Started Early, Took
My Dog is Kate Atkinson's seventh novel
and the fourth to star private eye Jackson Brodie, survivor of a tragic
childhood and much hapless love; seeker of lost people; and champion of the
powerless. Melancholy, rueful, and obstinate, Jackson is one of the most
appealing sleuths ever to tread the pages of a crime thriller, an appeal now
sharpened by his new-found affinity for Emily Dickinson and heightened beyond
all resisting by his having acquired a dog. Rescued by Jackson from an abusive yobbo,
it is a little terrier, exuberant and joyously doggy one moment, thoughtful and
attentive the next.
Turning from this excellent
creature to the plot we find a superbly ingenious construction composed of the
meshed repercussions of hidden crimes and cruelties, and a gradually revealed
arabesque of intertwined lives. The book begins in 1975 in Leeds with the
discovery of a starving child and the body of a murdered woman in a locked
apartment. Called to the scene is Tracy Waterman, a solidly built policewoman,
and her partner, Ken Arkwright, "a stout white Yorkshireman with a heart
of lard." But no sooner is this event introduced, than the action sheers
off, first to Jackson finishing off his last caper six months ago, and then on
to the present where we find Tracy Waterman again, now in her 50s, retired from
the police force and working as head of security at a down-market shopping
mall. Surveying the commercialized ugliness of the place and the unhappy people
who frequent it, she reflects, "All human life was here. Britain -- shoplifting
capital of Europe."
Tracy's
thwarted maternal instincts come to a boil as she observes an enraged woman,
Kelly Cross, "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-around pikey," yelling
into a cell phone while dragging a screaming little girl along at brutal speed.
Inundated by "despair and frustration as she contemplated the blank but
already soiled canvas of the kid's future," Tracy is seized by an impulse.
"One moment she was…contemplating the human wreckage that was Kelly Cross,
the next she was saying, 'How much?'" She flashes 3,000 euros she has just
withdrawn from the bank. It's enough for Kelly, who grabs the money and drops
the girl's hand. Tracy has just bought a child.
Tracy and
her new charge set off in search of a new life -- pursued, soon enough, by
mysterious trackers with, it would seem, evil intentions. So begins one
extraordinary strain of the story. Another proceeds from the addled point of
view of Tilly, a superannuated actress drifting in and out of senility. She has
been playing the mother of the macho star of a TV soap opera, a role created to
make the man seem "more human." But she has recently learned that her character is going to
be killed off very soon, presumably because she can't get her lines down. This
is only the beginning of the woes that fill Tilly's old head, all of them
merging together, impressionistically, almost poetically, in her befuddlement.
The third major strand of the story
proceeds from Brodie's point of view as he pursues a new assignment: finding
the natural parents of a woman living in New Zealand who was adopted in England
as a child. Although a few other characters contribute threads of consciousness
to the narrative, Tracy's, Tilly's, and Jackson's points of view carry the
story along, each accompanied by tart observations on the degraded condition of
England and nostalgic laments for her vanished past: "No more half-day closing," reflects Tilly, contemplating
the tawdry activity of the shopping mall through which Kelly is dragging her
child. "Everything open all the time now, getting and spending we lay
waste our powers. And where had all the money gone? You go to sleep living in a
prosperous country and you wake up in a poor one, how did that happen?"
The novel
is immensely exciting and very funny, even with all the sadness and badness it
encompasses; and it is supremely devious in execution. Atkinson deploys past
and present storylines in a pincer movement, marshalling seemingly
miscellaneous actions and events into a coherent picture, one in which each
character plays an often unwitting part. Atkinson really has no peer in the
deftness with which she pulls this off; and it is a trick that goes beyond
technique. As characters belonging to one narrative strand suddenly pop up in
another, a surreal mood creeps into the novel. Indeed, these surprise
involvements and coincidences begin to seem like evidence of an underlying
current in the world, of some invisible struggle between good and evil, one in
which the innocent are at once the most vulnerable and the most potent. This
mood, which has a tincture of Arthurian romance about it, is an amalgam of
whimsy and irony, and is uniquely Atkinson's.
The result is an intoxicating read. As the suspense and action
intensify, as everything and everyone come hurtling together in the last pages,
this particular reader was completely swept away by an exhilarating mix of
dread and hilarity.
--Katherine A. Powers
British private detective Jackson Brodie, star of three previous Atkinson novels (When Will There Be Good News, 2008, etc.), finds himself embroiled in a case which shows that defining crime is sometimes as difficult as solving it.
Tracy Waterhouse, who is middle-aged, overweight and lonely, heads security for a mall in Leeds. Retired from the local police force, she remains haunted by one of her earliest cases, when she and her partner found a little boy abandoned in the apartment where his mother had been murdered days earlier. Although the murderer was supposedly found (but died before being brought to trial), Tracy never learned what happened to the child with whom she'd formed a quick bond. When Tracy sees a known prostitute/lowlife mistreating her child at the mall, she impulsively offers to buy the child, and the woman takes the money and runs. Tracy knows she has technically broken the law and even suspects the woman might not be the real mother, but her protective instinct and growing love for the little girl named Courtney overrides common sense; she begins arrangements to flee Leeds and start a new life with the child. Meanwhile, Jackson has come to Leeds on his own case. Raised and living in Australia, adoptee Hope McMaster wants information about her birth parents, who supposedly died in a car crash in Leeds 30 years ago. As he pursues the case, Jackson considers his relationships with his own kids—a troublesome teenage daughter from his first marriage and a young son whom DNA tests have recently proved he fathered with a former lover. Jackson's search and Tracy's quest intertwine as Jackson's questions make the Leeds police force increasingly nervous. It becomes clear that the 1975 murder case Tracy worked on is far from solved and has had lasting repercussions.
The sleuthing is less important than Atkinson's fascinating take on the philosophic and emotional dimensions of her characters' lives.
