Last year we got a new Tana French and a new Robert Galbraith, both of which I had been waiting for impatiently. (If only all my favourite mystery authors would come out with one solidly satisfying book a year). This year…
Kate Atkinson is coming out with a new Jackson Brodie book!
I had never read anything quite like Atkinson’s debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It follows a single Yorkshire family through generations of (mostly) misery: some die at the Somme, some are married to people they hate, some have children they don’t want. It is biting, dour, very clever, and in an odd way, funny. It works because Atkinson is affectionate and understanding towards her characters.
I didn’t take to her other novels as much. Life After Life and A God in Ruins were both critically well received, but not to my taste. I’ve read better WWII espionage than Transcription, her most recent.
But her Jackson Brodie books are great reading. Brodie himself is an anti-hero private detective: always on the brink of poverty, had a rough childhood, doggedly determined with a kind but quite unsentimental heart. Despairing, lost people are drawn to him. The other characters in each book are also excellently memorable: the intellectual and flighty Julia, capable sixteen-year-old Reggie, tough security chief Tracy Waterhouse who steals a child, single mother Detective Inspector Louise Monroe. Atkinson writes wonderfully rich female characters, no two alike, not a cliché among them. The cases in the books are grim: murdered children, family horrors, past secrets — and I find it difficult to read about the children, in particular — but somehow the books are also funny.
The tiny people who resentfully ran his memory these days (fetching and carrying folders, checking the contents against index cards, filing them away in boxes that were then placed on endless rows of gray metal Dexion shelving never to be found again) had, in an all-too-frequent occurrence, mislaid that particular piece of information. [..]
Jackson supposed that other people’s small brain-dwelling inhabitants ran their operations rather like air-traffic controllers, always aware of the location of everything they were responsible for, never sloping off for tea breaks or loitering in the shadowy recesses of rarely accessed shelves, where they smoked fly cigarettes and kvetched about their poor working conditions. One day they would simply lay down tools and walk off, of course.
[Started early, took my dog]
Note the sting in the last sentence of that paragraph.
The new Jackson Brodie novel, Big Sky, comes out in June.
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