Reading: Started Early, Took My Dog

[white_hart]

The fourth and last* of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie crime novels takes Jackson back to his native Yorkshire. He is house-hunting and carrying out a fairly desultory investigation on behalf of a client in New Zealand who wants to find out more about her biological parents when he somehow finds himself mixed up with a 35-year-old murder. Meanwhile, retired detective superintendent Tracy Waterhouse, who was one of the first officers on the scene at that case, finds herself becoming the primary carer for a small child in rather unusual circumstances; over the course of a few days her story and Jackson's circle around each other without ever quite intersecting, building up a story about missing children, absent parents, families, responsibility and corruption. As so often in Atkinson's books, none of the characters sees the full picture; that's reserved for the readers, and even we have to work for it. There's nothing extraneous in this book, but all too often the significance of a detail only becomes apparent a hundred pages later and I found I had to keep flipping back to check things that I hadn't really paid attention to at the time. (Atkinson is a one-woman argument against ebooks.) I liked this a lot, and if I didn't like it quite as much as When Will There Be Good News?, that's only because I found Tracy a less engaging secondary protagonist than Reggie. The only trouble is that, having started to read so much more, I have now read everything Atkinson has published and will have to wait and hope that she will have a new book out soon.

*at least for now

Comments

[callmemadam]

I love the Jackson Brodie books so much that I even bought one as soon as it came out because I couldn't wait for the paperback or the library. Might have been this one!

[white_hart]

I loved Case Histories but found One Good Turn heavy going, hence only coming back to When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog this year, but I think that was more about where I was than the book itself.

[legionseagle]

The thing I really liked about Started Early... was the idea of the lasting trauma in West Yorkshire of the Ripper murderers; they lost that when the film series moved the action to Edinburgh.

[white_hart]

Yes, that's very well done - not heavy-handed, but definitely there nonetheless.

[jadesfire]

I've only read One Good Turn of the Jackson Brodie novels and while I always love Kate Atkinson's writing, the theme of 'you tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals' rather put me off the others. I don't remember much else about it, in all honesty. Maybe I should start again at the beginning - Life After Life was quite traumatic enough, I'm not sure I'm ready for God in Ruins yet!

I think she does that 'you think this is just a detail' thing, better than almost anyone. And although the plot is strong, she's one of the few writers that I find myself reaching for abstracts when someone asks what the book is 'about'. Perhaps I just need to start at the beginning again to get the hang of them.

[white_hart]

One Good Turn is the one Kate Atkinson I didn't really enjoy at all, though part of that may have been to do with my own state of mind when I read it (I found the animals theme difficult as it wasn't long after our dog died). My favourite of the Jackson Brodie novels was When Will There Be Good News?

A God in Ruins is brilliant, but also had me literally weeping on a train, so probably not one to read if you're feeling fragile!