Atkinson picks up the story of the Todd family, with Ursula’s ‘glorious’ brother Teddy centre stage, but how does it compare to its predecessor?
Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Life After Life, played an ingenious game with time. Over and over again, Ursula Todd is born on 11 February 1910; over and over again, she dies – at birth, or drowning at the beach aged five, or falling out of a window, aged five again. Or of influenza, four times, in 1918. The first time she dies of influenza, she is tended to the last by her broken-hearted mother. The second time, her little brother Teddy, her mother’s favourite, has also just died of the virus; her mother, demented with grief, hardly has attention to spare for poor Ursula. During her third bout of influenza, something begins to leak through to Ursula from those other selves, warning her, making her feel an incoherent dread, turning her into an odd little person, dreamy and haunted. Until she dies anyway – and then is born again. Eventually, dreamy and haunted still, she pushes past 1918, and on to her future deaths.
Atkinson’s new novel, A God in Ruins, picks up the story of the Todd family, but arranges it this time around the perspective of sweet-natured, affectionate, beautiful Teddy, Ursula’s beloved brother, his mother’s golden boy. And what happens in A God in Ruins just happens – there are no second chances or different versions. Teddy doesn’t ever catch influenza (as indeed he doesn’t in most of the timelines in Life After Life); he grows up to become a bomber pilot in the second world war. Against all the odds he survives the war, marries his childhood sweetheart Nancy, and lives on into old age. At the core of the book is the discovery that the glorious Teddy, whose death in Life After Life seemed such a wrenching and archetypal loss, might actually, if he’d survived, be rather dull. In the earlier novel we circled round the charm of his existence, along with all those women who adored him. In this later book we’re allowed inside Teddy himself, and there just isn’t very much there.
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