Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
May. 1st, 2006 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief - a small, battered and bruised belief - that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance.
Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected ...
One of the review quotes on the jacket of this book describes it as a "moving literary detective story". I went into the book thinking that it was going to be a more cerebral and well thought-through mystery than the norm. I was wrong.
Atkinson knows how to write a plot. She holds together four disparate storylines in this book, intertwining them to bring out the backstory for each and working them towards the conclusion. Each story is well paced and written in a manner that keeps you interested. She also manages to keep you guessing as to who the respective culprits are, which when you're as used to the genre as I am, is quite a trick.
The problem is that the characterisation, with the exception of Jackson Brodie, is trite and the dialogue completely fucking awful. There are two middle-aged women - Amelia and Julia whose sister Oliver disappeared 35 years earlier and was never found. They come across like something from a particularly low-brow Jilly Copper, Julia in particular reading like someone you would just want to smack in the face with a frozen turkey if you ever had the misfortune of bumping into her in Iceland. Theo is the token nice fat bloke who eats because he's miserable and whose daughter Laura was murdered in his solicitor's office over a decade before, the murderer never being found. Finally there's Caroline, a teacher in a middle England countryside school married to a stereotypical upper class landlowner Jonathan (another refugee from Jilly Cooper) who hides a gruesome past.
As I said, Jackson Brodie is at least more believable, although you never get to hear his own troubled history until the end of the book and even then, it feels like an afterthought. However, Atkinson is a devotee of the tell rather than show method and we are handheld through everything that he and the other characters think - she even goes so far as to add thoughts in brackets at the end of a sentence just in case we don't understand what she's getting at. There are also several scenes where she strains credibility - for example in addition to saddling Jackson with a broken marriage, she throws in a scene where his bitchy ex-wife announces that she's taking their daughter to New Zealand because her new husband is getting a job there, only to later decide that this will only be for a year because the position is temporary. It was a soap opera move and not something you'd expect to see in a "literary detective story".
The Verdict:
This has an interesting plot but it's stifled by stereotypical characterisation and some appalling dialogue. It's a well paced novel that would suit the beach for those too snobby to take an Ian Rankin or P. G. James or Karin Slaughter, but I'd suggest that those authors give you a more rounded detective experience.
Investigating other people's tragedies and cock-ups and misfortunes was all he knew. He was used to being a voyeur, the outsider looking in, and nothing, but nothing, that anyone did surprised him any more. Yet despite everything he'd seen and done, inside Jackson there remained a belief - a small, battered and bruised belief - that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet - Lost on the left, Found on the right - and the two never seem to balance.
Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realise that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected ...
One of the review quotes on the jacket of this book describes it as a "moving literary detective story". I went into the book thinking that it was going to be a more cerebral and well thought-through mystery than the norm. I was wrong.
Atkinson knows how to write a plot. She holds together four disparate storylines in this book, intertwining them to bring out the backstory for each and working them towards the conclusion. Each story is well paced and written in a manner that keeps you interested. She also manages to keep you guessing as to who the respective culprits are, which when you're as used to the genre as I am, is quite a trick.
The problem is that the characterisation, with the exception of Jackson Brodie, is trite and the dialogue completely fucking awful. There are two middle-aged women - Amelia and Julia whose sister Oliver disappeared 35 years earlier and was never found. They come across like something from a particularly low-brow Jilly Copper, Julia in particular reading like someone you would just want to smack in the face with a frozen turkey if you ever had the misfortune of bumping into her in Iceland. Theo is the token nice fat bloke who eats because he's miserable and whose daughter Laura was murdered in his solicitor's office over a decade before, the murderer never being found. Finally there's Caroline, a teacher in a middle England countryside school married to a stereotypical upper class landlowner Jonathan (another refugee from Jilly Cooper) who hides a gruesome past.
As I said, Jackson Brodie is at least more believable, although you never get to hear his own troubled history until the end of the book and even then, it feels like an afterthought. However, Atkinson is a devotee of the tell rather than show method and we are handheld through everything that he and the other characters think - she even goes so far as to add thoughts in brackets at the end of a sentence just in case we don't understand what she's getting at. There are also several scenes where she strains credibility - for example in addition to saddling Jackson with a broken marriage, she throws in a scene where his bitchy ex-wife announces that she's taking their daughter to New Zealand because her new husband is getting a job there, only to later decide that this will only be for a year because the position is temporary. It was a soap opera move and not something you'd expect to see in a "literary detective story".
The Verdict:
This has an interesting plot but it's stifled by stereotypical characterisation and some appalling dialogue. It's a well paced novel that would suit the beach for those too snobby to take an Ian Rankin or P. G. James or Karin Slaughter, but I'd suggest that those authors give you a more rounded detective experience.
