Book review: Started Early, Took My Dog

Published on Thursday 19 August 2010 11:19

STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG Kate Atkinson Doubleday, £18.99

AS IN Emily Dickinson's poem from which the rather odd title of Kate Atkinson's fourth Jackson Brodie comes, covert menace is everywhere.

We're posted decades into the past to 1975, and here's a police force from a scene straight out of Life On Mars. Big, misogynist, hard-drinking coppers, cheese and pineapple cubes on sticks, backcombed hair, vol-au-vents, and in the midst of it all, Tracy Waterhouse.

A big lass and wet behind the ears, she's training on the beat with partner Arkwright and sent to a house whose unsettling contents will fan the flames of curiosity for the following 35 years.

As with the rest of the Jackson Brodie series, with Atkinson, there's always something nasty in the woodshed, and in this case, it's the ghost of murdered prostitute Carol Braithwaite evoking her "revenge tragedy".

Our hero of the piece enters the fray once more, operating as private detective Jackson Brodie, buying himself time to hunt down his own demons while being hired to investigate the parentage of a Kiwi woman. Touring about the country on the case, Jackson picks up a canine sidekick and finds himself drawn into a murder investigation with an array of other folk, including Tracy, who will make a life-altering purchase.

There are also northern prostitutes, the social services, the cast of a rubbish Yorkshire TV show called Collier and a gaggle of police party people from the 1970s, so Atkinson's typical complexity of cast prevails.

Atkinson's narrative staggers constantly between the interior psychologies of several characters, while simultaneously straddling 1975 and the present; one episode is seen from several vantage points, making tiny details crucial. Not for nothing is "For want of a nail the shoe was lost" the book's epigram. As well as this impressive tightrope act, she also manages, as before, to sashay a fine line between comedy and tragedy, malignancy and lightness of touch: from the small still voice within to uproarious humour married deftly.

A stellar cast, the sophisticated plotting we've come to expect, and an incendiary denouement are complemented by a staunch moral touchstone, a stark deliberation of how we treat the weaker members of our society. The effect is hypnotic, compulsive reading, the result more bright fine lines of literary cocaine from Kate Atkinson.