2Having said that, it is undeniably true that, since the 1980s, there has been a marked resurgence of history in English fiction. As Jerome De Groot boldly asserts at the very beginning of his overview of the historical novel 1980-2018, ‘It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years’ (De Groot 2019, 169). However, just as one cannot step into the same river twice, the re-birth of the historical novel is necessarily accompanied by changes and takes new forms. It is thus said of Hilary Mantel who won the Man Booker Prize twice, in 2009 and in 2012, with historical novels centred on the figure of Thomas Cromwell, that she ‘rereads and reinvents the genre . . .’ (Hanson 23; emphasis added). We are talking here of new trends in the historical novels, distinct from Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction and its disruptive narrative strategies, marked by distance, irony, parody and pastiche. Indeed, in 1991, Fredric Jameson declared that ‘the historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby becomes pop history)’ (Jameson 25). Since then, this ironic stand has been subsumed in a return to ‘a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history’ (Boxall 41) marked by the ‘struggle towards a historical realism that remains beyond the grasp of a narrative that is alive to its own limitations’ (Boxall 64). Looking at contemporary novels that represent the Second World War, Alexandra Stewart notes the presence of ‘the postmodern sense of uncertainty about knowledge of the past’ yet tempered by ‘an eschewal of radical uncertainty’ (3) while Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone generally refer to ‘works that maintain postmodernism’s self-reflexive playfulness while also adhering to an underlying sense of emotional truthfulness’ (2). New attempts are made to represent the past realistically without dismissing the lessons of postmodernism in the line of post-postmodernism and ‘new sincerity’ or metamodernism. At the same time, the borders of the genre have been pushed back and made less marked as quite generally, the past and its impact on the present have become a major concern in contemporary fiction, relying on forms and modes usually beyond the remit of historical fiction (see Eaglestone).

3Kate Atkinson is part of this trend as, in the last ten years, she has published three novels that are all paradoxically committed to re-imagining the Second World War, striving for accuracy and truthfulness, yet forcing self-consciousness on the reader in various ways. The first one, Life After Life (2013), offers narratives that all together range from February 11th 1910—the day of the heroine’s birth—to 1967 or, mostly, the aftermath of World War II. It thus fits Walter Scott’s ‘Tis 60 years since’ at the outset of Waverley that has been accepted as a benchmark for historical fiction but its narrative structure differs greatly from traditional narratives. In addition to being an instance of a re-birth of the historical novel with necessarily attending changes, the notion of renaissance as ‘rebirth’ is actually illustrated literally in Life After Life which offers successive versions of Ursula Todd’s life as the heroine is born, dies, is born again, lives, dies again and so on and so on, each time hoping to improve the world she lives in by trying to avoid causes of death or misery.

4This article will show how Life After Life straddles two tendencies: the 1990s’ ‘new versions of the genre [of historical fiction] which they [women writers] shaped to reflect their sense of history as subjective, multiple, contingent and fragmented’ (Wallace 2004, 203) and Peter Boxall’s remark that ‘the fiction of the twenty-first century . . . invents new forms with which to narrate the past’ (40). Life After Life pursues the traditional aim to create ‘a living empathy, a live connection between then and now’ (De Groot 2010, 27) but this is achieved in an uncommon way: through a combination of distance and self-consciousness and a form of immersion. In order to explore this unresolved tension between a claim to exactness coupled with self-consciousness, the following pages will initially discuss the chosen perspective on the war, here seen from the margins as the focus is on the women of the Todd family, and then examine the unusual combination of narrative strategies at work to reconstruct the past: first, the use of the forking-path narrative technique and second, the emphasis on affect and the senses that together contribute to renewing the historical novel.

Women’s Experiences of the War

5Even though she was born after the Second World War (in 1951) and did not experience it first-hand, Atkinson considers this book as her ‘bearing witness to the past’ (Author’s note). In Life After Life, she strives to create ‘an atmosphere of authenticity or narrative credibility’ (Author’s Note), which is confirmed by the addition of a list of sources in her ‘author’s note’ at the end. What she bears witness to in this novel are the lives and perceptions of individuals, especially women, in relation to the wars. In this respect, Life After Life illustrates one of the tenets of contemporary representations of the past, which is to focus on previously neglected figures or events which can be considered as a form of revisionism, i.e., ‘the attempt to reconsider historical consensus and offer critique, or to include unaccustomed agents in the historical account’ (Brooker 169). Atkinson’s fiction supplements the historical record in the sense that it makes space for these ordinary lives that are not part of the record. Thus, the re-imagining of female experience in Life After Life and in fiction in general parallels the work of feminist historians: ‘to recover women’s submerged or unrealized past’ (Anderson 130).

6As Life After Life revisits the first half of the twentieth century from the margins, focusing on the home front through the lives of members of the Todd family, war developments and battlegrounds remain in the background. Brief allusions to key historical events are made from the characters’ point of view, with no didactic exposition by the narrator. For instance, the mention of the peace agreement or non-aggression pact signed by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Nazi Germany in September 1938 is made in the following terms: ‘Sylvie had been in a good mood that day and they had drawn together over the subject of curtains and the idiocy of people who thought that Chamberlain’s silly little piece of paper meant anything at all’ (Atkinson 250). The narrator refers to a day when Ursula’s mother came up to London and bought curtains for her daughter’s new flat. Not only does the syllepsis that brings together curtains and politics yoke together domestic and political preoccupations and point to women’s double involvement, one foot in the private world and the other in the public one, but the women show perspicacity and are later proved right by historical events.

7The war is thus depicted in terms of its consequences on the lives of civilians. The First World War is seen from a distance through the Todd female household at Fox Corner, servants included, in the countryside as Hugh, the father, has joined up. The narrative repeatedly says they are in a frenzy of knitting ‘to keep their men warm’ (Atkinson 61). The repetition of the activity (Atkinson 64, 85) underlines their narrow range of action. The narrative shows how they are affected through their male relations. If the father of the Todd family returns unharmed, their cook, Mrs Glover, sees her son fatally injured in a gas attack (Atkinson 74). As for their servant Bridget, after the death of her first fiancé (Atkinson 75), she becomes engaged after the war with another local young man whose face is half hidden by a tin mask. He is depicted through the perspective of the child Ursula: ‘The mask had one wide-open eye painted blue to match the real one. ‘Enough to frighten the horses, isn’t it?’ he said and smiled. She wished he hadn’t because his mouth wasn’t covered by the mask. His lips were puckered and strange, as if they were an afterthought, stitched on after he was born’ (Atkinson 80). With this minor character, Atkinson briefly evokes the situation of the men facially disfigured in the war as well as the (few) masks created by Francis Derwent Wood.

8Life After Life evokes the changes more or less rapidly met by women after the war through Izzie, Hugh’s single, fashionable, reckless and selfish sister. An ambulance driver during the war, Izzie then adopts a bobbed haircut and declares: ‘The modern woman must fend for herself without the prospect of the succour of hearth and home’ (Atkinson 153). Izzie’s somewhat hyperbolic phrasing, mixing the literary and the clichéd, makes her sincerity somewhat doubtful. At the same time, Hugh and Sylvie’s conservative and hostile reactions indicate the reception met by this change in attitude at the time.

9Life After Life contributes to giving visibility to the very diverse ways in which ordinary women experienced the war years. At the time of WWII, Ursula’s sister Pamela becomes a resilient, motherly but politically-conscious figure along with Sylvie who turns to breeding animals and growing vegetables. They represent different types of nurturers while Ursula lives through the Blitz, dying in the rubble or working as an ARP warden. If Atkinson believes that women ‘had exciting times in the war’ (Schulman) and that she depicts it in Life After Life through the female characters’ various lives, she does not minimise the gender restrictions at work then and later but denounces them through irony. Thus, about Ursula, the narrator caustically reports:

. . . the men who interviewed her for the job in the Home Office, men she would never see again, clearly believed that her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buffcoloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. . . . Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress.’ (Atkinson 241, emphasis added)

11The depiction of a wide range of women’s forms of involvement (whether passive or active) in the wars is facilitated by the unusual narrative structure of Life After Life.

Variations on Traditional Historical Fiction: The Forking-path Narrative and the Anti-mimetic

13First, the table of contents at the start of Life After Life clearly indicates an unusual non-linearity as the dates dart back and forth. For instance, the first headings indicate (in this order): ‘Be Ye Men of Valour November 1930,’ ‘Snow 11 February 1910,’ ‘Snow 11 February 1910,’ ‘Four Seasons Fill the Measure of the Year 11 February 1910, May 1910, June 1914,’ ‘Snow 11 February 1910’ etc. Throughout the table of contents, there are jumps and leaps in time, sometimes big ones: from the 1918 armistice to ‘Peace’ which is in fact set in 1947 (after the Second World War and not the First as expected).

14Secondly, the second and third part quickly establish the premise of the narrative: in the second part, Ursula dies at birth and in the third one, we understand the same scene is replayed but this time the doctor has arrived and she lives. In a later example, she dies in pursuit of her doll on the roof (Atkinson 65–66) while in another version, ‘Ursula had been about to plunge out of the window . . . when something made her hesitate’ (Atkinson 73). Even though the decisions are at first made for her and they are later more or less conscious, as the novel is structured around Ursula’s death or survival at diverse precise junctures, Life After Life reads as a forking-path narrative on the paradigm described by Borgès:

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel. (98)

17Over these narratives that repeat themselves with significant variations, it appears that Ursula manages to live longer each time as she learns to steer away from events with disastrous consequences. Life After Life could thus be argued to be a novel of self-realisation as Ursula is shaped and formed into an adult by the events she encounters and overcomes, gradually learns to survive a little longer each time by making the right decision. However, rather than offering just one development from A to B (even allowing for errors and obstacles), Life After Life offers several developing processes that cancel each other in their coexistence. None is privileged over the other. In this respect, Life After Life is like an anti-Bildungsroman as the multiplicity of possible lives suggests a rejection of temporal linearity which is associated with masculine time: what Julia Kristeva identifies as ‘a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival-in other words, the time of history’ (17).

Suzanne Keen observes that
Postmodern fiction is often regarded as more cognitively pleasurable than emotionally inviting, with its emphases on ironies, parody, pastiche, and metafictional moves that draw attention to the artifice of the work . . . but contemporary novels often combine surprising formal experiments that lay bare the devices of fictionality with invitations to share in the intensities of embodied experience. (2019, 64; emphasis added)

21Life After Life operates a departure from realism with this ‘anti-mimetic’ set-up (it is generally understood that you only live once...) and in its narrative rendition but not in terms of theme as historical events and characters remain unchanged (Life After Life is not a counterfactual narrative). For instance, two chapters are headed with the same date 2 Sept 1939. The same day unfolds with the only apparent difference that Ursula buys or does not buy a yellow crèpe de chine dress with different follow-ups in each case (Atkinson 248, 273). But these variations at an individual level do not change the background fact that 2 Sept 1939 is the day before Britain and France declared war to Germany (and when British children were evacuated from the cities). The forking-path structure does not entail that Life After Life is about the subjectivity or the fragmentary dimension of historical knowledge, as in the fiction of the 1980s and 90s (Wallace 2004, 204), but mostly enhances the notion of chance and of decision-making at an individual level while offering a wide panel of women’s war experiences.

Strategies for a Readerly Experience of WWII

24In Atkinson’s version of historical fiction in Life After Life, in order to make the reader experience the past, the forking-path narrative is thus harnessed with strategies meant to engage the reader’s emotions and/or attention. Richardson explains that despite the breaches in the narrator’s immersion, Atkinson maintains suspense and interest in her character’s fate because she plays on surprise and defeats the reader’s expectations in terms of pattern. Richardson thus points to the change during the narration of the Blitz when Ursula dies three times in a row almost on the same spot in a street undergoing or having undergone bombing in London (Richardson 75). This acceleration or change of rhythm with Ursula’s death occurring in the same place also indicates the heightened danger in wartime and illustrates the variety of civilian casualties.

26Another way to enlist the reader’s empathy to convey access to the past is the emphasis on materiality and on the senses. The materiality of the war period is conveyed through lists of objects that denote referentiality and act as codes for the atmosphere of the time, as indicated by the depiction of Ursula’s preparation for the war on the day before the declaration (2 Sept 1939):

• 16 A similar description of Ursula’s activities is given in her life in Germany, also on 2nd September (...)

She had spent the morning on Kensington High Street, stocking up—batteries for her torch, a new hot-water bottle, candles, matches, endless amounts of black paper, as well as tins of baked beans and potatoes, vacuum-packed coffee. She had bought clothes too, a good woollen frock for eight pounds, a green velvet jacket for six, stockings and a pair of leather brogues that looked made to last. (Atkinson 247)16

27The part entitled ‘A Long Hard War’ is set during the Blitz and Ursula is then an ARP. As a result of the bombing, houses and streets are reduced to a list of fragments from homes: ‘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’ (Atkinson 352). The elements act as synecdoches for people’s ordinary lives and their disjointedness conveys the sense that all is irremediably destroyed.

28As the narrative returns for the fourth time to the bombed site on Argyll Road, the dual position of the reader—brought about by the forking-path structure—who both espouses Ursula’s viewpoint through internal focalisation and remains distant as s/he remembers Ursula’s previous and alternative lives raises a form of ethical awareness. Every time, the same horrible trick of the eye applies as Ursula first identifies a dress before she realises that she is looking at a woman’s headless body. However, in this fourth occurrence, Ursula looks at the scene with an external detached perspective when the reader recognises ‘the woman’ (390) as Lavinia Nesbit since she was introduced earlier as one of Ursula’s neighbours on Argyll Road. This repetition of the perception of the headless dress allows for a self-reflexive reflection on narrative empathy as Ursula’s external perception of the scene in ‘A Long Hard War’ (as in that life she does not know Lavinia Nesbit) now deprives the situation of sentiment and emotion.

• 20 Encounter with Maggie O’Farrell, 29 April 2021, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris https://www.youtub (...)

if you’re going to animate people who lived so long ago, their lives are so different from us, so unfamiliar to ours, you need to have something that the reader can hang, can sort of grasp, so something like the smell of leather or the sound of a horse, just something that feels familiar that they can get a foothold in the narrative.20 (my transcription)

30The Blitz in Life After Life is thus narrated through Ursula’s senses when, in a chapter set in November 1940, Atkinson seemingly buries her reader along with her heroine under the debris caused by a bombing through the emphasis of Ursula’s senses, starting notably with the sense of smell emphasised in the first 9-line-long paragraph: ‘smell . . . fetid stench . . . stink . . . smell’ (249). This chapter alternates between the moment of Ursula’s imminent death as she is lying in the debris and memories of more or less distant events in a stream of consciousness that follows Ursula’s wandering thoughts triggered by her senses (for instance, the vision of the window’s curtains brings back the time when she bought them with mother Sylvie (249–250)). In another version of September 1940 in which Ursula works as an ARP warden, the narrative also relies on a description of her physical reaction (vomiting after a failed rescue (358)) and senses to convey a feel of the situation: unseeing by ‘a moonless night,’ she is hit by ‘the stink . . . the smell’ and guided by her hearing with the sound of voices and of the ‘rumble’ of a bombed building (Atkinson 352). The appeal to the reader’s senses through the depiction of the character’s works as a way to experience the past.

31To conclude, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life can be read as an illustration of the contemporary renaissance or rebirth of historical fiction in that it confronts its reader with a representation of the past which invites the reader to experience the past but also somehow to reflect upon it. The forking-path narrative structure complements the historical record as it enables multiple versions of women’s lives during and in-between the two world wars. Its challenges to, and constant interruptions of, traditional historical narration however do not destroy the reader’s interest all the more so as it is coupled with techniques that solicit the reader’s empathy and ‘alignment’ (Felski).

32What does such an imaginative return to the past tell us? First, contrary to the recurring charge of escapism, recent instances of historical novels seem to be vehicles for contemporary issues. Life after Life, like most of Atkinson’s novels, is about women (presented as victims or empowered) and the limits set on them because of their gender. In one of her unhappy lives, Ursula is raped by a friend of her brother’s and later dies under the blows of her violent husband, which resonates with today’s lasting situation regarding unreported rapes (performed by friends of the family) and with the current focus on hitherto ignored feminicides. Secondly, the fact that the experimental (with the use of the forking-path narrative) and the appeal to reader empathy can be combined and are not merely to be opposed may illustrate a trend both in writing and in reading.