My book for the week was Kate Atkinson's When Will There be Good News? which is the third book of hers to feature former soldier, former policeman, former private detective Jackson Brodie. As you can guess by that description of the character they are crime novels. When Will There be Good News? focuses on three stories which as they tend to in novels ultimately intersect. The opening chapter of the novel tells of Joanna Mason who as a six year old escapes when her mother, elder sister, baby brother and pet dog are slain by a mysterious man in a remote English village. Skip forward 30 years and Joanna Hunter nee Mason is now married, living in Edinburgh with her husband, young baby and large dog and working as a GP. Joanna Hunter isn't the one of the novel's principle characters but she becomes the central spoke around which they turn. Joanna Hunter's nanny, Reggie Chase, is a precocious 16 year old who looks about 12 and left school around a year earlier when her mother drowned. She is mildly obsessed with Dr H as she calls Joanna Hunter and when her employer disappears Reggie focused on tracking her down even when no-one else will listen to her. On top of this, Reggie also has to contend with bad seed elder brother and with the death of her former school teacher who after retiring on medical grounds is assisting Reggie to complete her A levels. Visiting Joanna Hunter prior to her disappearance is DCI Louise Monroe who is the one to let Joanna know that her family's murderer is to be released from prison. DCI Monroe is a tough as nail police officer who believes she isn't good at relationships as evidenced by the distance growing between her and her teenage son but despite this she has recently married a surgeon and has also taken a younger police officer under her wing. DCI Monroe is focused on helping a women who had members of her family gunned by her husband at her child's birthday party especially as the husband is still at large and when she meets Dr Hunter she focuses on the contrast between these two women who have both been victims who narrowly escaped death at the hands of a madman. Finally there is DCI Monroe's old friend/colleague/almost lover Jackson Brodie who unwittingly boards a train heading for Edinburgh instead of London when trying to return home to his new wife after retrieving DNA from his former girlfriend's son in order to test if the boy is his child. Brodie's luck gets worse when his train is derailed on the outskirts of Edinburgh leaving him seriously injured and momentarily dead until he is saved by Reggie Chase who happens to be nearby and thanks to Dr Hunter knows CPR.
Rambling plot summary done and now onto the love/hate relationship with Atkinson. I have read three of her books in past- Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Emotionally Weird and Human Croquet. For the most part I enjoyed all three (in particular Emotionally Weird) and found Atkinson's prose style quite smooth, entertaining and skilled and I can see why a lot of people I know like her works. At the same time, I found all three had minor plot points that bugged me- not that I could reel them off now- and Atkinson's obsession with saccharine epilogues drove me half mad as I despise epilogues especially soppy ones (Atkinson's aren't the worst of recent years- the epilogue in the final Harry Potter scores that crown- but they are still a waste of paper). When Will There be Good News? doesn't have an epilogue but my love/hate relationship remains and sadly for this novel there is less positive than her earlier non-crime works. Thankfully as my mother had informed me it can be read having not read the two earlier Jackson Brodie novels and not feel that you are missing anything. Atkinson's prose is still of a high standard and it is at times quite funny (I loved in particular DCI Monroe's comment on her young colleague's taste in music). That said it is novel that suffers from too many characters syndrome. I could deal with the focus on women who are lost, women who are victims and women who fight to raise above this but this could have been executed without the need to introduce Reggie's elder brother, DCI Monroe's in-laws and, I hate to say as his name emblazoned the cover of the copy I read, Jackson Brodie. Reggie's brother, Billy, served no tangible point and all Monroe's in-laws did was highlight the cracks in a marriage that were already glaringly obvious to the reader. Both Billy and the in-laws felt like padding on the novel. Brodie was a different beast. He was an interesting character and I could see potential for him but not in this novel as he felt like he had been pasted into a novel that was mostly written in order to push along the plot and as a catalyst to unite Reggie and DCI Monroe. I felt that the Monroe character could have been expanded to cover Brodie's function in the novel or that Atkinson should have worked harder to make him fit more smoothly. There are several plot points that are odd and not strictly neccessary which will bug the eagle eyed reader- one near the end is so impossible and ridiculous that I was left wondering why it was there at all and if it was needed all I could do was puzzle over how to make it make sense or even land in the realm of possibility. Also Atkinson may have abandoned the epilogue but there is still plenty of sugar at the end- too much for my liking. Ultimately I only really like three categories of conventionial crime fiction- Agatha Christie, detective fiction ala Hammett or Chandler, or gritty stuff in the vein of Larsson's Millennium trilogy and the like- and sadly this doesn't fall into any of them. It is well written but poorly executed and a little too twee for my liking at the end.
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| This cover looks exactly like the one I read except the one I read said "The New Jackson Brodie Novel" under the title. Looking for this image on google, I discovered that there is an edition with a small red haired girl and what looks like an Irish setter on the front which makes no sense as there are no small red haired girls or Irish setters in the novel- the only small girls are Joanna Hunter and her sister who have dark hair and the only dogs are a terrier and a lab- WEIRD |
So after the step down from McCarthy to Atkinson there is nowhere to go but up as I delve into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. I've loved every Murakami books I've ever read so here's hoping for another win.
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