May 14, 2020
Rereading Jackson Brodie in the Spring of 2020
“‘Life’s random,’ he said, The best you can do is pick up the pieces.'” —When Will There Be Good News?
There are several ways a reader comes to Kate Atkinson: as the award-winning author of historical novels including Life After Life and A God in Ruins; as author of the Jackson Brodie detective novels, which were made into a celebrated television series; or as the quirky literary superstar who won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1995 for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, an event celebrated with news headlines referring to Atkinson as “an unknown hotel chambermaid.”
The third route was my own path to Kate Atkinson’s work, though I didn’t encounter it for another decade, reading a copy of a library book I’d borrowed from a friend, which seems like the least intimate literary encounter I’ve ever experienced, but it changed everything for me, the unforgettable first line marking Ruby Lennox’s conception: “I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall…”
I wasn’t fond of detective fiction when I picked Atkinson’s Case Histories, presumably around the same time, but it occurred to me when I did that all literary fiction is about mystery in a sense, and indeed Behind the Scenes at the Museum was, structurally at least, a work of detective fiction, except the sleuth was the reader, because it’s a puzzle of a novel with a solution I didn’t see coming.
But I read Case Histories, because Kate Atkinson was now on my list of fundamental authors, authors whose work I will buy the day of release. Even if I wasn’t as crazy about Jackson Brodie as other readers were, perhaps distrusting of genre—although these books would prove to be my gateway to detective fiction proper, and fifteen years later, I’m absolutely a devotee.
And maybe it was because these books weren’t my favourite, or maybe it was the reason why they weren’t: the plots of the novels didn’t stay with me. Except for the first book, vaguely, the story of the Land sisters and their pile-on of tragedies. When I sat down to reread Case Histories this year in March, it was remarkable that I remembered nothing at all about the story except who had dunnit.
Part of it was that I’m not sure detective fiction necessarily lends itself to rereading for the average reader (and I am also talking about the average work of detective fiction, of which the Jackson Brodie novels, I think, are not). Also because this is a series of novels that have come out over fifteen years—it’s been ten years between Started Early, Took My Dog and the latest, Big Sky. Which I read last June on my 40th birthday, and I remembered nothing of the books that came before. Which is fine—each of these novels stands up fine on their own. But to miss anything of Atkinson’s keen sense of story and detail would be thoroughly a waste, and I thought how much I’d appreciate the chance to reread the Jackson Brodie books from start to finish.
And when the world fell apart in March, and I cycled into despair along with it, finding myself unable to read, the chance appeared, and I took it. Case Histories: An absorbing novel rife with plot, perfect for escaping. But also undeniably dark, brutal, violent, in a way that resonated with the world around me. A book that was an escape, but that was not completely a disconnect either. Why do bad things happen? Why is life so unfair? How do we keep going when people die? How do people survive trauma and tragedy? What kind of life is possible after that?
I was still pretty shattered when I reread Case Histories, during that very bad week I spent unable to eat, barely sleeping, having panic attacks, and finding it exhausting to walk upstairs. But the act of reading, of finding joy and solace again in a book, which is my usual practice, helped me to find my centre again, to find my feet, and feel at home inside myself even at this very strange time.
I don’t know that I properly understand these books’ notion of justice until I read them again in 2020. Jackson Brodie as an outlaw—he used to be a policeman. But the sense that justice proper lives outside the law, which continues to benefit the powerful, which continues to undermine the safety of girls and women. Jackson’s origin story lies in the murder of his older sister, a murder that was was never solved, and it’s a need to right what happened somehow that drives Jackson in these novels, which portray a world, very similar to our own, which is a dangerous case for girls and women.
That murders go unsolved, crimes unavenged. Clues don’t add up, villains get away with it, the banality of so much of this. Reality is a different kind of narrative, is what these books are saying, and yet, somehow, within the confines of a narrative, and there is the possibility of redemption in that. For the world, I mean. The possibility of hope.
One Good Turn takes place two years after Case Histories, Jackson in Edinburgh where his girlfriend Julia has a show at the summer festival. “A Jolly Good Murder Mystery” is the novel’s subtitle, and there is a rollickingness to the novel, whose characters include a writer of middling detective fiction. One Good Turn is self-aware, possibly winking. And its many strands are slightly absurd, but their weaving is masterful, a much richer tapestry than Case Histories. The confident way it all holds together.
And then When Will There Be Good News?, which is a literary masterpiece, I think, the best book of them all, and they’re all extraordinarily good. Featuring Reggie Chase, who appears again in Big Sky—but I didn’t remember her. Unfathomable too, because she’s basically unforgettable. A teenage genius from the wrong side of the tracks, almost no one to guide her. A devastating train crash, and it’s Reggie who saves Jackson’s life, forever in his debt—and doubly, because he writes her a cheque that bounces when his wife disappears with his entire fortune. And we meet Louise Monroe again, the police inspector from the previous book, and this all is a book about trauma, and violence, everyday brutality, domestic violence—and Atkinson even makes it funny, like all the books, which still doesn’t undermine the enormity of the message. Humour is how you make it bearable, I guess, and it helps that life is so absurd.
To reread a series of books so concerned with history is interesting, and the series also shows the changes occurring during the years they were written and take place. I will never forget my first trip to the UK post 2008 economic crash, how different it was, all the holes in the streets where the Woolworths had been—and Started Early, Took My Dog is situated in the wreckage of that moment, another kind of trauma. “The world was going to hell in a handcart…” The sex workers who used to do the job because of poverty, but now it’s because of addiction. Started Early… moves between the 1970s and 2010, and it’s a strange kind of nostalgia. It wasn’t that things were better then, but they were different, that’s all. This is a novel that’s about the fraying of the social fabric, but that’s not necessarily a contemporary story, and might be classic after all. There also have always been bad guys, and some things never change, which is why Jackson Brodie knows as much as as he does—when he’s not walking headlong into disaster.
(This novel is also the way I discovered Betty‘s, and made our first visit to the one in Ilkley in 2011, on the recommendation of Jackson Brodie himself… “If Britain had been run by Betty’s, it would never have succombed to economic Armageddon.”)
And then last week I reread Big Sky, not even a year after the first time, and I knew Reggie Chase this time, now a police inspector herself. And I loved it, just like I loved all of them—its furious, unabashed politics and strong sense of justice. And I loved too the way a few strands in the book that do not quite get tied up, which could suggest that perhaps there are more Jackson Brodie novels to come. A reader can hope…
Or else it’s just that these books, while precise in their composition, are also meant to mimic reality—rough, ragged, and untidy, but sometimes so sublime.
May 12, 2020
Gleanings
- Thrilling (read: meaningful, brave, productive) conversations between friends don’t require mountaintops or war zones—they thrive in deceptively placid settings, where restless hands brush aside crumbs while the worst of life’s torments are explored.
- Though the mulberry is technically invasive, and sometimes I resent the way it’s shaded out part of my garden, I still see the tree as a gift.
- This virus is teaching us a whole new vocabulary. Social distancing. Self isolation. Presumptive. COVID-19. I even had to dictate this new word into the dictionary of the voice recognition software I use to write. (New blog alert! By a BLOG SCHOOL GRAD, no less!)
- While we all remain a little concerned individually that our reading enthusiasm and tempo is not quite what it was (but hey, it’s never been a competition), our aggregate book list is still rich, formidable and gorgeous.
- When the pool re-opens, I’m not sure how I’ll feel.
- What matters even more for me is a cookbook about eating and sharing as much as it is about cooking.
- It’s been ten years since my mother died but I think of her daily.
- You are one great dame and each time I think of you I’m reminded that there is really no higher aspiration for a woman.
- Homemade tater tots, huh. Huh. I would not bother, personally.
- As this shut-in time wears on and wears me down, it helps to imagine doing a little more ‘square haunting’ of my own some day.
- One of the things I’m most grateful for in this life is the innocence, security and endless love of my childhood.
- This is one instance of a more general dilemma which radical political movements have often grappled with: should we choose our terms to reflect the world as it currently is, or the world as we would like it to become?
- You’ll have to write a new Covid edition of your book called The Artist’s Way: Watching The Great Canadian Baking Show Counts as Art when the Alternative is a Mental Breakdown.
- ‘I think I have forgotten what a street fully lit and all the other things that go with peace look like…’
- It felt like hope. The world was showing off and waking up and maybe that was the sign that she would, too.
- If you’re lucky, like me, and live near a forest full of shagbark hickory trees, it’s easy to make this wonderful, velvety, smoky, sweet syrup – a gift from the forest.
May 11, 2020
Starred Review for The Abortion Caravan
One thing I miss about those days in which we used to sit in cafes is the opportunity to flagrantly display the word “abortion” in public. A small act of resistance, but even better, I was reading an extraordinary book and my (starrred) review is now online at Quill & Quire.
Karin Wells’ book is a rich and vivid record of an event in Canadian history we all need to know better (where IS that Heritage Minute?) when a ragtag group of women travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa and shut down parliament in their protest against Canada’s unjust abortion laws, literally CHAINING THEMSELVES TO THE SEATS. (Women who worked in MPs’ offices forged them passes to the House of Commons.) It’s an incredible story and Wells tells it so well, tying the event to other activism sweeping North America at the time. (Wells speculates that the women weren’t arrested for their disruption because police were hyper conscious of optics, the Kent State killings having taken place the week before.) It’s such a good book! Read my review, and then read the book yourself. Buy a copy for your mom!
May 8, 2020
18 Ways That Living Through A Pandemic is ALSO Just Like Having a Baby
It’s been eleven years since the first time I had a baby, and in years since then, I have found that almost nothing is truly analogous to the experience. Until 2020, that is, notable for being the year I discovered not one but two analogies that were absolutely perfect. The first was when I got a sourdough starter back at the beginning of February, and I really wasn’t being facetious when I made the comparison—thought my approach was lighthearted, of course. But if I thought I was serious then, I’m really serious now, when we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s exactly the same, and now I am going to tell you why.
- The universe as we know it is shattered. Farewell to the distinctions between day and night, possible and not, our worst nightmares and reality. Between each day. There is grief and loss, and letting go of plans you made, the life you recognize, and the expectation of ground beneath your feet.
- There are no real answers, but in lieu of a world we recognize, and because we feel so vulnerable, we cling to dogma, signal virtue, and make up rituals to feel exempt from bad things ever happening to us.
- These rituals and signals become performative and are insufferably dull, and yet we share them on social media because we’re desperate for human connection.
- …but we’re also desperate for validation, to have all our biases and points of view confirmed, because anything otherwise only reminds us that the universe is shattered and that we’re all just clinging to life as we know it by the skin of our teeth,
- (Shhhh!)
- A person might wonder how a world could shrink so small.
- The ordinary world is rife with dangers we’d never considered before.
- If you look hard enough, you can find a doctor telling you what you want to hear. You will find that online community.
- Other people’s rituals and signals are anxiety-inducing and only underline that nobody really knows how to do this and we’re all making it up as we go.
- Everybody is getting snippy in Facebook threads.
- Obviously, there is not a lot a whole lot going on where you are.
- Nobody is getting enough sleep.
- Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like?
- I don’t remember signing up for this.
- But there are moments of light in the darkness, of grace. We’ve never had so much food dropped off on the porch, or received so many cards in the mail. We feel cut off from the world, and yet connected.
- We consider how the people with real problems must be faring, as we’ve been overwhelmed with fear and anxiety while sheltering safe at home.
- There are some days, sometimes, that seem almost normal.
- But that we’re still inside the storm makes it difficult to know whether or when it will ever be over.
And a hopeful addendum from my own experience, relevant if the analogy holds: one day it was.
May 7, 2020
Writers & Lovers, by Lily King
I was a bit wary of Writers & Lovers, by Lily King. I’d read her previous book, Euphoria, and I remember finding it a bit wanting (I am in the minority in this assessment), but then Maria Semple recommended this new novel on Instagram, and Maria Semple is a person I trust. I started reading it though, and thought: this is a novel that I’ve read before. The young woman who can’t get her life together, hold her liquor and whole makes terrible choices (see The Dud Avocado, Bridget Jones Diary) meets Lucky Jim, but for girls (and it’s different for girls) meets the MFA novel (any work of fiction that references Breadloaf, except for Ducks, Newburyport). “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say,” our narrator is told on the second page, by the man who owns the property where Casey rents a potting shed that stinks of mould. She bakes cookies in a toaster oven, and almost everyone she ever knew who was a writer has gotten married and/or gone to law school. Casey is 31.
But I haven’t actually read this book before, unless you count Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where Lily Briscoe realizes her vision. Is Casey a fool or not to believe that she can make it as a writer, that the struggle is worth it, six whole years on a novel that maybe nobody will ever read? She makes money waiting tables at a restaurant in Harvard Square, she’s up to her eyeballs in debt and regret and heartache, and desperately mourning the death of her mother. An older writer (a widow with two young children) invites her into his orbit, clearly with domestic intentions, and maybe this is the answer to all her problems, but there is also the other guy, the one with whom the spark is undeniable—but right before their first date, he took off across the country on his motorcycle.
I am unaccustomed to reading about a woman who is flawed and who takes her art seriously, and I am unaccustomed to art that treats such a woman seriously, instead of as the butt of a joke. The book begins in familiar territory but then takes its reader to unexpected places, to previously unexplored terrain. How do you know you’re going to make it, until you make it, and it reminded me of reading Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, the two of them starting out in their careers, writing to save their own lives. And there’s a lightness to the tone that is possibly deceptive, that any story that’s such a delight to behold must necessarily be less than profound. That any woman who fails to be a perfect candidate must necessarily fail to triumph.
I loved this book, set in 1997, back you had to look up literary agents in guides at the library, and spend your last dollars mailing out your manuscript to the lot of them. A book that, as I said, begins in familiar territory, the usual tropes—the douchebag writer guy who’ll break your heart, the writer waiting tables, the possibly creepy mentor, the writer friend with whom one is in unspoken competition. But this portrait of the artist as a no-longer-young woman does something different and novel with all of these pieces, which is why the story so comes alive on the page.
May 5, 2020
A Match Made for Murder, by Iona Whishaw
If you’ve ever wondered just how much they have to pay me to love the Lane Winslow mystery series as much as I do…the answer is nothing. And never has there been a series quite so easy to love, a series of books that has done wonders for my reputation as a person with good literary instincts, because everyone I recommend the series to loves them too, and that I get to receive a tiny bit of credit for that is marvellous luck. To have any kind of proximity to Lane Winslow is really a wondrous thing.
It never disappoints, this series, whose seventh installment is A Match Made For Murder, and Iona Whishaw has taken her heroine and her new husband on honeymoon to Tucson, Arizona. But first I’ll catch you up a bit, if you’re new to King’s Cove, the small village outside of Nelson, BC, where Lane Winslow—young, brilliant, beautiful, looking for a quiet life after spending WW2 spying for the British—retires in search of a quieter life, but she’s just got this knack for stumbling over bodies. Which brings her close to the handsome Inspector Darling—although in the first book, he’s arresting her on suspicion of murder. All that’s sorted out now, however, and the wedding has finally happened. On her honeymoon, at least, will Lane finally get the rest and relaxation she’s been seeking for the past two years?
But just while Lane is settled onto a lounge chair by the pool, reading a book (Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, naturally!), a shot rings out, and it won’t be the last one fired before the book is over. It turns out that Lane and Darling are surrounded by couples with complicated arrangements, mob connections, and possibly murderous intentions. Meanwhile, back in King’s Cove, Ames is left to unravel a curious case involving a dead man whose reputation for interfering with teenage girls goes back at least a decade, and when the woman he fancies turns out to have a connection to him, he struggles to retain his impartiality.
As always with Whishaw’s books, the novel is a delight, charming and funny, cozy and enveloping—by page 7, there are already scones. It’s also a wonderful literary homage to the classics of detective fiction, and I love that Nelson, BC, comes with its very own Baker Street. But coziness is not even the half of it—the series takes on race and racism (in this latest book, Nelson has its first Black police officer and Ames comes to understand that he gets to be regarded as an individual, while his colleague is forever representing an entire race), and misogyny, rape and spousal abuse all factor in this story, which is strongly concerned with the enormous power that men had at the time (and still have now) to control the women in their lives, and also with their sense of entitlement to that control. It’s an idea that is present in both Lane and Darling’s minds as they contemplate how their relationship might be different now that they are married—but then neither of them has ever had much taste for convention.
Lane Winslow, of course, will be keeping her name.
And here is Iona Whishaw reading from her new novel as part of 49thShelfLAUNCHPAD.
May 5, 2020
Gleanings
- We’re adapting. We didn’t want to. I’d rather be swimming…
- At this threshold, in this, our most vulnerable moment yet, can we find in our heart, our soul the empathy, the compassion and the kindness that is needed so badly?
- The pandemic might turn us all into birders.
- Pandemics actually “unfold in slow motion,” he says, and “there’s no event that changes the whole landscape on a dime.” But it feels that way, because of how relentlessly we quest for updates.
- We are living through unusual circumstances, and you are not obligated to do anything extra right now. But if a complete dinner on a single pan appeals, this one is pretty easy, and easy to adapt.
- I kinda want to say, “this week’s cake is…” but it is only Tuesday and there are five of us so half the cake is already gone.
- I’m not yet mourning or grieving the closure of the library. I guess I’m busy looking to the future of libraries.
- walking where no one walks
- From the very beginning, This Ain’t was familiar and it was all Hamilton.
- There, the sum of my sourdough expertise–it’s honestly not very much but has allowed me to cruise through many years of bread-making with much pleasure and little stress.
- I don’t want to leave my characters on the brink — maybe one or two, if they deserve it, but for at least some of them, I want church bells, or trumpets, or the Rocky theme song.
- The clouds have blown on, the sun is shining, it is 18°C and, at long last, it does seem as if we are in the opening stretch of an Ontario springtime in a year when optimism is utterly essential.
- However, if we can exercise our imagination and envision possibilities for the future, if we can live in a better future for even a few minutes in our minds, it is far likelier that we will experience hope and a belief in a better world.
- She gave me my love of reading which I treasure above most things in my life.
- Now I know, I know, you’re really not supposed to pick them but we have to cut ourselves some slack right now and I think the hedgerows can cope.
- I’m not sure they’ll function as vases. Or anything, for that matter. But I plan on glazing and firing them, anyway. We’ve come so far.
- Where on the map’s contours is the place where a woman paused to consider the beauty of the morning?
- She’s too smart and too artful a novelist to have left in anything that didn’t serve her purpose as she understood it, and she’s the kind of writer (meticulous, deliberate) who has earned my trust. That, arguably, shifts the burden to me: if the novel seemed too long to me, what was I missing?
May 4, 2020
Open House, by Jane Christmas
Something that truly shocks me are the number of attractive book covers identical in palette to my hideous bathroom, a bathroom whose hideousness I can blame on the fact that I don’t own a house, have never bought a house. The pink tiles and green blue tub are not something I ever would have chosen, but I have grown comfortable with them (and with the mildewed grouting) because it’s been home for 12 years now, and we live very comfortably here with rent that’s as affordable as my bathroom is ugly. (Which is to say: VERY)
But I have always been fascinated by houses, and how people live inside them, which is why I peruse real estate listings for fun, which is how I discovered my childhood home is currently for sale, and spent Friday morning virtually touring the place as in a dream. Which is why I was also a fan of the British property show Location Location Location when I lived in England, a nation whose sense of house and home is peculiar and fascinating, and felt very proud to rent a terrace house of my own (albeit just a two-up two-down, with nary a bay window), a photo of which hangs in my living room today (naturally with the bins out front). All of which makes me an ideal reader for Open House, Canadian Jane Christmas’s memoir of an extensive renovation on a Victorian terrace in Bristol she purchased with her third husband after their dream of living in a seaside town was scuppered by a variety of factors including SEAGULLS. Throughout the book, she examines her propensity for moving (she has moved 32 times!), her peripatetic childhood (and her many childhood homes in suburban Toronto, her marital homes, the places she lived in gritty 1980s Hamilton as a single mother.
The book has all the appeal of MLS listings, but with stories that don’t need to be guessed at. Instead, with characteristic candour, humour and flair, Christmas strips her life to the studs, and ruminates fascinatingly on notions of home and the places where we make them.
May 1, 2020
Actress, by Anne Enright
I find Anne Enright difficult, but not in the way I find other writers difficult. Which is so much so that I have absolutely no desire to read them, because life is difficult enough. But the work is usually worth it with Anne Enright, whose books are strange and beguiling, although ordinary at first glance—although I didn’t love her most recent The Green Road so much, a novel that was interesting that never really hung together in the way I wanted it to. For me, Actress was more satisfying, but also strange and disorienting, which isn’t a bad thing for a novel. Uncanny: to be both at home and not at home.
It’s the kind of book that’s just so specific, the kind of book of which you can’t say “it’s the kind of book…” at all otherwise. It’s so specific that’s difficult to fully comprehend that this is fiction, that Enright made the whole thing up, the singularly personality and career of Katherine O’Dell, the Irish theatre legend, her story told by her daughter, Norah, who grew up in her mother’s shadow, but this experience too is singular, as human experiences are. This is no Mommie Dearest, is what I mean. It’s so richly imagined and then filtered through the lens of Norah’s perspective, who’s missing half the details. A story by a daughter of her mother that is not a story of neglect or a litany of grievances, though there are some of these, but no more than with any human being. A different kind of take on mothers and daughters, that one can regard the other as a human being—albeit a complicated and flawed one, one who was eventually admitted to a psychiatric hospital after shooting a producer in the foot (which was less funny than it sounds—the injury caused torture for the rest of his days).
I appreciated this novel more after having read Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, which filled in my understanding of The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, though this part of the story is peripheral in The Actress. Intentionally so, because there are many things that Norah doesn’t want to know about her mother. But the part that resonated for me as I read this book in April 2020:
A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.
Anne Enright, The Acress
April 30, 2020
Catching Up with THE M WORD
Last week, I was asked to blurb a memoir that’s coming out this September, and I was happy to say yes to this request, though I always have trouble reading books that aren’t actual books yet, and especially when they’re digital, because I’d have to read on my phone, and who wants to do that. But this book. Which I received on Friday and had finished by Monday night. On my stupid phone. Do you know what an endorsement that is?
The book is How to Lose Everything, by Christa Couture, and it’s a story that sparkles and sings. A story for anyone who would like to consider ways to find grace and keep going in the face of a hopeless situation. Amazingly, it’s also a book that was born out of the essay that Christa published six years ago in The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. What amazing seeds that book has planted!
Which made me consider all the remarkable things that contributors to The M Word have been up to in the years since the book was published. I continue to be bowled over with gratitude to all the women who contributed to our project, and want to celebrate what some of them have been recently been up to literary-wise.
But first, I want to note the death of Priscila Uppal in September 2018. Uppal’s essay was “Footnote to the Poem “Now That All My Friends Are Having Babies: A Thirties Lament,” and it was funny, brutal, honest, and necessary. I am still so honoured that her work was a part of our collection.
- Heather Birrell’s latest book is the poetry collection, Float and Scurry, which has been shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
- Christa Couture has just released her fifth album, Safe Harbour. Her memoir How to Lose Everything will be published in September.
- Nancy Jo Cullen’s debut novel The Western Alienation Merit Badge was published in 2019.
- Marita Dachsel’s most recent book is the poetry collection There Are Not Enough Sad Songs
- Ariel Gordon released the essay collection Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests in 2019. It has been nominated for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award
- Fiona Tinwei Lam’s poetry collection Odes & Laments was published in 2019.
- Maria Meindl’s debut novel The Work was published in 2019.
- Saleema Newaz’s new novel, Songs for the End of the World, was due to be released in August. Due to uncanny connections between her novel—about a coronavirus that sweeps the world in 2020—and our current moment, the book has been released early as an ebook and the print book is coming this summer.
- Patricia Storms’ most recent book is the picture book Moon Wishes, co-written with Guy Storms and illustrated by, Milan Pavlovic published in 2019
- Julia Zarankin’s first book, Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, is coming in September (and I can hardly wait!)
This is just a smattering of updates from our contributors, all of which have been up to good and interesting things in the years since the book came out. What a pleasure it is to have this connection with each and every one of them.
