This engaging novel is a companion to the British author’s earlier novel, Life After Life, about the tragicomic lives of the Todd family from 1925 to 2012. Some of the characters are extremely eccentric and others, such as Teddy, the wartime pilot of a Halifax bomber, are damaged by what would now be labelled post-traumatic stress disorder.
The unnumbered but dated chapters start with 30 March 1944, then proceed to 1925, 1980, 1947, 1939, 1993, 1951, 1942-43, 1982, 1943, 1960, 2012, 30 March, 1944, 2012, 2012, and 1947. The jumbled order seems to be a characteristic of her writing; it is as though she wrote a linear account of events, then scrambled them randomly, with frequent use of flashbacks and insertion of snippets of the future, some of which the reader will have already encountered in earlier chapters. I am sure that many readers enjoy this age-old time-shift literary device, but others, including me will find it confusing and frustrating. Perhaps I am at fault in just thinking of time as being too linear, even though I accept that space-time is warped.
There is a lot of abstract but eloquent discussion of the ultimate meaning of time and of death. The impending death of one character dying of a brain tumour is described as being “…..subtracted from time altogether.” The insight into the horrors of war are graphic and in keeping with why surviving fighters, including some of my oldest relatives and friends who fought in Europe in WW2, never talked about what they had experienced. How could anyone ever forget or describe adequately the horror of seeing a young member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, while bicycling around the perimeter of an airfield, being decapitated by the broken propeller flung from a returning damaged Halifax bomber? When Teddy reached her “….the wheel of her bicycle was still spinning.” Or the final farewell to a comrade who could not be pulled out of the rough waters of the North Sea when a downed Halifax was sinking in it, and the dingy with the other crew members was already dangerously overloaded.
The writing style is fluid with abundant startling metaphors and sometimes obvious and sometimes obscure references to classics of English literature, many of which were lost on me- several characters become aspiring novelists and one becomes a very successful writer.
I have not read any of this author’s other books. Perhaps I should, but I am not sure that I will. This one was good in small doses, but paradoxically needs to be read over a short period of time to avoid losing the thread in the fog of one’s own memory.
The Passionate Reader 