Most novels follow a fairly standard format: beginning, middle and end. This is the form drilled into almost anyone who writes in any capacity: common wisdom states that one must introduce, expound and conclude, in order to put together a cohesive tale. In her novel Life After Life, Kate Atkinson takes this contemporary formula in a whole new direction — rather than just one of each, her novel contains a multitude of these three components.

The opening pages of Life After Life place us in a German café in 1930, smack in the middle of an assassination. A woman pulls out a gun and shoots Adolf Hitler; but instead of following through on the consequences of that act, Atkinson reboots her story, taking us back in time 20 years, to the birth-cum-death of a stillborn child in England, 1910.

Or is the child stillborn? We’re not quite sure, because in the chapter that immediately follows, we are introduced to the new-born Ursula Todd. “Little Bear,” as she is affectionately called by her father, the immensely matter-of-fact Hugh Todd, could have her life set to Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Ursula is, as we discover, simultaneously a still-born infant, and a “bonny, bouncing baby girl”; she is Hitler’s killer and an air-raid warden in London during the Blitz; she is a mother and a spinster aunt; a reality-spanning character whose life (well, all of them really) is just as simple, strange, and possibly lethal as anyone else’s.

It really is. Ursula is raped and impregnated by a college friend of her brother’s; shamed and convinced that she must have done something to lead him on, she surreptitiously undergoes an abortion with the connivance of her aunt Izzie (who, in any timeline, is the black ewe of the family). But in the same moment (or is it?) she laughingly rebuffs the would-be Lothario pawing at her; in yet another, she enjoys a flirtatious moment with him, and calls it quits.

There’s more though. Ursula befriends a young Eva Braun (Hitler’s eventual mistress) while touring pre-war Germany; but during the war, she is seen working in London with rescue teams, grimly coping with Luftwaffe strafing. In one scenario, she is a glorified clerk; in another, she is a pioneer, one of the first women to achieve a senior position as a wartime intelligence officer. She meets — and marries — an abusive, pathological liar who beats her to death, and in another frame of existence, avoids his offers of help based on a flash of intuition and foreboding.

Fortunately for all concerned, Atkinson keeps her chapters brief, and fairly organised. This really is for the best, because with the sheer number of things going on in Life After Life, reading the book can be challenging. The sheer number of ‘reverses’ that take place are slightly jolting — although not in a bad way — and it’s a tribute to Atkinson’s writing that she manages to make it seem normal for characters who — we assume — have played their parts, to re-emerge into Ursula’s life in completely different ways, and for this to seem perfectly fair.

There is after all a kind of basic contract between readers and writers: what you see is what you get; an author may play with plot and time, but there are no ‘backsies’ really. There are plot devices, sure; the occasional deus ex machina is perfectly allowable, but it almost seems a little unfair that Atkinson manages to keeps us so fully involved in each of her stories. The realisation that nothing can be taken for granted, not even death, should be, in all honesty, a little boring. The fact that Atkinson can keep us interested, surprised and just a little disturbed, even when we know that in a few pages everything may turn out just fine, is impressive.

In Life After Life, Atkinson does more than just explore alternative lifelines and times. Instead, what she does is create multiple, fully-realised worlds, playing on the idea that every decision we make causes our lives to unfold in a completely different manner. It is Eliot’s “awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract” — only in Ursula’s case, the latter is not a concern, because she almost doesn’t need to retract anything.

It’s not as if Ursula re-incarnates into a past life with future knowledge. She doesn’t travel through time. She simply ceases to be, and then is, once again. After all, if the moment of surrender never takes place, what consequences can there be? And yet, if we can’t suffer through consequences, how do we learn? How do we grow?

Well, somehow, we just do. In an odd sort of way, Ursula is a stand-in for all of us; yet another person who is born, lives and dies. There is no grand revelation or spark waiting to be revealed; frankly, although the outcomes of their lives may change, Ursula and her family don’t. They stay constant: Ursula’s father, Hugh, is consistently droll; her brother Teddy is always beloved; her aunt Izzie is always a binge-drinking flapper; her brother Maurice is perpetually vile and pretentious.

Atkinson’s novel is a bit like a child’s flip-book; each scenario presses on rapidly and comes right on the heels of its predecessor, albeit not always in the kind of chronology that would make this an easy read. War and peace; family and friends; lovers and husbands; countries and nations; Atkinson not only manages to make each of Ursula’s many stories interesting, she also embraces the idea — unusual, I think — of being playful and experimental with an atypical protagonist: an Everywoman, as it were.

We all have to make choices about how to live our lives. Decisions don’t just happen to us, nor are we in the (un?)enviable position of being able to retract our actions. And neither can Ursula. But what Atkinson has done is refuse to just build one possible path for her character. Instead of focusing inwards, exploring where one set of decisions takes her character, Atkinson throws open the doors of her protagonist’s destiny: she may not have it all, but we can certainly experience a hell of a lot of it.

Life After Life

(Novel)

By Kate Atkinson

Doubleday, UK

ISBN 0385618670

480pp.