review of any novel......
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The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional[2]but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog".[3] The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff.[Note 2]This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.[citation needed]
Following the overwhelming success of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome later published a sequel, about a cycling tour in Germany, titledThree Men on the Bummel (also known asThree Men on Wheels, 1900).
In Kate Atkinson's compelling new novel, "Life After Life," the baby girl who might have been Ursula Todd is born dead on a snowy 1910 day in England, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. But then she is born again, and acquires her name. She drowns in the ocean as a little girl, but is born again on that snowy day in 1910, only to fall to death as a girl trying to rescue a doll her older brother tossed out the window. More rebirths, longer lives, more deaths.
"Life After Life" is the second literary novel I've read this year that reflects gaming structures, consciously or otherwise, in depicting the joys, vicissitudes and choices of a life. With its second-person narration, Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" reads like a text-based role-playing game. In "Life After Life," Ursula keeps re-spawning after each death, eventually gaining some ability to return to life at a key checkpoint and make a different choice.
As her sequential lives pile up, Ursula lives uneasily with the powerful déjà vu that prompts her into actions inexplicable to others: As a girl, she knocks the family's Irish maid down the stairs, breaking her arm. Only Ursula knows she's saving the maid from a trip that will lead to death from influenza. "The past was a jumble in her mind."
While different choice points lead to some dramatically different outcomes, Ursula's personality is fairly consistent. Loves her father, Hugh. It's complicated with her mother, Sylvie. Adores her younger brother, Teddy. Forms strong friendships with sister Pamela, childhood neighbor Millie.
With men, it's more than complicated. "She seemed instead to be a magnet for unsavory types . . . and worried that they could read something in her that she couldn't read herself." In different incarnations, she's raped and becomes pregnant, marries and is physically abused. She's victimized but no eternal victim, and doesn't make the same mistake twice.
Her lives through the interwar years and the Blitz of London demonstrate how narrow women's roles and options could be then, but smart, pretty and determined, she makes her way. Once she imagines her headstone reading, "Ursula Beresford Todd, stalwart to the last." That would fit her, possibly in a way nobler than she realizes.
In the notes for her novel (which contain spoilers), Atkinson writes that it is about "not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our own imagination." Part of her motivation, she writes, is bearing witness to life in England during World War II. Ursula's experiences as an air raid warden in London go on my favorite shelf with Connie Willis' "Blackout" for their depictions of the everyday heroism of the English during the bombing of London.
Some of Ursula's roads lead to Germany. Through Ursula, Atkinson engages one of the great counterfactual what-ifs: Could someone stop Hitler before he destroyed Europe?
I tallied 17 lives for Ursula, but Atkinson handles these transitions so deftly I might have miscounted. Why does Ursula keep coming back? To kill Hitler? To save a loved one? To grow in empathy for the difficulty of lives lived anywhere? All of the above? Atkinson tantalizes but does not state outright. Playfully, she also threads the novel with grace notes about choices and time, such as allowing Ursula to buy the yellow party dress in one life that she denied herself in an earlier one.