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Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:17 pm| Quote: |
| Beyond the fringe
Justine Jordan enjoys Kate Atkinson's excursion to Edinburgh, One Good Turn Saturday August 5, 2006 The Guardian One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson Buy One Good Turn at the Guardian bookshop One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson 396pp, Doubleday, £17.99 Once best known for her Whitbread award-winning first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson followed up three playful, picaresque family sagas with her hugely successful crime sortie, Case Histories. A masterly orchestration of random violence and domestic heartbreak, it featured the requisite grizzled private eye with a troubled private life and a taste for country singers; in a combination of critic and text intriguing enough to well deserve its place among the back-cover blurbs, Stephen King considered it "the best mystery of the decade". Article continues It's not an unreasonable claim; many literary novelists find the shallow, well-rewarded waters of crime fiction to be choppier than they'd anticipated, but the tense plotting and sombre subject matter of Case Histories reined in the whimsy that had been threatening to overshadow Atkinson's canny eye and emotional intelligence. Funny, moving, honest and involving, it was a hard act to follow. One Good Turn returns to the now ex-private eye Jackson Brodie two years after the events of Case Histories. Wealthy, retired and bored, he is mooching around the Edinburgh festival while his girlfriend Julia, another of Case Histories' damaged souls, acts in a dreadful fringe production and ducks his emotional demands. Atkinson refreshes readers' memories with some brisk asides: "He had once watched his own house explode." "They both had a sister who had been murdered ... Jackson's eldest brother and Julia's eldest sister had both killed themselves ..." Julia is as absent to us as she is to Jackson, who finds his purpose in the shape of a dead body washed up on Cramond Island and then snatched back by the tide - another lost girl, doubly lost this time. Her death is somehow connected to the road rage incident that begins the book and links the disparate cast of characters, in which the psychopathic "Honda Man", who is about to batter another driver to death, is felled by a laptop impulsively hurled by shy, stifled crime-writer Martin, while a crowd spectates as though at one of the flame-juggling unicyclists that clog the festival streets. These gawping onlookers include Gloria, who has greeted the news of her dodgy-businessman husband's cardiac arrest in the company of someone called Jojo with worrying equanimity, and Archie, the troublesome teenage son of DI Louise Monroe, who ends up investigating the case of Jackson's vanished corpse and fancying Jackson more than she ought ("Let's just say it again, Louise - he was a witness, a suspect, and a convicted felon"). Atkinson interweaves their stories with customary panache, all comic trills and airy asides; One Good Turn is an absolute joy to read. It is subtitled "A jolly murder mystery", which is how the extremely un-jolly Martin's gentle pastiches are described (according to a fan, they are "as if a Chalet school headgirl grew up and became a detective" - and that's a compliment). Martin, when he isn't indulging in fantasies of postwar domestic harmony or fretting over the "Russian incident" that teasingly unfolds over the course of the novel, provides an opportunity for much fun at the expense of both writers and readers, including a terrible literary event in which he is sandwiched between an American female serial-killer novelist and a macho young author of "edgy" thrillers. (If the Edinburgh festival "authors' yurt" didn't already exist, Atkinson would have had to invent it.) Unlike Martin's Nina Riley mysteries ("'Something's up, Bertie,' Nina whispered as she balanced on Bertie's shoulders to get a good view of Lord Carstairs in the palm-filled conservatory of Dunwrath Castle"), Atkinson's world is violent, and disappointing, though it's true that this novel is far less harrowing than Case Histories; the deaths are literally and metaphorically less close to home. The emotional intensity here resides in Jackson's moribund relationship with Julia and Martin's terminal isolation, while the action of the book is more akin to a romp, if corruption and murder can be called that (well, it works for Carl Hiaasen). Honda Man, the villain of the piece, is hardly three-dimensional, being described whenever he pops up wielding his baseball bat as "more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being", "a walking cliché", "a golem", "a cartoon character" with a "Cluedo armoury". Atkinson has always used elements of pastiche, which the crime genre can only encourage, but Honda Man is not convincing enough to maintain his threat; Atkinson certainly doesn't sound convinced by him. Jojo, otherwise known as Tatiana, also turns out to be "like a comedy Russian" - "If you had sex with her," wonders Jackson, "would she kill you afterwards? He thought there was a possibility that it might just be worth it" - but she's so vigorously drawn, the slapstick stereotype comes fizzing into life. Despite Atkinson's promise of "boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds", the finale, when the cast are manoeuvred together for a violent climax and the inevitable expostulations of "You? Here? Why?", does not slot the pieces together as neatly as the Russian dolls which stud the novel might suggest. But the pleasure of One Good Turn lies in the ride, in Atkinson's wry, unvanquished characters, her swooping, savvy, sarcastic prose and authorial joie de vivre. In the end it is Jackson Brodie we remember and hope to meet again, gunning down the motorway with the stereo on, "someone who had weathered the world and still had something left to give". |
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