Kate Atkinson – couldreads

The meaning of Life After Life

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In The Simpsons’ sixth-season Halloween episode—”Treehouse of Horror V,” primarily remembered for its Shining knock-off, The Shinning—Homer accidentally turns his toaster into a time machine, travels back to the prehistoric age, and realizes that anything he does in the past has the capacity to change the future. It’s a lesson as pivotal to time travel (see: every story ever told about time travel) as it is irrelevant to everyday life. After all, we can’t not make decisions. Should our choices send us down one path at the expense of others—or, to get more J.J. Abrams about it, should each of our choices create countless additional paths which themselves generate still more simultaneously occurring futures—so be it. We’ll never know the difference.

Unless. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is elegantly concerned with this abundance of potential paths, and with the possibility that one might indeed be aware of their existence. At the heart of LAL is Ursula, born on a snowy night in 1910, dead within minutes, and then born again—on a snowy night in 1910. Nor is Ursula’s first rebirth her last: She dies in a variety of ways, and at a variety of ages, over the course of the book, and only in certain versions of her life does she mature enough to experience significant rites of passage, (or in some cases enough to make major contributions to the trajectory of world history). In this way, Life After Life is not so much about reincarnation—Ursula is in all iterations herself, never a cat or a horse or a blade of grass—and more about how even small choices have the power (or maybe just the capacity?) to redirect our lives. In other words, Ursula is not repeatedly reborn to a different set of circumstances, but rather given multiple opportunities to live within the same set of circumstances. It’s how she handles each life that shapes its direction.

CSI: Cambridge

Suffice it to say that in a kidnapping situation, I would be a hot mess. I mean, not a situation where I was kidnapped, in which case I’d pull a Bette Midler in Ruthless People and spend my isolation losing weight to aerobics shows and befriending my captors, but a situation where someone I know, or someone close to me, was kidnapped. I don’t deal well with uncertainty, and the idea of wondering whether my sister/daughter/dog was dead or not seems far worse than simply knowing it for a fact. Already prone to hermititude, I suspect I’d be one of those people who stops showering and starts wearing the same sweatpants every day. I’d paper over my guest bedroom with maps and crime scenes photographs, held together by that red bulletin board ribbon you only see in police shows. I’d almost assuredly start talking to myself, and I would definitively hire a private detective, who I would without question drive totally insane.

Which brings me to Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. Dubbed “literary crime fiction,” the novel revolves around retired cop and private detective Jackson Brodie, who finds himself at the center of a run of major cases after years spent trailing cheating wives and looking for lost pets. Among the mysteries to be solved is the 30-year-old disappearance of an eight-year-old Olivia Land, whose sisters Amelia and Julia, now quirky spinster types, hire Jackson to reopen the case after they discover a long-lost stuffed animal Olivia had been holding on the night of her death. There’s also the 10-year-old murder of a young Laura Wyre, whose killer has never been found. Then we have Michelle, who killed her husband in cold blood; and Binky, who’s convinced her cats are being stolen, and Jackson himself, who can’t seem to catch a break in his personal life. All in all, there’s a great deal of uncertainty to be dealt with, and it’s safe to say I have zero interest in ever pursuing a career in police work.