When will there be good news?

A question on many lips! Greeks are rioting. Eyjafjallajokull is still erupting. The Euro is plunging. The stock market has dropped 500 points since the election campaign shot off the starting blocks and the Camerons are coming with cuts and tax rises.

So when will be there good news? But hey!  Alex Salmond has got his £180m from the Fossil Fuel Levy, which he couldn’t screw out of Brown. No wonder he was impressed with the UK’s new Prime Minister and looks like he will get at least one other from his 4 pots of Westminster gold.

But this is about dark news on the pages of fiction as we look at two of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. A friend read the manuscript of the headline novel and suggested the title to her.

So bending time backwards from our starting point – in Atkinson fashion – I’ll start with Case Histories and progress to When Will There Be Good News? and leave the second of her Jackson Brodie novels, One Good Turn, for another day. It sounds just too optimistic for the current uncertainties!

Jackson Brodie, Atkinson’s ex-policeman private detective is brutally attacked, his brakes are tampered with and his house blown up. Battered and bruised he is also nursing a rotten tooth that leads to blood poisoning. Embroiled in his own difficulties he has three other old mysteries to solve. As his own ‘case’ unfolds it is to become intertwined with the others.

Atkinson’s skill as a storyteller beguiles her readers with intimate descriptions and idle thoughts abstracted from her characters surroundings intermingled with philosophical ponderings.

The multiple tales are interwoven like the knotwork on a Celtic cross. Each tale end tucked into itself yet leading to the next but questions remain in the mind and explanations seem at times like a plant escaped from the Gardens of Babylon.

Kate Aitkinson displays an interesting technique in time manipulation returning to what we have just read but from another perspective, that of another character and their part in events. And she moves backwards and forward through time with events depicted as they happened even when that might be decades before.

A multitude of characters pepper the intertwining stories- some challenging remembrance – a misplaced but slightly familiar face. But is that not a reflection of real experience?

Jackson Brodiie has much to contend with and we have not mentioned his turbulent personal life. Others are introduced with a background and life burdens that would challenge anyone’s possibility of developing as a rounded balanced person let alone with a semblance of sanity.

In Case Histories Michelle is Caroline – next, who? Always moving on, driven from a past that wasn’t hers. Yet the daughter she left behind emerges from all that is unstable, in a past she was not responsible for, as a caring person.

It is the confilicts and the contrasts that make both books less dark than the events they portray. Atkinson is witty. She may toy and tease the reader at times but with her characters she is seldom so playful.

They may come to the page light, lovable and carefree like Laura or Olivia in Case Histories (The Good Die Young) but their loss leaves an indelible mark on those left behind – no explanation no closure.

Olivia’s loving older sisters are tormented by her disappearance. Julia is sex obsessed. Amelia would like to be, or at least not have to invent lovers and Sylvia, abused by their father, speaks to God and Joan of Ark and is hiding in a convent from a truth she cannot face.

For Hugo, Laura’s father, it is why, why, why and was she really the intended victim of such a brutal murder in the boardroom of his legal practice at a time when he was supposed to be there.

In When Will There Be Good News? two characters dominate the intertwining tales, sixteen year old Reggie (Regina) and Dr Joanna Hunter. Both strong individuals, warm and caring but with steel in their bones and capable of being more than just what the French call ‘très sympathique’.

Left alone when her mother died of cancer, a brother who is never around except when she least needs him, Reggie is resourceful and intent on continuing her education, holding herself and the small flat in Edinburgh’s Gorgie together with considerable determination.

Her brother’s dubious activities destroy her tenuous security with the Gorgie flat first trashed then set on fire.

Reggie’s relationships with two older women provide anchors in her young life. Ms MacDonald, a former teacher, helps her with her studies and whose dog Reggie minds on Wednesdays when Ms MacDonald, whose brain is being eaten by a virulent tumour, goes off to a meeting of her new found ‘weird’ religion.

Wednesday tea ‘was usually a stodgy macaroni cheese or a gluey fish pie …Ms MacDonald didn’t eat much anymore now that she herself was being eaten.’

Reggie keeps body, soul, ambition and Gorgie flat together working as a nanny looking after Dr Joanna Hunter’s baby son. Everyone finds the good doctor a caring and likeable person and she seems a more suitable role model for Reggie.

Like most of Atkinson’s characters Joanna has a past. She is the sole survivor of a brutal and inexplicable multiple murder attack that took her mother, sister and baby brother from her.

Thirty years later her family’s killer is released from prison. Tough cookie, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Munroe, with none of Amelia’s sexual repressions is currently married to Patrick. ‘He was Irish, which always helped. A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.’

The Chief Inspector calls on the delightful Dr Joanna to inform her that the youth that murdered her family thirty years ago has been released and apologies that she was not told in advance.

Returning to her Musselburgh home Ms MacDonald – bit of a suicidal driver -causes the London/ Edinburgh train to derail. Reggie saves Jackson Brodie’s life and the killer Andrew Decker is around somewhere.

Dr Joanna and her young son disappear and her husband’s explanation may satisfy Chief Inspector Monroe but not Reggie. Joanna’s survival instincts of 30 years ago are alive and well. She could not save her family then but now she can save herself again and the life of her son?

Decisiveness and medical knowledge are Joanna’s weapons and she would not be afraid to use them.

A case of genre bending

These novels reflect society and its values. Coincidence may be more frequent, action faster moving and more compressed than in real life. But it is how people react, deal with their values and beliefs, their strengths and weaknesses in unexpected situations which makes Kate Aikinson’s novels not just of our time but also an articulation of a moral humanity that rises above our black souls.

Both books tend to be categorised as crime novels but that is to place them in too narrow a context. Atkinson plays delightfully with preconceptions of genre.

Speaking about Case Histories, Kate Atkinson was forthright about her manipulation of Jackson. Trouble is heaped upon trouble then he lands a fortune ‘like winning the lottery without buying a ticket.’ With a twinkle in her eye Kate announces that in the next book it will all be taken away.

In When Will There Be Good News? it is, and it is humiliating for a toughened ex police inspector.

The endings are superb. But Atkinson teases till the last.

Multiple tales have multiple endings. So for those yet to read the books I will only give one away from Case Histories.

Jackson sleeps with Julia. Amelia is released from her sexual repression and has an affair with Jean Stanton, lawyer and local Conservative Party Secretary. ‘Was she really a Lesbian?’ ‘Oh, everyone’s bi these days!’

God continued to speak to Sylvia.

Russell Bruce, Books Editor

Note: Case Histories won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster. Kate Atkinson’s latest novel When will there be Good News? won the Richard & Judy Book Club Award and was shortlisted for the Galaxy British Book Awards 2009.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
ISBN 9780552772433 Black Swan 428pp Paperback £7.99

Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News
ISBN 97805527724547 Black Swan 480pp Paperback  £7.99

rBooks

The image embedded in the text above is Russell Bruce’s photograph of the painting by Fernand Léger, Les Acrobates en gris. Léger’s painting dating from 1955 is in the collection of Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

It somehow illustrates  Kate Atkinson’s intertwining stories and the celtic knotwork that her characters find themselves in as the dramas unfold.

Fernand Léger was enormously important in the development of 20th century art and a succession of Scottish painters studied with him in his Paris atelier. The Collection du Musée d’art moderne at Centre Pompidou is outstanding beyond description and you could spend days and more absorbing this astonishing collection. And yet, it is only one of many parts of the Centre Pompidou that your €12 ticket  entitles you to visit.