Life After Life

“Motherhood was [Sylvie’s] responsibility, her destiny. It was, lacking anything else (and what else could there be?), her life. The future of England was clutched to Sylvie’s bosom.”

In probing the power of human connections and the meaning of life, the novel suggests motherhood as one answer. Motherhood is Sylvie’s calling and purpose, as she imagines that her contribution to the world will be her children.

“Izzy never mentioned her baby. He had been adopted in Germany and Sylvie supposed he was a German citizen. How strange that he was only a little younger than Ursula but, officially, he was the enemy.”

Izzy’s absent child is an ongoing motif in the novel, the valence of which changes over time. Sylvie detests Isobel for giving up her child instead of answering the calling of motherhood, making the two characters antagonists and foils. The irony of thinking of a blood relation as an enemy intensifies the novel’s message about the human cost of war.

“Ursula was expecting something wonderful—sparkling fountains and terraces, statues, walks and arbors and flowerbeds as far as the eye could see—but it wasn’t much more than an overgrown field, brambles and thistles rambling everywhere.”

Pastoral imagery is used throughout the novel to represent England, home, and life—everything one fights a war to protect. Ursula’s encounter with the overgrown garden at the Hall reflects how life in the countryside has changed with the Great War. The neglect of the hall and gardens indicates a lost or passing age and symbolizes the family’s loss of their sons.

“She could hear the clopping of hooves followed by the rattle of the coal as the coalman emptied his sacks into the coal shed. Life was going on. A thing of beauty. One breath, that was all she needed, but it wouldn’t come. Darkness fell swiftly, at first an enemy, but then a friend.”

Ursula’s deaths are often described in poetic imagery that softens the devastation, with images of beauty and life juxtaposed. The repetition of breath emphasizes it as the essence of life, but the suggestion of death as both dreaded and a relief from suffering introduces a new perspective on the theme. Life is further signified by the mundane, daily tasks like securing fuel, rather than in grand or philosophical terms.

“[Ursula] often felt confused between what was real and what was not. And the terrible fear—fearful terror—that she carried around inside her. The dark landscape within.”

The unique narrative device of the book—that Ursula is repeatedly reborn—leaves her with knowledge and sensations she cannot explain, a metaphor for a sense of isolation and difference that sensitive children can often feel. The metaphor of the dark landscape represents her sense that her inner world is out of tune with the outer.

“Jimmy’s arrival had the effect of making Ursula feel as if she was being pushed further away from the heart of the family, like an object at the edge of an overcrowded table. A cuckoo, she had overheard Sylvie say to Hugh. […] But could you be a cuckoo in your own nest?”

The novel examines relationships between family, posing connection as part of what makes life meaningful, but here, ironically, Ursula feels distanced from her family by the birth of a third brother, represented by the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in the nest of other birds. Stylistically, the many asides and parentheticals add to the polyphonic nature of the novel, bringing in perspectives that Ursula otherwise would not know.

“Ursula wasn’t sure that she had a yardstick against which to measure happiness or unhappiness. She had obscure memories of elation, of falling into darkness, but they belonged to that world of shadows and dreams that was ever present and yet almost impossible to pin down.”

As Ursula matures over various lives, the novel introduces its deeper philosophical themes, such as how to measure the quality of a life and what gives a life meaning. Ursula’s association of elation with the darkness suggests that death is not always terrifying or to be feared, as is conventionally believed. Her repeating realities question reality itself as what is presumably defined by what is visible, as opposed to the shadows and dreams which represent less tangible but still powerful experiences like imagination and memory.

“Ursula still harbored the feeling that some of her future was also behind her but she had learned not to voice such things.”

As she matures, Ursula develops a sense of irony that matches the dry voice of the narrator. If time can be erased or a life relived, then that raises the question of what events or experiences lend a life true or lasting meaning.

“He must have sensed something in her, something unchaste, that even she was unaware of. Before locking it away she had gone over the incident again and again, trying to see in what way she had been to blame. There must be something written on her skin, in her face, that some people could read and others couldn’t. Izzy had seen it. Something wicked this way comes. And the something was herself.”

Ursula’s reflection on her rape and whether she invited it raises the novel’s thematic question of how responsible we are for what happens to us, particularly the events that cause suffering. This passage also contains a stylistic technique the novel uses frequently, that of repeated phrases and language; Izzy remarked Ursula about something wicked earlier in the section. As events are shown to be good or evil only by consequence, Ursula wonders if people are good or evil by nature, and if there is something unrecognized inside her.

“Would she really be able to come back and start again? Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was—wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?”

Here the novel skirts weighty philosophical questions dealing with the very nature of reality. Ursula questions whether her memory of past lives has any substance. What constitutes life if she simply restarts? How does she measure value in her life if she knows she will get more? The novel asks the reader to supply their own answers to these questions.

“[Derek] changed almost immediately, as if the honeymoon itself was a transition, an anticipated rite of passage for him from solicitous suitor to disenchanted spouse.”

Derek offers an example of the novel’s consideration of how, and why, people change. While some characters remain much the same throughout the novel, Derek changes quickly from Ursula’s perspective, revealing himself as an abuser and a predator. The swiftness of the change suggests that this was his true nature all along, and that marriage allows him to drop the façade of kindness. Initially, however, the sudden change causes the young Ursula to wonder whether she deserves or has somehow caused the misfortune that befalls her.

“She no longer recognized herself, [Ursula] thought. She had taken the wrong path, opened the wrong door, and was unable to find her way back.”

The metaphor of paths and doors complicates the notion of a course or steady trajectory that unfolds over the course of a life. The novel’s branching timelines further explore the question of what consequences a single human choice can have on future events.

“It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point but there was nothing to be gained from arguing with Sylvie.”

In the first chapter dealing with World War II, Sylvie voices the fatalistic pronouncement that everyone ends up in the same place (dead) and it doesn’t matter how you got there. Ursula’s thought voices an alternative philosophy that events of the novel would seem to support: The measure of life is not what one accomplishes but the meaning one gains from experience.

“If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. Not just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too.”

The novel’s theme about human choice and consequence emerges in a discussion Ursula has with Ralph about how the world would be different if Hitler had been killed as a baby. Ursula weighs whether she could make such a choice, giving an answer that shows the power of human love and connection as she thinks, first, of saving her brother.

“‘For me, marriage is about freedom,’ Izzy said. ‘For you it has always been about the vexations of confinement.’”

This passage captures the device of contrast that Atkinson uses throughout the novel to create emotional impact and meaning. Marriage is one way the novel examines its themes of human connection and meaning. In this respect as in others, Izzy and Sylvie prove foils and antagonists to one another, representing the broad variety of human experience.

“She sensed something inside her was torn beyond repair. Cracked. She was a golden bowl.”

Though this image describes one of the times Ursula is killed by a German bomb, the metaphor of something inside her being torn applies more broadly, as Ursula’s life is different from those around her in its repeating nature. Her realization that others don’t have the same experience has made her feel different, possibly defective in some hidden way, like the golden bowl in Henry James’s classic novel of that title—one of the novel’s many literary allusions pointing to a life of imagination, even beauty, that Ursula lives beyond her immediate reality.

“And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden—a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.”

In its many scenes of war, the novel reflects on the abstract ideas that wars are fought over—peace, freedom, nation—but Ursula finds it more compelling to think in concrete terms. This metaphor follows one that illustrates the German soul through its dramatic, romantic mountains, while in comparison the English soul is humble, ordinary, and nurturing. Pastoral imagery is used throughout the novel to represent England as well as a lost age or a simple way of life that has presumably vanished.

“The rubble had been homes half an hour ago, now those same homes were just a hellish jumble of bricks, broken joists and floorboards, furniture, pictures, rugs, bedding, books, crockery, lino, glass. People. The crushed fragments of lives, never to be whole again.”

This specific list of broken things, a litany of devastation, is a powerful image that captures the novel’s lament over the effects of war. Ursula’s confrontation of this loss of life spurs the reader to reflect on the themes suggested by her own uniquely iterating life.

“Miss Woolf believed in the war but her religious faith had begun to ‘crumble’ since the start of bombing. ‘Yet we must hold fast to what is good and true. But it all seems so random. One wonders about the divine plan and so on.’”

The novel debates various philosophical approaches to describing the meaning of life, including the reasons for terrible events. Miss Woolf represents a kind of moral compass that goes beyond religious faith to notions of right or good that are expressed through human kindness and charity. Fortitude becomes a survival tactic in its own right.

“That was the problem with time travel, of course (apart from the impossibility)—one would always be a Cassandra, spreading doom with one’s foreknowledge of events. It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.”

This statement ripples with irony since Ursula does in fact travel in time and has, to some degree, foreknowledge. The comparison of herself to Cassandra, to the prophetess of Troy who was doomed never to be believed, gives expression to the premonitions that move Ursula as being ultimately futile since her life will reset. However, this very repetitiveness imbues Ursula with her own personal philosophy: Keep moving forward, despite all.

“Pamela’s life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”

Somewhat ironically considering the narrative device of her rebirth, Ursula most often considers death as simply an ending. The novel turns over many metaphors for life and death; here, Pamela’s life is imagined not just as a stream that continues to feed and nourish others after her passing, but as a delta with many branches.

“Amor fati […] means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.”

This philosophy proves a motif in the novel as various characters, including Ursula, refer to it. The notion of amor fati transcends the novel’s questions about human choice or the meaning of life to counsel simple acceptance of everything, good or bad.

“Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness. She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls. This is love, Ursula thought. And the practice of it makes it perfect.”

Crowning a section where the accumulated weight of her memories has become too much to bear, Ursula recovers and makes peace with her situation, which she now believes she understands. The “its” of the last sentence have an ambiguous referent—what is it Ursula has decided is love, and what can be perfect in the practice? Atkinson asks the reader to decide. This passage with its black bat as a metaphor for death and the clipped, balanced sentences are characteristic of Atkinson’s prose style.