Courtesy Little, Brown & Company
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
One Good Turn
By Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown & Company)
Review by John F. Baker, October 2006
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Kate Atkinson is that unlikely creature, a literary award-winner who has morphed into an author of suspense novels while retaining an eagle eye for eccentric English character and a dashing, witty style. Like Atkinson's surprise hit Case Histories two years ago, which marked her breakout from being a critically admired author with a limited readership, her new novel stars retired detective Jackson Brodie. Brodie, in his late 40s, is the very antithesis of the tough, sardonic private eye; he is diffident, anxious about his young daughter from a failed marriage, lives in wealthy retirement in France (from an inheritance), and misses the routine of his old police days. He also has a wandering eye, and it is typical of Atkinson's playful spirit that his latest companion, Julia, is a much younger actress obviously unsuited to him ("sometimes she sounded just like his wife"). She has a role in a hopeless play that is part of the "fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival, and Brodie goes along reluctantly to support her.
It is there, on a crowded street outside a festival event, that a car driven by a mysterious man who calls himself Paul Bradley, and who is obviously up to no good, is rear-ended by one driven by a large angry man with a baseball bat and a hostile dog. Bradley is knocked down by the bat but is saved from further injury by a briefcase thrown at his attacker by a timid but highly successful crime writer, Martin Canning. The incident is also witnessed by Brodie, as well as by Gloria Hatter, unhappily married to a bullying and unscrupulous real estate magnate, and the entire complex plot evolves from the presence of all these people at the scene.
One Good Turn is by no means a mystery or a thriller in any conventional sense, though it contains moments of violent action and several murders. At heart it's a book about disappointed middle-age people doing their best to come to terms with the way their lives have turned out, and Atkinson has an unerring eye for the telling thought and detail that brings melancholy, regret, and cockeyed optimism to hilarious life; whole passages are funny enough to deserve reading aloud in company. And while it's the expansive character studies, particularly of Hatter, Brodie, and Canning, that make the book so delightfully readable, the plot—particularly the headlong series of brief scenes in which Atkinson hurries to wrap it all up toward the end—seems incidental: a flimsy framework on which to hang a series of memorable portraits of middle-age angst. And since the reader comes to empathize so wholeheartedly with Brodie, it's a great relief when his errant eye falls on a sultry policewoman with a sick cat and a wonderfully hideous teenage son. It seems clear that she will figure in what we can only hope will be a further Brodie outing.
John F. Baker is a former editor of Publishers Weekly and a longtime reviewer.
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