Too much probing and explanation would deaden the novel's natural vivacity. Meanwhile, Ursula's continuing premonitions compel her parents to send her off to see a psychiatrist keen to talk reincarnation, but Atkinson wisely doesn't take this too far. Most of all, though, there's an odd exhilaration in the sheer number and the build-up – like one of those old childhood clapping songs that go faster and faster until you fall down, breathless and laughing. Atkinson's knack for retelling – what to repeat, what to change, what to leave out – is satisfyingly faultless. These virtually identical, yet subtly different versions of the same events feel both poignant and electric to read. And then, in an almost comically chilling coda, Bridget, having felt "hands shoving me in the back… like the hands of a little ghost child" falls and sprains her ankle – only to hobble off to London (and her fate, their fate) regardless. Several versions later however, Ursula, now troubled by an increasingly powerful sense of deja vu, does everything she can to stop Bridget going to London, including pushing her down the stairs (it works, Bridget stays). So, Bridget the maid goes off to London on Armistice Day to celebrate and mingle with the crowds and returns late that night and, regaling them all with her stories, unwittingly – and fatally – infects Ursula and her siblings with Spanish flu.Ī few pages later, the rerun: eight-year-old Ursula, hearing Bridget come back from London and feeling "a great dread, as if something truly treacherous were about to happen" stays in bed and doesn't go downstairs to hear the stories.
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In the early pages, this preoccupation with "getting it right" inspires quite dizzying heights of narrative suspense. What if we had a chance to live life "again and again, until we finally did get it right?" The premise – so pregnant with narrative opportunity that you wonder why no novelist has explored it before – is simple. Much of the (very considerable) pleasure of this almost deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting novel lies in the almost spookily vivid atmosphere and pathos that Atkinson manages to extract from all this Groundhog Day repetition.
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And this time an amateur artist happens to have set up his easel close to where the children are playing and he sees Ursula go under and returns both girls "sopping wet and tearful" to their grateful mother. But no, here it is all over again – the summer's day, the crucial, dangerous moment.