A far better than average What If I Could Do It Differently book

I came to this book indirectly. A bookshop opposite my bus stop had a sign in the window for its successor, A God In Ruins. That led me back here, with mixed feelings. While I'm (perhaps too) attracted to the "What If" genre, it's only occasionally done well and I feared that this would be nothing more than Ken Grimwood's "Replay" reheated. (It's not. Not even remotely. And that's not a reflection one way or the other on Replay, they're simply very different books.) In any case I gave it a chance and read the introductory chapters, one of which introduced the central character's parents. A couple of lines had me with my face in my hands thinking "Not the 'free spirited woman stifled by a boring, unimaginative man' thing again, because that NEVER gets old." And thankfully, it wasn't. Again, not even remotely. Once I got into the story proper I could barely stop until I'd devoured the entire thing.
What this is, in fact, is probably one of the most finely crafted novels I've read, on many levels. I'm giving away nothing (that isn't on the dust jacket) by saying that it's the story of a woman (Ursula Todd) whose life keeps repeating from her birth in 1910 up to her death in... well, that varies. She has no direct recollection of her past lifecycles, up to a point. She has only instincts about the things that happened, some of which she can influence, some of which she can't. The path of her own life runs differently depending on events that happen or don't; sometimes the difference is radical, sometimes more subtle. Not all of these things are in her control, as other people also make different decisions along the way. None of us are complete masters of our own destiny, much as we would like to believe otherwise.
I don't think we ever see one complete path of Ursula's life, and this restraint on the part of the author is one of the things that make it such a good piece of writing. It must have been tempting to work through the whole timeline each time and milk it for all it's worth. Instead we're just taken to key points in Ursula's life in each cycle. Sometimes briefly, sometimes in detail. We see the things that determine the current cycle's path, or the outcomes of those things. Sometimes differences that have already occurred are alluded to, sometimes they're assumed to have changed in the way they had in a previous cycle. And sometimes it's left to the reader's imagination. (And at one point Atkinson throws us a nicely crafted curve which tricks the reader, but I can't describe that without a spoiler. It's after the war, and you'll know it when you see it.
Another example of this is with Ursula's parents. There's another entire story there, yet we're offered only glimpses into it. We know about certain events but we never get to find out what the context of those events was... much as Ursula herself doesn't. In real life you can never know everything about another person, no matter how close you are. Atkinson resists the temptation to prop the reader into the "God seat" and take them behind the scenes. Oddly this makes the read more rather than less gratifying. There are no neatly wrapped endings or explanations, no unquestionable truths. (Not even for Ursula's own life, much less those that her life crosses with.) The reader is therefore drawn into the story, to make of certain things what they will, never knowing for sure whether they were right about them. Again, much like life, really. Aside from which it's much harder to achieve certainty here, given the looping nature of the narrative. Did Ursula's mother have an affair in one of Ursula's lives but not another? Did she have an affair in none of them, and the hint that we were thrown in one cycle was simply an out of context distraction? More intriguingly, has Atkinson preserved material for another follow up book or two?
Another thing that appeals about this is the characterisation. It would be hard to say that we know many of the characters intimately. They're sketches rather than detailed paintings, but again, that's pretty true to life. However they're generally consistent sketches, though with some discordant notes here and there. (Even in the little details; I could never imagine her sister Pamela smoking as she did in one cycle, for example (especially given her scientific leanings and her husband's description of autopsies of smokers), but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility especially given that in that cycle her mother did as well.) Yet these notes are not so much "completely out of character" as "this is another path this character might have gone down". Another example is when Ursula found out that her one time / some times boyfriend had acquired a taste for a particular sport in his later years despite disliking it when she knew him.
We all change... and doubtless we would change in different ways in different circumstances. This, I think, is part of Atkinson's point.
For me the key thing about the characters is that there is a diversity of them; likeable, unlikeable, difficult, sharing, selfish... without them devolving into mere caricatures. There is a certain sameness about how people are supposed to react to the characters - for example, everyone supposedly loving Teddy when I only felt somewhat indifferent to him and couldn't understand why he was the loveable one - but I think that was done mainly to avoid the need to get bogged down in minutiae. This, after all, is Ursula's story. Teddy has his own in the sequel, something that I have no doubt Atkinson had in mind as she was writing this one.
Finally the storytelling. In a couple of instances I could see clearly where things would lead, and yet the writing, the characters and the story itself kept me moving along with it to discover the specifics. Your mileage may vary, but I for one wasn't disappointed.
There is one area where it squibs a little, but unfortunately I can't say very much about that without introducing huge spoilers. In the afterword Atkinson refers to one of her motivations in writing the book, which is one of history's "What Ifs". And yet that very thing is what is ultimately glossed over. Suppose that your life was to be dedicated to nudging history in a different direction? First, "why you?" given that (in this case) someone born 5 years earlier and elsewhere in the world would be much better at giving it that nudge? Second, can you even make a difference to the broad sweep of history, as opposed to the lives of a few individuals? (Michael Crichton's "Timeline" had an interesting discussion on this. The book, not the movie. Gods no, not the movie, please.) Third, if you do change it, how can you be sure that you are changing it for the better rather than the worse? Fourth, even if you do change it for the better is that what your life then becomes; an endless loop of going back and doing the same sequence of things over and over again, for if so, what's the point? Stephen King's 11/22/63 spent chapters on some of these issues (and King is hardly a terse writer), yet they remain relatively unexamined in "Life After Life".
But in the overall scheme of things that's a minor niggle in a book as good as this one. When it comes to the difference between words and deeds, my next deed after posting this review will be to buy its sequel.

A far better than average What If I Could Do It Differently book

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