Kate Atkinson – Started Early, Took My Dog

Ruth Rendell said on ‘Faulks on Fiction’ last week that you don’t read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries for the mystery. You read them for glorious, complex, loopy Sherlock. I think the same is true of the Jackson Brodie series, except that Jackson isn’t so loopy and doesn’t take quite so much opium (not yet anyway). Jackson is getting older and wiser, and in this book he is also getting cultured – hence the Dickinson inspired title.

If you’ve read any of the other Kate Atkinson books about Brodie then all you need to know is DOES NOT DISAPPOINT.

And if you have not, then I say – why not? Get yourself a copy of Case Histories immediately. And I say this as someone who normally does not read either crime fiction or fiction with recurring characters in it.

You want a bit more? Well. Like the other Brodie books, this has multiple narratives which come together as the story progresses. In grim 1970′s Leeds, Tracy Waterhouse investigates the murder of a prostitute, under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. In the present day, the newly retired Tracy makes an unexpected choice which. Meanwhile, Jackson is on the hunt for yet another lost girl – this time a New Zealander in search of her real parents. And there’s a sweet old lady actress whose mind is gently drifting off while she plays a lead role in a tea time drama.

I am such a rubbish plot summariser. I make it sound all morbid and grim. Which it is, there’s no doubt. The casual misogyny and sexism and dismissal of prostitutes as sub-human is so callous and vivid and yet so everyday. As Julia, Jackson’s sometime girlfriend says ‘you feel that tragedy should be more operatic somehow’ but the tragedy here is all the more tragic for being mundane.

And yet and yet and yet. Atkinson is so ironic and funny and all her people are such real people that you never feel like you are being crushed under the weight of the issues. She has just the right tone for characters who bumble along, getting by, being English and baffled. It’s perfect.

(The only downer, Atkinson fans, is there is no Louise. There is moping about Louise, but she doesn’t actually turn up.)

I did get to the end and think, I must have missed something. So I went back and flicked through. Nothing. So I turned to the internets, and lo and behold, the internets are full of people all saying: did I miss something? People seem distraught by this. I say, surely this is the best of all possible endings? Most of it is all tied up, so there is no overall feeling of unsatisfactory cliff-hanging for the sake of it (unlike, say every single series of 24). There is just enough to let you know there will be another book. Hooray.

Also, people who have read this – what did you make of the scene where he sleeps with that random woman? Surely that must have greater significance in the long run?

Also (again) if you are here on the Hop, hello and welcome and I will deffo return your visit if you let me know you were here