You may think I've been a bit quiet lately, but actually I've been reading even more than usual in the past few weeks because I've felt the need for some light relief from the novels I've been reading for work. Light relief, for me, is almost always detective fiction. Quite why reading about violent crime should be so pleasurable and relaxing is an interesting question but not one I am about to get into here. Anyway, I've gobbled up a few crime novels of late, but to be honest they generally haven't been interesting enough for me to want to tell you about them. But here we have the exception that proves the rule -- though in fact I have never fully understood what that meant. But if it implies that you can measure the comparative failures against an obvious success, that just about sums up my experience with Kate Atkinson's latest.
As I'm sure you know, this is the fourth in a series which started with Case Histories and continued through One Good Turn and the award-winning When Will There Be Good News? Having absolutely loved the first three, I've been eagerly awaiting this novel and was lucky enough to get it for my birthday a few weeks ago.
What connects all four novels is the character of Jackson Brodie, an ex-policeman turned private investigator. Jackson solves cases, or most of them, but he also struggles with his difficult and confusing private life -- his failed first marriage, his affair with an ex-client, his disastrous second marriage to a con artist who steals all his money, his ongoing unrequited love for Police Sergeant Louise Monroe, his tricky relations with his children, and much much more. In Started Early... he has more or less recovered from the train crash which nearly finished him off, and is on the road, looking for a place to settle down. He has just one client, a woman in New Zealand who wants him to find her birth parents, a seemingly impossible task.
The story swings between two time frames, the present and the 1970s, and focuses on three main characters -- Jackson himself, recently retired DCI Tracey Waterhouse, and Tilly, an ageing actress suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimers. All their voices and inner thoughts are perfectly captured, as Tracey learns, in her fifties, how to cope with the pleasures and pains of motherhood, Tilly's mind wanders between her eventful past and an increasingly confusing present, and Jackson -- well, Jackson is Jackson. He's developed a passion for ancient ruined abbeys and for the poetry of Emily Dickinson, which intrudes at the most inopportune moments. He worries about the world, about his children's futures, about his many failed relationships. He is intelligent, gloomy, quirky, and altogether delightful.
The plot is intricate and well-constructed, the characters are convincing, but the point really is that this a a well written novel. That's what makes it stand out above the rest. It's intelligent, perceptive, thought-provoking, humane, witty -- what more could you want?