Reading Atkinson

For a few years I lived on the same street as the novelist Kate Atkinson on Edinburgh’s south side, without actually reading anything she had written.  It was only after moving a mile or two away that I discovered what I had been missing.  Partly it’s her private eye Jackson Brodie who has brought this about,  though even he, I must confess, is someone I’ve approached obliquely by way of the TV series based on his exploits.

These, with their Edinburgh settings,  struck me as impressively action-packed, though at times excessively busy and intricate. Moreover, as I have discovered, what is quite often Atkinson’s originsl English setting for a book is brusquely swept aside in the TV version.  This, presumably, is meant to make the novels more attractive to a Scottish audience, but is it necessarily so?  Too often I have found my eyes ditracted by some familiar piece of local scenery which I can’t quite identify, and for a crucial moment I have lost track of the often quite complex story line.

In the books themselves this does not happen. I am able to concentrate on the text, and to savour Atkinson’s often idiosyncratic humour as well, which comes across more effectively in book form. So I’m happy now to be able to call myself an Atkinson reader rather than viewer, despite the fact that Jason Isaacs, who plays the role of Brodie, seems so conspicuously well cast. But the books themselves ring truer, I think, even if the plot of one of them, about a missing mother, does seem to run away with the author towards the end. 

But the book entitled Case Histories, which broods about bereavement - in this case the unconnected deaths of a young girl, a young woman, a man axed by his young wife (and we need to remember that Brodie’s own older sister has been strangled before the story starts) - strikes me as not only superbly stuctured but very moving.  

The Jackson Brodie series, however, is by no means all that Kate Atkinson has written. Her range is wider than  that, and I, for one, still have some catching up to do.  Now that the incentive is there, I look forward to doing it. Case Histories can be bought in peperback from Amazon for £5.51, or in its Kindle version for £3.99.

18 June 2014