The Nature of Things

Kate Atkinson published the last of her Jackson Brodie novels, Started Early, Took My Dog , in 2010, but somehow I did not discover them until 2013. When I did, I read and reviewed all four, starting with the first, Case Histories , over a two month period. I thought they were all brilliant and I was eager for the next one in the series to be published. But it didn't happen. Instead, Atkinson produced two other brilliant but unrelated literary novels, Life After Life and A God in Ruins . I had to accept the fact that she was never going to produce another Jackson Brodie mystery.  Then a couple of months ago, wonder of wonders, I read that a new Brodie book was in the works and would be published in June. I immediately preordered it and as soon as it arrived in my Kindle queue last Tuesday I started reading. It was definitely worth waiting for. Kate Atkinson's books really defy categorization. There's certainly a mystery/thriller element to them and, of course, Jackson Brod...

No one or nothing in Kate Atkinson's new novel is exactly what it seems. There are double agents, double crosses and secrets galore. It is, as Winston Churchill once said in another context, a riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma. It is literary fiction, historical fiction masquerading as a mystery/spy thriller. Moreover, Atkinson uses much the same technique as she employed so successfully in Life After Life to take us back and forth through the life history of her main character, Juliet Armstrong. We meet Miss Armstrong on the day of her death. It is 1981 and she is 60 years old. She is crossing a street in London when she is struck by a car. She knows she is dying as she lies on the pavement surrounded by concerned passersby who try to help. Flashback to 1940 when she was still only 18 and an orphan. She is recruited by the British intelligence agency, MI5, to work as a transcriptionist. She is to listen to the conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and a group o...

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Those of us who read and loved Kate Atkinson's last book, Life After Life , have looked forward to and been curious about how she would follow it up, and maybe we worried a little bit that she wouldn't be able to again reach the high standard she had set for herself. We needn't have worried. This is a wonderful book, every bit as imaginative in its way as the hugely successful book that preceded it. And right up front, I'll give you a piece of free advice. If you haven't read Life After Life , read it before you read this book for this is a companion piece to that book. Not a sequel as such but simply another part of the story. In Life After Life , we met the Todd family of Fox Corner. The focus of that book was one of the Todd daughters, Ursula. Atkinson imagined various scenarios for Ursula's life. In some of those scenarios, the life was brief, tragic, and uneventful. In others, the life stretched throu...

My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?"  - Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Return of Tarzan People of a certain age - my age - remember fondly the great television series of 1959-1964, "The Twilight Zone."  Each week it presented stories of a unique vision, stories that could be loosely categorized, as could this book, as science fiction. Indeed, as I read Kate Atkinson's latest marvelous book, Life After Life , I kept thinking that this would have made a great tale for "The Twilight Zone." Earlier this year, I first met Kate Atkinson through her Jackson Brodie series. I read all four of the books in that series, in which she explored the outer reaches of possibilities of the mystery genre, beginning with Case Histories . In this new book, she seems to be exploring the outer limits of possibilities of science fiction. She imbues the genre with her own unique brand of creativity. But how to begin to describe this story? Well...

One of the great pleasures - one of many - for me in reading Kate Atkinson is all the cultural and literary references in her books. It's sort of an "inside baseball" thing, I guess. The  cognoscente  feel especially smart and privileged to understand the references. Many of her references relate to television series that any fan of PBS/BBC mysteries will recognize. For example, I think every one of her books that I have read so far has had someone in them watching  Midsomer Murders ! As a prodigious fan of that series and owner of an (almost) complete collection of DVDs of it, I know just who she's talking about when she refers to  those  people. Another television investigative team she mentions in this book is that of Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis, another of my all-time favorites. There are also literary references to everyone from Shakespeare to Faulkner to, in this case, Emily Dickinson. It's from one of Dickinson's poems that the rather weird title...

Thirty years ago, Lance Corporal Jackson Brodie and his fellow soldiers were called out to do a search and rescue for a little girl lost. Six-year-old Joanna Mason had been walking along a quiet country lane with her mother, sister, and baby brother when they were attacked by a mad man wielding a knife. As her mother fought with the man, she screamed at Joanna to run. Joanna did and she was the only one who survived. After an extensive search, she was found and rescued by Jackson Brodie. Now, Joanna is a successful doctor married to a man who may be a fraud and a criminal. She has a baby son, the same age as her brother when he was killed, and she learns that the man who killed her family is to be released from prison. It looks like Joanna's life is falling apart again.  Jackson Brodie's life has taken a radical turn for the better. He thinks. He has no money worries thanks to a bequest and he is recently remarried to a woman he had only known for two months, but he is happy. H...

Kate Atkinson's mysteries read like literary fiction. Very, very good literary fiction. She manipulates her multiple story lines to construct a tight and intricately woven tale that is fast-paced and keeps the reader turning those pages. She writes with wit and humor, but also manages to convey the melancholy, loneliness, and regret of her characters without ever being maudlin. In other words, she is able to present a full portrait of their humanity.  Moreover, in  One Good Turn , she delivers a delicious and particularly satisfying twist at the end. I loved it! In this book, we again meet Jackson Brodie, the ex-army, ex-police, and now ex-private detective. At the end of  Case Histories , Jackson had inherited two million pounds from a grateful client and had sold his private detective agency and gone to live in France.  He had started an affair with one of his former clients from that first book, Julia the actress. Now, Julia has taken a part in a production to be ...

Case Histories  is certainly not your typical mystery. It is more of a literary fiction/mystery hybrid, perhaps weighted on the side of literary fiction. Still, it contains all the elements and many of the stock characters of the mystery formula, including exploited teenage runaways, innocent female murder victims, blowsy and outrageous middle-aged actresses, strait-laced and uptight spinsters, pathetic and hapless males, and wives with secrets. Moreover, it has the world-weary detective, existing in his own world of pain, who feels driven to try to protect, or occasionally avenge, all of these characters. The book begins with the telling of three case histories, any one of which could have been the backbone and beginning of a literary fiction novel. First, we have the story of Olivia Land, the youngest and favorite of four Land daughters. The child disappears one hot summer night when she is three years old and she is never seen or heard from again. Thirty years later, two of the ...