Tring Book Club - Life After Life and Harvest

It's hard to be objective about my favourite author, but this Life After Life transcends anything she has written before. On the one hand it is a bold experiment about someone living multiple lives with jumps in time that leave you dizzy. On the other, a dramatic family saga that would have been great in it's own right. It is packed with Atkinson's trademark wit and the best of modern prose:

"Ursula craved solitude but hated loneliness. A conundrum she couldn't even begin to solve."
"The ostrich feather (on her hat) trembled in sympathy".
"Expediency generally trumps ethics".
"Well, we all get on" Sylvie said "one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see how it matters how we get there". It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point......

Certainly complex and dazzling, but at all times structurally cohesive and satisfying. Often it repeats a scene, sometimes the same, sometimes slightly different, occasionally so different it can change a life. That concept is at the heart of the story. I loved the repeats. I think that's enough to say how I loved this novel. In her note at the end KA says people always ask what her book is about. She finds this difficult to answer, "but if pressed, I think I would say "Life After Life" is about being English. Not just the reality of being English but also what we are in our imagination". I think we have to go back to the author's first book in 1995, the prize winning "Behind The Scenes At The Museum" to see how she has now developed a time chasing English family story into something extraordinary. Book Club agreed.

Harvest was a pretty intense but beautifully written novel (my first by the author Jim Crace). It certainly could have done with some light relief or at least some wit, and I found it hard to concentrate for the first third of the book. I found the tone to be a little wearisome. But suddenly it takes a turn into thriller territory and picked up as a result. Given this is the middle ages, things promised to get nasty, but we are saved by some delicate passages. The story is set in a village miles from anywhere, and the lives of the landowner and the "peasants" come under threat from more than one direction. In the end they only have themselves to blame. Crace has pitched his narrator, Walter Thirsk, as someone on the fringes. Once the landowners assistant, now an agricultural labourer like his neighbours. His language is meant to be medieval, so there are occasional words not in use today. He has to be intelligent with lines like "the village has been freckled with chaff" and "dissent is never counted, it is weighed". There is a mystery woman whose appearance, presence and absence is always in the background, and I found this a clever and pleasing facet of the book. And the ending is very good.