Guest review by David Breakell: DEATH AT THE SIGN OF THE ROOK by Kate Atkinson

 

"Only a writer of Atkinson's skill could pull this off without straining credibility to breaking point."

David Breakell, formerly a practising lawyer in the City of London, writes historical fiction. His novel The Alchemist of Genoa was published in March this year - find out more on his website.

Great fictional detectives have dysfunctional personal lives. Or at least that's how it seems: Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Inspector Laidlaw - just add your favourites to the list. And Kate Atkinson's sardonic ex-cop turned private eye, Jackson Brodie, is a great detective. Not 'great' for his brilliant deductive reasoning or his observational powers, or even that he (usually) gets his man, if not the girl. Rather that his humanity, fallibility, dark humour - and the sheer train wreck of his life - grab our minds and hearts and never let go.

If you've read any of Atkinson’s novels, then you won't need much arm-twisting to read this one, the sixth to feature Jackson Brodie. Just as there are spy fiction writers and then there's John Le Carre so, in this reviewer's mind at least, there are crime writers and then there's Kate Atkinson.

Jackson Brodie trails his personal history like a long-life shopping bag and he's instrumental in unravelling the truth behind the crimes, but he's not a permanent presence in the novel. DC Reggie Chase, the rookie police detective last seen in “Big Sky”, is given equal billing this time. Reggie is a warm-hearted young woman who’s clever - but not always wise - beyond her years.

It seems that Atkinson has decided to have fun with this latest novel in the series. She places her focus on the other main characters. And what a menagerie they make: the battleaxe - or just plain batty - dowager marchioness and her graceless offspring; the solitary vicar who has lost his only child, then his faith and now his voice; and the young army officer, invalided out with only one leg and yet to find an alternative purpose in life.

Written like that, it might not sound as if humour was the intention. But Atkinson sets these characters against a background straight out of Agatha Christie: a crumbling stately home, a missing Old Master or two, a killer on the run, a snowstorm in which three of the main characters get separately stranded, and the unloved novels of a whodunit writer, whose creaking plots mirror the real-life crimes.

Atkinson ramps up the comedy by pitching her real-life characters against pretend ones, a troupe of might-have-been actors who are contracted to perform in a Murder Mystery evening at the stately home. No-one, except perhaps Jackson, seems able to separate the stage villains from the real ones. The action hurtles at an ever-increasing pace towards near-farce and the bodies, dead or just acting, mount up.

The Christie parody is of course intentional: only a writer of Atkinson's skill could pull this off without straining credibility to breaking point. In the meantime, her trademark one-liners propel the reader along. Talking to the heirs of a deceased old lady who describe her death as 'peaceful', Jackson muses, "He had seen a lot of dead people, and he wouldn't call them peaceful. He would call them dead." When it comes to the Pet Service at the local parish church, Lady Milton "made a point of not taking her own dogs. It might have given them ideas."

Atkinson also has the uncanny ability to take an everyday observation and turn it on its head. Contemplating the gravestones in his churchyard, the vicar reflects that plague victims "had never tasted coffee. Or tea for that matter. Or potatoes. The list of deprivations in the Middle Ages was a long one." The invalided soldier with his too-stiff-upper-lip parents believes that "if you spent too long trying to look on the bright side, you became dazzled and couldn't see anything properly.”

So, how does this compare with other Jackson Brodie novels? Much as I enjoyed it, I doubt it will rank with her very best. Admittedly, "When Will There Be Good News?" was a pretty hard act to follow, with one of the most jaw-dropping opening chapters I've ever read. The book had the power to make you both laugh and cry, many times. The bereft vicar apart, this latest novel is weighted more towards comedy: and indeed, I laughed, but I would have liked more of the emotional tug of its predecessors…

In the same way as Graham Greene described some of his own oeuvre, “Death at the Sign of the Rook” could perhaps be classed as an 'entertainment' rather than a novel. But I'll take a Kate Atkinson 'entertainment' over someone else's magnum opus, any day.

Death at the Sign of the Rook is published by Penguin.

David Breakell's The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books.

See also: Nicola Morgan's review of Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins.

Guest review by Nicola Morgan: A GOD IN RUINS by Kate Atkinson

Nicola Morgan is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. None of the former recently but she has been very busy writing non-fiction and speaking about adolescent brains, mental health and modern online life. Her most recent book is The Teenage Guide to Friends and next year sees publication of Positively Teenage and The Teenage Guide to Life Online. For more, see her website.

I’m a big fan of Kate Atkinson and I’ve found her books getting better and better, even after the high standard set by Behind the Scenes at the Museum. She’s uncompromising, mind-blowingly inventive, writes whip-tight wry prose, is mistress of conjuring a whole character in a few clever brushstrokes and tells a cracking story. She’s also a very nice woman: I met her when the Society of Authors in Scotland had a research trip to a police station. We made it into her next book; I forget which one but if you come across a group of authors eating pink wafer biscuits in a police station, picture me there.

I don’t know what you call a book which is neither sequel nor prequel but runs alongside another book but let’s say that A God in Ruins is a paralleloquel to Life After Life, the extraordinary novel where Ursula is born and dies again and again and again and again, imagining very different results of a series of tiny events. (I had a similar idea in Wasted – I did it first but Atkinson obviously did it rather better!)

A God in Ruins focuses on the life of Teddy, Ursula’s younger brother. Teddy was a bomber pilot in WW2 and I honestly don’t know how Atkinson was able to describe in such visceral detail the physicality of the cockpit. But this is mostly a book about what happens after war ends, the human ruins that it leaves. Or, crucially, that it might leave.

The back cover describes the book as “deliriously funny and emotionally devastating”. It’s certainly the latter but the former? I have a high laughter threshold, admittedly, but even I found my lips twisting with the humour, in the same paragraph as my heart was being ripped to pieces. Atkinson is searingly witty, that’s for sure.

For me, the emotional devastation comes mostly from the wrecked character of Viola, Teddy’s daughter. She behaves appallingly; she’s cold, snide, unpleasant to her children, unlikeable. “What kind of a mother doesn’t see her child for a decade?” she asks of herself. Late in the book she says, “Her excuse…was that she had been exiled from love after her mother died.” As Viola had been six when her mother died of cancer, this would have been entirely plausible if it weren’t that she hadn’t been likeable before her mother died. Much later, she wants to start again, although “there are no second chances”, and then she would “learn to love”. She does have a second chance and may or may not succeed in taking it. Actually, the extraordinary twist at the end gives her simultaneously another chance and yet no chance at all.

Viola has a better excuse for her damaged heart. She knows something about her mother’s appalling death – though not, crucially, the whole story. Neither Teddy nor Viola knows what the other knows, and that lack of knowledge is at the novel’s and Viola’s devastating core.

Not many books are “unputdownable” for me nowadays, with my easily-distracted mind, but this one was. The way Atkinson draws the reader in to a complex and cracking plot and then plays mind-games and emotional croquet is some kind of genius.

A God in Ruins is published by Transworld.