This book is being marketed as a 'companion' to Kate's previous novel, the award winning 'Life After Life'. It follows the story of Teddy, Ursula's younger brother, as he grows up, and joins Bomber Command during WW2, and then follows him through a life after the war, the 'afterward', a life he never thought he'd witness.
I really loved 'Life After Life', and so thought I'd feel the same about 'A God in Ruins', but I must admit that by about half way through, I felt myself 'plodding' through it, and feeling some chapters as a bit of a chore. I found myself getting a little fed up with the backward and forward in time, and even though the main story of Teddy is of his years in service, I hate to admit that at times I skimmed through those passages. I much preferred reading about his home life, his family, the awfully unkind Viola, and of course the wise words of Ursula.
This is not to say I disliked it, I would like to think that anyone who read 'Life After Life' should read this, it's just that I felt my thoughts wandering, and my eyes flicking to how many pages I had left! But I still loved Teddy, and it was lovely to read more about his parents and siblings.
Life After Life
by Kate Atkinson
In my late 20s I read Kate's first book 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' which won the Whitbread Book of the Year 1995. I still have it and must re-read it, especially after finishing 'Life After Life' and then reading a review of 'Behind the Scenes....' to remind myself what happened. There are familiar themes - death, families, children. She especially seems to like the child death theme. Anyone who has read her later series of novels following Private Detective Jackson Brodie will recognise this heartbreaking theme.
Which brings us back to 'Life After Life'. We follow the tragic life of Ursula and her family - tragic in that, from birth through to adulthood, we watch her follow different paths which ultimately always lead to her death. She is born in 1910 and lives and dies (through the aforementioned different paths) through the two World Wars, which affect her in different ways depending on which path she has taken in life. This is the Butterfly Effect in full motion. Some scenes are so tragically sad and heartbreaking you just want to moan out loud and shed many tears, and share with whoever may be in the room with you how awful such a scene was and poor poor Ursula. Then you think, but that's ok, because the next chapter she will not follow the same path and everything will be better and happy - but the future for Ursula is not often a happy one.
I read this book on my e-reader, and must admit that at times I was a bit confused with what year I was in and how old Ursula was, as the chapters continually jump back and forth in time. If I was reading a paperback, it would have been easier to flick back to the start of the chapter to remind myself of the year, but with an e-reader it's just a bit more fiddly and you don't bother. However, I found myself getting into the flow of the time changes and it wasn't a problem then.
Shortlisted for both the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 and the Costa Novel Award 2013, this brilliant novel would be one of my contenders for Book of the Year 2013 (along with Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch).
