I have been a fan of Atkinson’s writing for many years, both of the more ‘literary’ books like ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ and of her excursions into crime fiction with Case Histories . I like her way with words and the dry, ironic humour. But I have to say I was disappointed in this book.

As with ‘Human Croquet’, she has experimented with the idea of time. It is a theme which has fascinated many writers. The idea that it might be possible to turn back time to a crucial moment and alter the course of events is one which JB Priestley played with in ‘Dangerous Corner’ and ‘Time and the Conways’ and Martin Amis reversed it completely in ‘Time’s Arrow’. Robert Frost touched on the idea of a casual decision that alters the course of a life in ‘The Road Not Taken’. But Atkinson has gone much further. Since the days of Albert Einstein, the idea that time is not a current flowing ever onwards has interested physicists and philosophers and there is a theory that there may be parallel universes in which the same event may occur simultaneously with different outcomes. It is this concept that informs ‘Life After Life’.

The protagonist, Ursula, experiences repeated reincarnations but they are simultaneous, not sequential. Each one ends with her death, by various means, but then time turns back, she chooses a different path, and her life continues. Beginning with a chapter in which she dies at birth she experiences death by drowning as a child; falls from a window; catches the deadly flu that killed so many after World War l; is raped, suffers an abortion, a miserable marriage and death at the hands of her brutal husband; avoids rape and goes on to become a senior civil servant with a lover in high circles. During the Second War she might be killed in a bombing raid, or be one of the rescuers; or she might have become a German citizen and a friend of Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun. In each incarnation she retains some sense of the previous life, a feeling of deja vue or a premonition of impending doom; and this leads her in one episode to organise her life deliberately in order to become one of Hitler’s circle, so that she can shoot him before he starts the war.

We all know how it feels to look back at a moment in our lives and wish we could recall an angry word or change a decision. Sometimes it is amusing to speculate about how different our lives might have been. But we know it is not possible. We choose our path and have to follow where it leads us. We expect the same to apply to our fictional heroes and heroines. It is seeing how they cope with the exigencies and traumas that their choice throws up that intrigues and excites us. If every time something goes wrong for them they can simply turn back the clock and put it right, the story loses all dramatic tension. I am afraid this was what happened for me with this novel. Each time I turned a page and found Ursula’s life beginning again I mentally sighed ‘Oh, here we go again!’ And as the variety of outcomes became a virtual blizzard towards the end of the book that changed to ‘Who cares, anyway?’

My verdict? An interesting experiment, but in the final analysis not a successful one.

I have to admit I found this book puzzling. I almost gave up after the first few pages but I’m glad I persisted, if only in an attempt to discover what Faulks is getting at. The book begins with the story of a young man who is recruited into SOE as a secret agent, is betrayed and finds himself in a Nazi extermination camp – events which Faulks himself covered so dramatically in ‘Charlotte Grey’. But here they are narrated in the flat, unemotional style of a police report and framed as just one of a series of occurrences in an unremarkable life. The narrative then jumps to the life of a poor working class boy in London at the end of the nineteenth century; then forward to a futuristic tale of scientific research in the late 21^st century; back to a remote village in pre-revolutionary France and then to the rock and folk music scene of 1970s America. All these stories I found much more engaging than the first one, which seemed designed to keep the reader at a distance; but do they add up to something more than the parts? As far as I can make out, Faulks’s thesis is that the individual life is an illusion. We are all made up from the atoms and elements which constituted other people’s bodies in earlier times and the sense of the unique personal self is purely an biological accident of evolution. This is an interesting philosophical proposition, but in my opinion it is not enough to turn what is in essence a series of short novellas into a coherent whole.

 I was disappointed by this book. As a sequel to Pride and Prejudice I was hoping for something with the same vitality as the original, paired with P.D.James’s flair for ingenious plotting, but I found neither. Perhaps James was seeking to adopt a style more in keeping with the early nineteenth century, when the original book was written, but I found her prose plodding and verbose. Because so much of the story depends on a previous knowledge of events in the original book, there is a great deal of summarising of the ‘back story’, with characters reminding each other of past events in order to ensure that the reader is up to speed. Even when the plot moves on, much of the action takes place ‘off stage’ which again requires it to be related at second hand.

The murder mystery itself seemed to me to lack James’s usual flair for unexpected plot twists. There is only ever one suspect and as the evidence stacks up against him we know that at some point there must be a revelation that proves his innocence, but when it comes it struck me as unconvincing. The idea that a young man at the point of death, from some undisclosed sickness, could find the strength to deal the blow which leads to the victim’s death takes some believing, but even less credible is the fact that he waits months, until the suspect is brought to trial and found guilty, before confessing. He does not, after all, face any danger that he will be accused of murder in his turn, since the actual death was an accident; and he knows anyway that he has not long to live. There are other revelations to follow, but again they are all delivered at second hand.

Meanwhile, we have to sit though the inquest and the trial itself, where the same evidence is repeated over and over again by various witnesses. And when the final denouement is reached, this has to be explained to us repeatedly by each participant. This is interspersed with long internal soliloquys from Elizabeth and Darcy about the effects of their marriage on those around them, their responsibilities to Pemberley and its occupants, and their previous relationships.

There is a well known adage constantly quoted to aspiring writers; ‘Show, don’t tell.’ In this respect I am afraid ‘Death comes to Pemberley’ falls short.