Big Sky by Kate Atkinson
There are crime writers who will bristle at the worn critic’s backhand: that one’s book transcends the genre. Which is to say – for someone who works in a cliché and plot-bound ghetto, the writing is pretty darn good. Such faint praise has been known to grate. I suspect Kate Atkinson is not troubled by such things. She is – and always has been – a literary novelist, who also happens to write a series of, yes, crime novels.
The distinction is silly, of course. As she notes in a recent interview in The Guardian, if you have a detective as your main character, you’re assigned to the genre. No choice in the matter. But when you write like Atkinson, backhanded praise – intended or otherwise – does not apply. Assign her whatever box you like. She’s working at so high a level that the idea of genre feels moot.
For lovers of crime, well-wrought sentences and impeccable plots, Atkinson has few peers. That’s why her latest, Big Sky (Little, Brown and Company), is cause for such celebration. After the author’s nine-year hiatus (while she was off winning high-brow awards for her non-crime novels), Big Sky heralds the return of her beloved private investigator, Jackson Brodie.
As I poured over it at dinner the other night, seated by the bar at a Union Square restaurant, an older lady peered over at my reading material and gushed: Oh, I love him! How did you get it early? When I corrected the pronoun and pointed to Atkinson’s first name on the cover, she scoffed. No, him, Jackson! she said.
When I replied that I was lucky enough to receive a review copy, she asked for my assessment, not that she needed it.
Amazing, said I.
Of course, it is, she smiled. She is excellent.
That she is. And so is her latest release.
Big Sky finds Jackson Brodie in an English seaside village, juggling the affairs of cheating hearts and a surly teenage son. Yet, in typical Atkinson fashion, there are plots being woven well beyond Brodie’s point of view. The straight-ahead narrative style of the traditional crime novel has never been for her. If you’re after the visceral, first-person POV so inherent to the genre, look elsewhere. While Jackson Brodie anchors the series, he could fairly be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor in Atkinson’s plots.
Other featured players in Big Sky: a pair of sex-trafficked sisters; a suicidal, cuckolded sad sack; a trophy second wife scarred by sexual abuse; golfing buddies with nasty secrets; a drag queen mentor to one of their conflicted sons; and the evil specter of Jimmy Savile, Britain’s pedophile devil incarnate, who, evidently, was not alone.
They are part of a “magic circle” – two words that ignite PTSD for those unfortunate enough to know what it means. The trophy wife knows all too well, and she’s reminded to keep her mouth shut about it. As Atkinson notes, in one of the innumerable passages that I underlined: “If she opened her mouth about the past then all the demons in hell would fly out.”
Business is booming for those prepared to meet the supply and demand for young girls – and boys – and those who prey upon them. As one character involved in the trafficking ponders: “Sometimes he wondered where his humanity had gone. Oh, yes, he remembered – he’d never had any.”
These are all rather dark themes and characters, yet, somehow Atkinson manages to carry things off with a deft touch. There are writers – some of my favorites – whose books must be set down after certain passages. The images become too disturbed, too brutal, and one needs a breather. Atkinson writes about the same brutalities, but she does it in a way that doesn’t slow the pages or churn the stomach.
Instead, she keeps the perspectives moving. We’re never with one troubled mind for too long. The effect, somehow, is one of collective empathy. We live in terrible times. We peek inside the very worst of human minds. Yet, led by Kate Atkinson, we can take some comfort. In Big Sky, the guilty pay for their sins, even if it means the law is bent a little – and rightly so.
Big Sky is now available.
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