Friday, March 18, 2011

Mystery Is a Thing With Paradoxes

By Janet Maslin
Published New York Times: March 16, 2011

 In her latest book to feature the quasi-retired detective named Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson (pic left, Martin Hunter), lets him deliver a fair working definition of how an Atkinson book is apt to unfold.
A whole lot of cryptic individuals may be involved in it, he admits: “Jackson didn’t know what ‘it’ was, but that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what solving something was about, it was hunting the ‘it’ down, pinning its arms above its head and making it spill the beans. It was like being in a game, a game where you didn’t know the rules or the identity of the other players and where you were unsure of the goal.”

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG
By Kate Atkinson
371 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.
(UK-Doubleday)

In other words, these books cannot be simply read. They must also be wrestled with, and that’s where much of the fun lies. This odd tactic has made Ms. Atkinson a darling of other writers, who understandably admire the wizardry of her techniques. It has also made nettlesome marvels out of the first three Brodie books: “Case Histories,” “One Good Turn” and “When Will There Be Good News?”

The new one, the fourth, is a little different, as Ms. Atkinson has been refreshingly willing to admit. She has said in an interview that she’s beginning to need a break from Jackson Brodie. She had more trouble dwelling on him this time. So “Started Early, Took My Dog” — with a wonderful title from Emily Dickinson, summoning a poem that is as artfully enshrouded as this novel — is also jampacked with echoes, parallels, doppelgängers, sneaky omissions and authorial attempts to mislead. For Ms. Atkinson this is business as usual and often a source of final-act revelatory glee. But it doesn’t coalesce as neatly as this series’s earlier installments have.

“Started Early, Took My Dog” features two central characters who have no direct connection with each other. The first is Jackson of course. He is rambling around his native Yorkshire, apparently as a tourist, visiting monasteries and brooding on the various women who have left him in the lurch. He has a lost sister, Niamh, murdered at 17; assorted exes, Josie and Julia, with each of whom he has a child, and Tessa, who stole his money and then vanished; and a woman for whom he pines and is likely to get involved in the future. (That one’s Louise.) None of them have anything to do with the event that gets this novel moving.

That important early event takes place in a Leeds shopping mall where Tracy Waterhouse, a hefty, lonely former policewoman and the book’s other principal, now works in security. Tracy encounters a prostitute named Kelly who is clearly an abusive mother. When Tracy sees Kelly mistreating a quiet, sorry-looking little girl named Courtney, she makes a shocking spur-of-the-moment deal. She pays Kelly and simply buys the child.

Full review at The New York Times.

Review in The Telegraph.

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