It is Christmas, and Nick Goodyew has not seen his father, Ken, in fifteen years, or Pearl, his mother, in twenty. His parents’ acrimonious life together, and their divorce, have come to typify the family’s way of dealing with issues—escape, a way of life for virtually all of them. His father, however, now believes he is going to die, and, despite the on-going rancor, typified by the Christmas phone call, he still wants to get the family together to make peace with the past. The ensuing novel is a witty and touching examination of all the members of the family as they finally examine their lives, their memories, and their relationships. Author Louise Dean, with her dark sense of humor and her breath-taking ability to suggest attitudes and psychological states through description, arouses sympathy for her characters as they search for ways to communicate and, perhaps in time, forgive each other for the past. On my list of Favorites for 2011.
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Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, the second son of Sir Harry, is now the eleventh generation of Tubals to have run the family’s bank, an old and prestigious institution which has, now, not surprisingly, fallen victim to the same deteriorating economic forces as every other bank and investment company in London and around the world. With Sir Harry in Antibes, where he is recuperating from a stroke, Julian has been responsible for managing the “firm.” Julian wants to accept an offer to sell the bank to an American, Cy Mannheim, but he has found it necessary to borrow two hundred fifty million pounds from the family trust for a limited time to shore up the bank, which now has eight hundred million pounds worth of toxic assets and useless mortgages in territories the bank has never even visited. Justin Cartwright, an award-winning author who was born and grew up in South Africa and now lives in London, uses his dry wit and sense of satire to tell the story of the Tubals, a family which has few inner resources to deal with the crisis the bank is facing: “The money simply imploded. It no longer exists. Nobody can explain it.”
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However good Kate Atkinson’s three previous Jackson Brodie novels have been, they were just the warm-up for this one. Though they are often called “mysteries” because the main character, Jackson Brodie, is a private investigator, Atkinson’s novels are far more character-driven than the norm, and more literary in execution–intriguing on several levels simultaneously. In the course of the three previous novels (Case Histories, One Good Turn, and When Will There Be Good News), Jackson Brodie has become a broader character, and in this one, his inner life is at least as important as the plot with which it intersects. The novel is complex, with a few threads left open at the end, suggesting avenues for further exploration in succeeding Atkinson novels, but Brodie becomes an even more interesting and sympathetic character, one whom the reader of the three previous Jackson Brodie novels will begin to understand even more fully. Though some of Atkinson’s novels have had threads of dark humor in them, this one is played “straight,” its serious story line obviously not a joking matter.
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Posted in 9a-2011 Reviews, England, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Psychological study, Scotland on Mar 26th, 2011
Not a traditional mystery, Kate Atkinson’s third Jackson Brodie novel grows instead out of the terrible traumas that children and young people must endure when people they love die violently. So marked are they by their sudden tragedies, that they never really escape their pasts, and spend the rest of their lives wondering “when will there be good news.” Five separate plot lines evolve and begin to overlap here, and in each of these plots the main characters are all needy people hiding an inner loneliness from which they would like to escape. In the first plot, Joanna Mason Hunter is a physician living in Edinburgh, the happily married mother of a one-year-old, a woman who appears to have it all, but thirty years ago, she escaped a slashing attack which murdered her mother, sister, and baby brother. Though she seems to have put her past to rest, the murderer of her family is about to be released from jail. Jackson appears on the scene when he is nearly killed in a train crash on the way to Edinburgh. The narrative speeds along, ironies abound, and mistaken identities create some bizarre and sometimes darkly humorous scenes.
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Jackson Brodie, a former police inspector turned private investigator, is investigating three old cases, which soon begin to converge and then overlap. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared without a trace thirty-five years ago while sleeping in a tent with one of her sisters, two of whom have hired Jackson to find out what happened to her. Theo Wyre has hired him to investigate the death of his daughter Laura, his much-loved 18-year-old daughter, who was slashed and killed by a maniac ten years before while working in her father’s office. Theo, having spent ten years accumulating information, has turned over a roomful of files to Jackson. Shirley Morrison, Jackson’s third client, is trying to locate her sister and her niece. Her sister Michelle, married at eighteen and living with her husband and screaming daughter on an isolated farm, has vanished from Shirley’s life, and after twenty-five years, Shirley wants to find her. Filled with ironies and noir humor, the novel also reflects Atkinson’s astute observation of social interactions, as she skewers some aspects of her characters’ lives at the same time that she manages to create interest and even sympathy for them.
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