest hour. We are treated to some splendid, though disturbing, imagery: as Ursula works to remove corpses after a raid, she lifts a body by the shoulders only to see him ‘come apart like a Christmas cracker.’ </p>

So, Atkinson devotees - like me - may feel they have a damp squib on their hands but, stick with it, and it’ll soon sparkle into literary brilliance.

<i>Life After Life</i> is published on March 14th by Doubleday.

<iframe src="http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=thepufrev-21&o=2&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385618670&ref=tf_til&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="width:120px;height:240px;" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
