Context Introduction I. Kate Atkinson: "Big sky"

The structure of the course paper consists of introduction, main body, involving two and three sub parts, the conclusion, bibliography.
Conclusion of the course paper gives overall idea with all information which were provided.
Bibliography gives references of the course paper.
In “Big Sky,” the former military man and police inspector has moved to the U.K.’s northeastern coast, where he’s set up his small agency. It’s an unassuming venture: “He tried not to use the term ‘private detective’ it had too many glamorous connotations or sleazy, depending on how you looked at it. Too Chandleresque. It raised people’s expectations,” Atkinson writes.Although this book is definitely a mystery, its structure is unusual. Jackson is barely working. Instead, he’s focused on intermittently parenting his 13-year-old son, Nathan hoping his ex, the actress Julia, will rekindle their romance and musing on the passage of time. The intertwined threads awaiting Jackson’s attention involve a sex-trafficking ring and an old sexual abuse scandal that echoes the true story of Jimmy Savile, the beloved British entertainer who was revealed, after his death, to have been a rampant sexual predator. The first crime doesn’t appear for more than 100 pages. There will, eventually, be blood. But the richness of this novel comes in spending time with the kaleidoscope of characters who spin together in the whirlwind ending.Chief among these is Crystal, the perfectly groomed trophy wife of a successful local businessman. Sure, she named their daughter Candy and dresses her in a parade of Disney princess outfits; yes, she feeds her husband exactly the traditional food he wants. But she’s privately eating healthy and learning school lessons from Harry, her teenage stepson.Harry, unlike his father, is a sensitive soul. He may take after his mother, who died when she tumbled off a cliff. He reads a lot and works backstage during the summer at a variety theater with a third-rate show. He gets to know a cross-dressing singer, who is kind, and the headliner, a comedian who’s even more unpleasant offstage than on. Harry also tries to tell jokes, but he’s such a hopeless nerd that they always involve cheese. But they too orbit this universe, asking the same routine questions about the old case so many times that they become a refrain the reader can recite. More than once, the duo wind up in the middle of the action; these two tiny, novice look-alike cops are underestimated by everyone. Meanwhile, we follow the descent of soon-to-be-divorced Vince, a hapless everyman with vague connections to Crystal’s husband. As the book progresses, Vince’s life goes from bad to worse. It might be hard to relate to Vince’s choices, but if you’ve ever been the least cool person in a group of friends, you’ll feel his pain. Atkinson is so skilled at getting inside people’s heads that when she introduces a new character, it’s almost impossible to not feel at least a little sympathy for the person. As terrible as I feel typing this, it even holds true for one of the human traffickers, who conceals his enormous profits from his domineering wife so he can surprise her with retirement in paradise. At times, he seems like he’s serving more as a frame to the story than its driver. Now long retired and removed from his home base of Edinburgh, Scotland, he’s not able to leverage the once helpful former-policeman connections. Readers familiar with Atkinson’s earlier mysteries will recognize Reggie faster than Jackson does, despite the fact that she once saved his life. And when he’s hired by Crystal, he does such a poor job that she refuses to pay him using language I can’t share here. But in fact, Jackson is on it — he’s just not putting himself at the center of it.
I.Kate Atkinson "Big Sky"
1.1The biography of Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson was born December 20, 1951, York, England, British short-story writer, playwright, and novelist whose works were known for their complicated plots, experimental form, and often eccentric characters. Atkinson received her early education at a private preparatory school and later the Queen Anne Grammar School for Girls in York. An avid reader from childhood, she studied English literature at the University of Dundee, where she earned a master’s degree in 1974. She remained at Dundee to study postmodern American fiction for a doctorate. Though she was denied the degree, her studies of the postmodern stylistic elements of American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut influenced her later work.
Throughout the late 1970s and for much of the ’80s, Atkinson held various jobs, few of which enabled her to make use of her literary interests. In 1981–82, however, she took up short-story writing, finding the brief narrative form an effective outlet for her creative energy. Later that decade, her short story “In China” won a competition sponsored by Woman’s Own magazine.¹ The prize inspired her to write fiction for other publications, including Good Housekeeping and the Daily Mail. In 1993 her short story “Karmic Mothers—Fact or Fiction?,” about two women hospitalized for their suicide attempts and recovering next to a maternity unit, won the Ian St. James Award; the story was adapted for television in 1997.
Atkinson’s first novel was the tragicomedy Behind the Scenes at the Museum which evolved from a series of previously written short stories. The novel centres on Ruby Lennox, whose narrative of self-discovery ultimately becomes the story of her family’s survival through two world wars. Atkinson interspersed the text with “footnotes”—chapter-long asides by family members, whose flashbacks reveal dark secrets hidden beneath the family facade. The work won the 1995 Book of the Year and First Novel Whitbread Book Awards later renamed the Costa Book Awards.
In her second novel, Human Croquet , Atkinson employed nonchronological flashbacks and magic realism to bring a mythical quality to the main character, Isobel Fairfax, and her family’s past. Atkinson’s inclination to experiment with literary device featured prominently in her next novel, Emotionally Weird, in which she assigned different fonts to certain characters and settings. The same year as that book’s publication, Atkinson’s first full-length play, Abandonment, premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. She subsequently began writing a series of crime thrillers that featured private investigator Jackson Brodie. Case Histories the first book in the series, made the short list for a Whitbread Book Award and later lent its name to the series adaptation for television, where the role of Brodie was played by British actor Jason Isaacs. Other books in the series included One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News, Started Early, Took My Dog, and Big Sky.
Among Atkinson’s later critically acclaimed works was Life After Life a novel in which the protagonist, Ursula Todd, repeatedly dies and is reborn in the year 1910. In each new life, Ursula is confronted by different choices and situations that have the potential to alter the course of history. The novel was an unusual blend of science fiction and drama and was noted for its insightful portrayal of human nature. It was short-listed for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was awarded the 2013 Costa Book Award for best novel. A God in Ruins traces the life of RAF pilot Teddy Todd, Ursula’s brother, though it dispenses with the latter’s rebirths, instead taking a more starkly realistic approach to the narrative. In Transcription a woman must confront her past as a worker at MI5 during World War II, fiction, literature created from the imagination, not presented as fact, though it may be based on a true story or situation. Types of literature in the fiction genre include the novel, short story, and novella. The word is from the Latin “the act of making, fashioning, or molding.” Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and studied English Literature at Dundee University. After graduating in 1974, she researched a postgraduate doctorate on American Literature. She later taught at Dundee and began writing short stories in 1981. She began writing for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story Karmic Mothers, which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its 'Tartan Shorts' series.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, beating Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins' biography Gladstone. The book is set in Yorkshire, narrated by Ruby Lennox, who takes the reader through the complex history of her family, covering the events of the twentieth century and reaching back into the past to uncover the lives of distant ancestors. The book has been adapted for radio and theatre, and has been adapted for television by the author. Her second novel, Human Croquet, was published in 1997 and relates the story of another family, the Fairfaxes, through flashback and historical narrative. Her third novel, Emotionally Weird, was published in 2000, and in 2002 a collection of short stories, Not the End of the World.
Kate Atkinson has written two plays for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: a short play, Nice and Abandonment, which premiered as part of the Edinburgh Festival in August 2000. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is an occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines. The four books Case Histories, One Good Turn shortlisted for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year, When Will There be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog form a crime series featuring ex-policeman Jackson Brodie. These books were adapted for television and a 6-part series starring Jason Isaacs as Jackson Brodie was broadcast in 2011. In 2013 she published Life after Life, winner of the Costa Novel Award and the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize; and A God in Ruins, a companion novel to Life After Life, featuring several of the same characters. In 2019 Jackson Brodie returned in Big Sky, and Atkinson also published Transcription.Michael K. Atkinson is an American attorney. He has worked for the United States Department of Justice for 15 years prior to becoming the second Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. He took over the office on May 17, 2018. Atkinson is known for alerting Congress in September 2019 to a whistleblower complaint about Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rival; the scandal eventually led to Trump’s impeachment and acquittal.
On April 3, 2020, President Donald Trump fired Atkinson, saying he “no longer” had confidence in the inspector general. Atkinson will be removed from his office 30 days from a letter sent from Trump to the Senate Intelligence Committee on April 3. Michael K. Atkinson is 55 years as of 2019. he was born on May 16, 1964, Oswego, New York, the U.S. He celebrates his birthday on 16th May every year. Atkinson appears to be quite tall in stature if his photos, relative to his surroundings, are anything to go by. However, details regarding his actual height and other body measurements are currently not publicly available. We are keeping tabs and will update this information once it is out.
K. Atkinson graduated from Pulaski Academy and Central School in 1982 and got his Bachelor of Arts from Syracuse University in 1986 and his Juris Doctor from Cornell Law School in 1991. After doing our research, details about his parents are not available and it is also not known if he has any siblings. Atkinson likes to keep his personal life private hence information about his dating life is not available. It is therefore not known whether he is married or has any children. However, this information will be updated as soon as it is available.Following his graduation from Law school, Atkinson was accepted to the District of Columbia Bar and joined the law firm of Winston & Strawn, where he worked for 11 years, first as an associate and then as a partner.
From there, Atkinson worked for the U.S. Department of Justice for 15 years. He served as a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Fraud Section, from 2002 through 2006 and Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia from 2006 through 2016. In May 2018, Atkinson was nominated to become Inspector General of the Intelligence Community by President Donald Trump. At his confirmation hearings, he indicated that he would restore order to the troubled ICIG’s office, which had a reputation for dysfunction, and pledged to revive a whistleblower program that had become defunct under the previous Acting Inspector General. Michael K. Atkinson, as inspector general, received a formal complaint from a whistleblower In August 2019. The whistleblower stated that they had learned that Trump had abused his power “to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” by pressuring (Ukraine) government to investigate a domestic political rival.
The whistleblower, a Central Intelligence Agency officer detailed to the White House, submitted the report to Michael K. Atkinson under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection A.Atkinson reviewed the complaint and interviewed several government officials whom the whistleblower identified as having information to substantiate his claims. On August 26, having found the complaint to be both “credible” and “of urgent concern” Michael K. Atkinson transmitted the complaint to Joseph Maguire, the acting Director of National Intelligence The complaint caused the launch of a House impeachment inquiry against Trump. The whistleblower complaint brought public attention to Atkinson, who previously was a little-known official.In mid-November, 2019, news reports disclosed that the president was angry with the IG’s perceived disloyalty and wanted to fire him. Subsequently,
Atkinson was fired by President Trump on April 3, 2020, and will be removed from his office 30 days from a letter sent from Trump to the Senate Intelligence Committee on April 3.
K. Atkinson has not revealed his net worth. He is a simple person and never likes to attract public attention by publicly displaying his wealth. However, this section is under review, we will update you when details about his net worth are revealed.
K. Atkinson is an American attorney. He has worked for the United States Department of Justice for 15 years prior to becoming the second Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. He took over the office on May 17, 2018. Atkinson is known for alerting Congress in September 2019 to a whistleblower complaint about Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rival. Michael K. Atkinson is 55 years as of 2019. he was born on May 16, 1964, Oswego, New York, the U.S. He celebrates his birthday on 16th May every year.Michael K. Atkinson is still in office until 30 days. The president has not yet named his successor.Details about Michael K. Atkinson’s love life are still under review. We will let you know when he gets in a relationship or when we discover helpful information about her love life. He has not yet revealed his net worth. We will update this section when we get and verify information about the wealth and properties under his name.
Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), won the 1995 Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year award. Set in Yorkshire, the book has been adapted for radio, theater and TV.² This was followed by Human Croquet (1977), Abandonment (2000), Emotionally Weird (2000), Not the End of the World (2002), Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006) and When Will There Be Good News (2008). The last three all feature former private detective Jackson Brodie. She has written two plays for the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: Nice (1996), and Abandonment, which premiered as part of the Edinburgh Festival in August 2000. She currently lives in Edinburgh and is an occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines.
She was appointed MBE in the 2011 Queen's Birthday Honours List, and was voted Waterstones UK Author of the Year at the 2013 Specsavers National Book Awards. Whatever genre Atkinson writes in, her books tend to touch on the themes of love and loss, and how to carry on, always presented with a astuteness and wicked sense of humor. Her books tend to be populated by odd, sometimes amoral, and generally dysfunctional misfits who become credible by dint of being so fully rendered. Her books have frequently been described as comedies of manners; that is to say a comedy that represents the complex and sophisticated code of behavior current in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true moral character. A comedy of manners tends to reward its clever and unscrupulous characters rather than punish their immorality. The humor of a comedy of manners relies on verbal wit and repartee. This form of writing flourished in England with authors such as Jane Austen, Samuel Coleridge, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward.
After nearly 10 years, Kate Atkinson’s much-loved detective Jackson Brodie returns in her 12th novel Big Sky. “The best mystery of the decade”, Stephen King wrote of Case Histories, Brodie’s first appearance back in 2004, but it looked as if he might have been retired for ever after his fourth outing in 2010. “Brodie did have a really long holiday,” the author says. During which time, Atkinson won the Costa best novel award twice, for her historical novels Life After Life and A God in Ruins, and wrote last year’s Transcription. But she always intended to bring him back, or she would have killed him off, “just to put that to bed”.
Big Sky started as a screenplay about a female detective, and was originally written for the actor and comedian Victoria Wood, who had appeared in one of the BBC’s Brodie adaptations starring Jason Isaacs. Wood did not see the manuscript before her death in 2016 so Atkinson put it aside, before eventually deciding it would work for Brodie, partly because it is set in Yorkshire, where the detective, like his creator, grew up. The idea for the story began with another Yorkshireman, Jimmy Savile, who had a home in Scarborough, with a plaque – now removed – that read “Savile’s View” on the railings overlooking the bay. Although the DJ and TV presenter doesn’t feature in Big Sky directly, he casts a shadow over a sinister web of storylines that connects child abuse rings in the 1970s and 80s to present-day sex trafficking.
Atkinson began writing Big Sky the day after she finished Transcription, her second world war espionage novel. Because the idea had been lurking in her mind for so long, she says, it came really quickly, “and I thought, ‘Well I’ll just keep on.’” But it must have been a jolt to switch from 1950s spies to contemporary sleazebags overnight. “I need to change tack quite vigorously, quite often,” she says. After the initial run of Brodie books, she felt she “never wanted to write another one of these again”; then, following Life After Life, A God in Ruins and Transcription, she decided: “I must stop writing about the war. I go on a groove for so long and then I have to change.” The world is a darker place and it is an angrier place ... That’s what the politics has done to us. The Brodie books always deal “with things that are happening now”, she stresses. This doesn’t mean writing a Brexit novel, she says, although that subject inevitably creeps in as she points out, it even features in Transcription. For Brodie – of all Atkinson’s characters “the nearest to my kneejerk reaction to things” – Brexit is “the end of civilisation as we know it”. As he observes, “the world had grown darker”. Even by the standards of the series, Big Sky is bleak. Yet it retains the jauntiness that makes Atkinson so wickedly entertaining. “I know, it’s not right somehow,” she says, laughing she laughs a lot. Since Brodie’s last appearance “the world is a darker place and it is an angrier place and it is a more bitter place,” she says. “That’s what the politics has done to us – everyone is now anxious all the time, because we don’t know what is going to happen.”
There are also echoes of the MeToo moment as, one after another, the female characters dole out justice or revenge on a pile-up of bad men. Although she didn’t intend Big Sky to be a “strong women book” it inevitably became one, “because all these middle-aged white blokes have to have their comeuppance – and who is going to give it to them?” As Brodie reflects: “It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.” She had to add names to the list as she was writing, she jokes, and if she were to write it now there would be even more to include.
The honourable exception is our man Brodie, “the last good man standing”, who always tries “to behave like a gentleman”, and although “knocking on a bit now”, is ready to dive into the sea or jump off a cliff to rescue someone. “He does have a sheepdog instinct,” Atkinson says. “He knows he’s got to protect women and children.” But he also “has such a strain of darkness in him that he is always going to be responding to the outer darkness”.
With his tragic childhood, string of divorces and melancholic outlook, he is the archetypal hard-boiled private eye; the only trait he is missing is a weakness for the bottle. “I like to take cliches and try and work with them,” she says. But when she first set him to work, she was nervous because she “hadn’t really written a male character of any substance before”, and she had no intention of writing a crime novel, let alone a detective series to sit alongside Ian Rankin’s Rebus or Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse books. But “if you put a detective in a novel it becomes a detective novel, there’s no way round it”. Where traditional crime fiction is “very narrative driven, like a trail”, Atkinson’s genius for plotting, combined with an acute sympathy for the inner lives of her characters, has created what she likes to call “a genre of Jackson Brodie” (her publishers plump for “literary crime novel”).³ Readers who would never pick up a crime novel are “the biggest Jackson Brodie fans now”.
Above all, the detective is a great device for bringing together multiple storylines and huge casts – Hilary Mantel once wrote that Atkinson must have “a game plan more sophisticated than Dickens”. “There are a lot of characters,” she concedes. Does her study resemble a procedural room in a TV police drama, covered with sprawling spider diagrams? “It is your working world and you know where everybody is and what everybody needs to do,” she says. “I can do it while I’m writing it, afterwards I can’t even remember anyone’s name.” She loves an ending hence the seemingly endless endings of Life After Life somehow managing to tie everything up with forensic neatness. “Everybody gets their just deserts.”
The question of justice recurs throughout Atkinson’s fiction, which always operates according to its own morality the bodycount in a Brodie novel often rivals that of an episode of Game of Thrones. In Big Sky “everyone is breaking the law”, or taking it into their own hands in one way or another. Brodie fans will welcome the reappearance of Reggie, last seen as a 16-year-old nanny in 2008’s When Will There Be Good News?, now a young policewoman. “What else would she become?” Atkinson asks. “Now she’s never going to be allowed to be happy. Because she’s always going to be seeing bad things. She will be fulfilled.”
Atkinson has said that “you can’t write a novel about happy people having happy lives”. “There is so much misery around, I never seem to get round to it.” But the author herself always seems remarkably cheery, in a no-nonsense Yorkshire way. “I am, on the whole,” she agrees, with that laugh. “If I was really gloomy would I write different books? Maybe this is the place for it – it frees you up, because then you don’t have to dwell in it.”
She was, however, a very fearful, anxious child, something she attributes to being “illegitimate” and not having a sibling her parents were together, but her mother was unable to get divorced following a disastrous wartime marriage. “There was a lot of suppressed emotion.” Born in 1951 and growing up above her parents’ shop in York, she was left largely to her own devices. She also wonders if she might have been “tainted” by her father’s own miserable childhood – one of poverty, violence and random accident – which she only discovered after his death, and which reads like the backstory of one of her characters. His grandmother, with whom he lived until he was 10, died falling from a table trying to get a fly paper down – “a wonderful little story: ‘Imagine the fly! Until her early 30s she never thought about becoming a writer: “I was a reader, that was my part in the whole book process.” But she won the Women’s Own short story competition – “the best moment of my life” – for “the very first thing I wrote that had nothing to do with me”.⁴ This led to an apprenticeship in magazine stories: “getting everything in there in a very short space that was how I learned to write.”
She published Behind the Scenes at the Museum when she was 43. “Everyone said, you are quite old to have your first novel published, and I’d think, ‘Well, now I can get on with it, I’ve done all the difficult thing living.’” She had been married twice and has two daughters and now granddaughters. Behind the Scenes won the Whitbread book of the year award in 1995, beating such big literary beasts as Salman Rushdie, which caused a bit of a brouhaha, with headlines such as “Unknown chambermaid wins prize” she had once worked in a hotel. The whole experience “tainted me for ever”, she says now, and she has been wary of interviews ever since. “I always feel as if I want to live as if I have a monastery inside me. I don’t want to be giving away all the time.” Although “Yorkshire will be written on my heart for ever”, she has spent most of her writing life in Edinburgh, which “cuts you off. I am beyond the wall.” She doesn’t enjoy parties or networking, “stuff that I always presume is happening in London all the time”. Although the day after we meet she is having lunch with her longtime friend Ali Smith – “she’s literally the only writer I know”, and they never talk about writing, “Never!” They will be celebrating their joint No 1 positions in the hardback and paperback bestseller lists for Transcription and for Smith’s Spring.
Atkinson has never suffered from “blank-page syndrome” and is already at work on two novels simultaneously – “It wakes me up a bit” – one of which is another Brodie. “Yes, he’s coming back in a very funny book”: an Agatha Christie homage. She’s had the beginning and the title for ages – “I’ve got titles to sell” – and has already written the ending. “I’m in Jackson Brodie mode, so I may as well do it now as opposed to putting it on the shelf of ideas I have.” Next on the shelf is her “Big Book”, a return to York and to the second world war, called The Line of Sight.
As she has got older, she enjoys writing more. But “it has really bad moments. A lot of the time it is completely tedious, but one good sentence can pay off for many, many years of tedium or hell.” When the novel is completed, “it’s done for ever. It’s in the world”, and she’s “happy just to lie there and watch Netflix all night long, because I need to just empty all that stuff out.”
She has always felt “a certain confidence” in her writing, “but you are not allowed in this country to be confident; women aren’t allowed to say ‘I think this is really good’.” While readers and critics were dazzled by the formal ingenuity of Life After Life, it is its sequel, A God in Ruins, that she believes to be her best work, “and will remain so”, she says emphatically. “That’s the book I always wanted to write. People are always telling me how they cried at the end.” But she has never made the Booker shortlist (perhaps because she is perceived to be a “genre writer” – “there’s no hope for me”), and won’t be on any future longlists as she has asked her publishers not to submit her work for prizes any more: “As long as I meet my own standards, that’s enough.”
“To have moved someone to tears and to move to them to laughter is great,” she says. “I live to entertain, I don’t live to teach or to preach or to be political. If I have a job to do it is to entertain myself first and then everyone else afterwards.” Big Sky by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday. As 2022 begins, there’s a new year resolution we’d like you to consider. We’d like to invite you to join more than 1.5 million people in 180 countries who have taken the step to support us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.In 2021, this support sustained investigative work into offshore wealth, spyware, sexual harassment, labour abuse, environmental plunder, crony coronavirus contracts, and Big Tech. It enabled diligent, fact-checked, authoritative journalism to thrive in an era of falsehood, sensation, hype and breathtaking misinformation and misconception.
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Like John Banville, who writes literary novels slowly and his Benjamin Black thrillers quickly, Kate Atkinson has a twin-track publishing career. The prize-winning author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Life After Life and most recently Transcription also publishes crime novels featuring Jackson Brodie, a retired copper who works as a private investigator. Big Sky is the fifth of these. It reintroduces several characters from previous outings: here’s young Reggie Chase from book three, for instance, all grown up and working as a police officer; here, too, is the slinky Russian honeytrap Tatiana; and here’s Brodie’s glum, on-again-but-mostly-off-again girlfriend Julia. But the book works fine on its own, as all good crime series novels must.
It takes its time to get going. There’s an excellently sinister opening – in a sort of pre-credits sequence, eastern European sisters Nadja and Katja are Skyping with the representative of an employment agency called Anderson Price Associates, who is arranging to fly them to the UK to take up jobs in high-end hospitality. Noo, the reader yelps, don’t do it. Sure enough, with the Skype connection severed, we learn that the swanky offices they can see behind “Mr Price” are a stage set. The opening chapters are full of little feints and teases. There’s the leisurely way in which the fates of Nadja and Katja are left undiscussed. Brodie sees a young girl climbing into a strange car and being driven off. There’s a near-drowning.
A trophy wife gets the feeling that someone is following her. And yet, at least to start with, we’re firmly in the ordinary world of suburban golf bores, seaside attractions in one-horse northern towns and a disaffected private detective, dog and sullen teenage son in tow. In a way, this is one of the novel’s most serious jokes. Atkinson roasts the old chestnut of “the banality of evil” by introducing us to evildoers in the round: their small vanities, their pragmatism, their affection for their families and loyalty to their friends. The book begins a couple of miles north of Whitby. Brodie is living in modest rural digs, sharing custody of his son Nathan with Julia, getting on with his small life. We are introduced to a trio of golfing mates. Vince is a telecoms area manager in late middle age going through a divorce; Tommy is a prosperous bouncer turned haulier; Andy runs a failing B&B with his formidable wife Rhoda. The narrative circles in its own time around the relationships and disappointments of its characters, but connections start to proliferate and secrets start to emerge.
Does Jackson Brodie know he’s in a detectiv. Does Jackson Brodie know he’s in a detective novel? He at least half suspects it, and as in Transcription Atkinson can’t resist a little salt-sprinkle of postmodernism. Brodie is always talking, a la Poirot, about his “little grey cells” (not that they do all that much work – his role in the plot is negligible and almost entirely accidental). One of his mantras, “If you get enough coincidences they add up to a probability”, is nicked from an old episode of Law & Order. A villain’s threat is “like a detective novel”; something else “sounded like the title of an Agatha Christie novel”; someone else is “like a character accusing someone in a melodrama”; Brodie is told “You should write crime novels” and so on.
There’s considerable vamping about with tone in Big Sky. The novel enjoys the absurdities of its genre – winks at them, even – yet manages at the same time to do a lot of work with the melancholy and absurdity of ordinary life. This, in a way, is a book of aftermaths – the aftermath of Brodie’s career; the aftermath of the clearing up of a historical paedophile ring – and it’s rich with the peeled-paint plangency of a seaside town that they forgot to shut down. Jackson is a mournful and defeated character. His career consists of low-grade snooping; his love life, such as it is, is a catalogue of regrets and small humiliations.
At one point he ruminates on his dead brother, dead sister and dead mother: “He wished that he could just once hear his sister play a solo again. Or help his sister pin up the hem on a dress she’d made. Or have a goodnight peck on the cheek from his mother – the most intimacy she could manage. They were not a family who touched. Too late now. Jackson sighed. He was growing weary of himself.” Yet this is the same Jackson who, in more prankish mode, is seen talking down a would-be suicide using unattributed country and western lyrics.
It’s a credit to Atkinson’s dexterity that despite these clashes of tone and register the novel manages to hang together, even though the subject matter – child sexual abuse, human trafficking – and the essentially comic mechanisms of the plot, its coincidences and confrontations, seem to be at odds. How seriously are we to take it all? Atkinson artfully avoids supplying or implying an answer. "Atkinson has been better at balancing personal and professional story lines, and the presence of a figure from Jackson's past, now a cop involved in an inquiry looking at establishment figures, won't resonate for first-timers. Series fans will best appreciate this outing."
"Kate Atkinson is a master at absolutely every aspect of the novel—character and plot and voice and language and themes and humor and dialogue and on and on. I love everything about Big Sky, a giant mosaic of people and stories that fit perfectly together in a complex, beautiful pattern, offering tremendous reading pleasure on every single page." - Chris Pavone, authoh.
This is Atkinson’s fifth Jackson Brodie novel, but fans know that the phrase “Jackson Brodie novel” is somewhat deceptive. Yes, he is the hero in that he is a private investigator—former cop, military veteran—who solves usually mysteries. But he is not so much the central character as the grumpy, anxious, largehearted gravitational field that attracts a motley assortment of lost souls and love interests. In this latest outing, Jackson is a half-duty parent to his teenage son while the boy’s mother, an actor, finishes her run on a detective series. Vince Ives is a more-or-less successful middle-class husband and father until his wife leaves him, his boss makes him redundant, and he becomes a murder suspect. Crystal Holroyd—not her real name—has built a brilliant new life for herself, but someone from her past is threatening her daughter. Both Vince and Crystal seek help from Jackson, with varying results. Meanwhile, Jackson’s protégée, Reggie Chase, has risen through the ranks in the police force and is taking a fresh look at an old case. That these stories intertwine is a given. “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen” is one of Jackson’s maxims; it could also serve as an ironic epigram for Atkinson’s approach to the mystery genre. A small cast of characters collides and careens in a manner that straddles Greek tragedy and screwball comedy. The humor is sly rather than slapstick, and Atkinson is keenly interested in inner lives and motivations.⁵ There are villains, certainly—human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children figure prominently here—but even the sympathetic characters are complicated and compromised. Jackson has a strong moral code, but his behavior is often less than ethical. The same is true of Vince, Crystal, and Reggie. The deaths and disappearances that Jackson investigates change with every book, but the human heart remains the central mystery.Jackson Brodie is back, and he’s still kind of a dreamboat.
The handsome investigator whom Kate Atkinson introduced in 2004’s “Case Histories,” played by Jason Isaacs on the BBC series, hasn’t appeared in a new book since 2011. If you haven’t met him yet, this is a fine place to start.
In “Big Sky,” the former military man and police inspector has moved to the U.K.’s northeastern coast, where he’s set up his small agency. It’s an unassuming venture: “He tried not to use the term ‘private detective’ — it had too many glamorous connotations or sleazy, depending on how you looked at it. Too Chandleresque. It raised people’s expectations,” Atkinson writes.Is she waving off critics? Although this book is definitely a mystery, its structure is unusual. Jackson is barely working. Instead, he’s focused on intermittently parenting his 13-year-old son, Nathan; hoping his ex, the actress Julia, will rekindle their romance; and musing on the passage of time.
The intertwined threads awaiting Jackson’s attention involve a sex-trafficking ring and an old sexual abuse scandal that echoes the true story of Jimmy Savile, the beloved British entertainer who was revealed, after his death, to have been a rampant sexual predator. The first crime doesn’t appear for more than 100 pages. There will, eventually, be blood. But the richness of this novel comes in spending time with the kaleidoscope of characters who spin together in the whirlwind ending.
Chief among these is Crystal, the perfectly groomed trophy wife of a successful local businessman. Sure, she named their daughter Candy and dresses her in a parade of Disney princess outfits; yes, she feeds her husband exactly the traditional food he wants. But she’s privately eating healthy and learning school lessons from Harry, her teenage stepson.Harry, unlike his father, is a sensitive soul. He may take after his mother, who died when she tumbled off a cliff. He reads a lot and works backstage during the summer at a variety theater with a third-rate show. He gets to know a cross-dressing singer, who is kind, and the headliner, a comedian who’s even more unpleasant offstage than on. Harry also tries to tell jokes, but he’s such a hopeless nerd that they always involve cheese.
What connection do they have to young policewomen Ronnie and Reggie? Very little. But they too orbit this universe, asking the same routine questions about the old case so many times that they become a refrain the reader can recite. More than once, the duo wind up in the middle of the action; these two tiny, novice look-alike cops are underestimated by everyone.
Meanwhile, we follow the descent of soon-to-be-divorced Vince, a hapless everyman with vague connections to Crystal’s husband. As the book progresses, Vince’s life goes from bad to worse. It might be hard to relate to Vince’s choices, but if you’ve ever been the least cool person in a group of friends, you’ll feel his pain.
Atkinson is so skilled at getting inside people’s heads that when she introduces a new character, it’s almost impossible to not feel at least a little sympathy for the person. As terrible as I feel typing this, it even holds true for one of the human traffickers, who conceals his enormous profits from his domineering wife so he can surprise her with retirement in paradise.Where is Jackson in all of this? At times, he seems like he’s serving more as a frame to the story than its driver. Now long retired and removed from his home base of Edinburgh, Scotland, he’s not able to leverage the once helpful former-policeman connections. Readers familiar with Atkinson’s earlier mysteries will recognize Reggie faster than Jackson does, despite the fact that she once saved his life. And when he’s hired by Crystal, he does such a poor job that she refuses to pay him using language I can’t share here. But in fact, Jackson is on it — he’s just not putting himself at the center of it.
Atkinson has returned to Jackson Brodie after a long break during which she published the remarkable “Life After Life” and its sequels and she seems to be having fun with it. Past books in the series have been criticized for leaning too heavily on coincidence, pointing to Jackson’s adage “a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen” as an easy way out. That line appears here so many times that it’s clear the author is not a victim of coincidence but using it to her best advantage.
Jackson appears to be aging basically in real time, like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, whose latest books have included another younger detective. With Ronnie and Reggie, Atkinson has set up that possibility here. And she’s also left a gap in which any number of next books might double back and fill in earlier chronicles of Jackson Brodie.What I’m fairly certain of is, this story will continue, someday. The gangbuster ending flings a pile of spinning plates in the air. They could be picked up in a swath of new directions, including Jackson or not. But I hope he comes back. He’s still the empathetic, flawed, country-music-listening detective we first fell for.
This book has a lot of drastic scene changes, is packed with minor characters and is in no hurry to get where it’s going. But somehow Atkinson never seems to be treading water. There is no stray anything in Big Sky. That’s one big reason Atkinson’s devotees love her. No detail is too small to come home to roost it’s worth rereading the beginning once you’ve finished this novel just to see how well the author has manipulated you. Atkinson is also adept at weaving the mundane details of her characters’ lives or perhaps her own into the Brodie books as a way of humanizing them, despite the stark malevolence that lurks beneath this workaday surface Atkinson opens Big Sky with one perfect page. It’s a bit of a red herring, but it couldn’t do a better job of throwing the reader off base and commanding instant interest. It’s a prime example of how Atkinson tells a great story, toys with expectations, deceives by omission, blows smoke and also writes like she’s your favorite friend. Thank goodness the long Jackson
There will, eventually, be blood. But the richness of this novel comes in spending time with the kaleidoscope of characters who spin together in the whirlwind ending. Atkinson is so skilled at getting inside people’s heads that when she introduces a new character, it’s almost impossible to not feel at least a little sympathy for the person. As terrible as I feel typing this, it even holds true for one of the human traffickers. Jackson appears to be aging basically in real time. He’s still the empathetic, flawed, country-music-listening detective we first fell for.
Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky, the fifth in her series of literary detective novels featuring ex-soldier, ex-policeman and private detective Jackson Brodie, is, like the others, wonderfully written, irresistibly suspenseful and offhandedly funny, its wildly eventful plot so chock full of coincidence and convenience that, looked at from arm’s length, it seems delightfully silly—yet so attuned to human foibles that it feels utterly genuine. Alternately depressing, inspiring and slyly funny tale ... The unfolding plot snags a dozen main characters in a web of duplicity, human misery, betrayal and murder that Atkinson skillfully relates from multiple points of view. As always in a Kate Atkinson book , whether it’s the Brodie series or her mainstream novels, the pleasures derive from her mastery as a storyteller, her skillful character development and the beauty of her quirky and poetic prose.
Atkinson has never been a straightforward crime writer, and in Big Sky, as in the four previous Brodie novels, she gives the impression of winking at the reader, making us complicit in the recognition of cliches and expectations. Big Sky is laced with Atkinson’s sharp, dry humor, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny, even when the themes are as dark as child abuse and sex trafficking. If Atkinson relies heavily on coincidence, that too is entirely deliberate; 'a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen, is a favorite adage of Brodie’s. These have always been novels about character, and there are enough moments of tenderness between parents and children to balance out the cruelty inflicted on the young. Anyone familiar with Atkinson’s work will know not to look for easy resolutions or happy endings.
Many writers practise literary trickery, or investigate the truism that things aren’t always what they seem, but a big part of Atkinson’s appeal comes from her unbridled delight in sleight of hand. Plot reversals, shifts in point of view, leaps in space and time; echoing and doubling, twists and fakeouts, MacGuffins and red herrings: all are deployed with gleeful energy. It’s tempting to think of Atkinson as a writer of maximalist, conventionally satisfying, carefully plotted fiction that is innovative only in stretching the usual elements of psychological realism to their technical limits. But one of the most exciting things about her books is the way they renege on their own promises. Atkinson’s illusions are performed out in the open: you think you’ve mastered their complexities, but then the chaos of human relations takes over, and people defy their own natures, or the rules of their own storie. Atkinson is good at presenting ordinariness as nothing more than the state that obtains before disaster occurs; every quotidian observation in Big Sky generates suspense. The fact that at any given moment hardly anyone actually knows what’s going on is part of the pleasure of this rangy, loping thriller. Atkinson tells you everything and still takes you by surprise.
Big Sky's large, colorful cast have lots of explaining to do: not just about homicide, it develops, but about other crimes, including child abuse and sex-trafficking. Such grimness is leavened by a text brimming with wit, unpredictable events and vivid characters. From the shocking to the comic to the poignant, Ms. Atkinson does it all with breathtaking panache.
Jackson Brodie know he’s in a detective novel? He at least half suspects it, and as in Transcription Atkinson can’t resist a little salt-sprinkle of postmodernism. There’s considerable vamping about with tone in Big Sky. The novel enjoys the absurdities of its genre – winks at them, even – yet manages at the same time to do a lot of work with the melancholy and absurdity of ordinary life. This, in a way, is a book of aftermaths. It’s a credit to Atkinson’s dexterity that despite clashes of tone and register the novel manages to hang together, even though the subject matter and the essentially comic mechanisms of the plot, its coincidences and confrontations, seem to be at odds. How seriously are we to take it all? Atkinson artfully avoids supplying or implying an answer.
There is...something unremittingly dark at the heart of Big Sky. It bubbles under the surface as Atkinson — once again — gleefully upends crime-fiction convention and spends the first chunk of her book introducing her wide range of characters, old and new. You start to wonder where the crime is Atkinson’s nimble and endearing skill across all her fiction...is to take the determinedly domestic, find the wry, sometimes waspish humour in it, and yet reveal something profoundly humane.⁶ She set up Brodie in Case Histories, his first appearance, as a man who, despite a horribly bruised past, held on to the belief 'that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad'. It’s this moral bedrock that underlies all his misadventures, including Big Sky, in which his enduring preoccupation with lost girls flows into the ghastly case of abuse and sex trafficking that slowly emerges. Yet Atkinson doesn’t forget that crime fans enjoy the 'cheerfully unrealistic' too. Her beloved coincidences abound. And deft misdirection, cheeky literary references and Brodie’s flailing attempts to offer sympathy by quoting country-and-western lyrics are constantly entertaining. You finish Big Sky feeling battered — but thoroughly cheered up.
Big Sky is a curious mixture: a detective novel about the sorry state of the UK, an exasperated celebration of blended family life and a meditation on loss, adversity, damage and repair ... Atkinson is interesting in this novel on the futility of crime: none of the criminals know where to put their loot, let alone how to garner enjoyment from it For this reader and writer more interested in texture and character than plot, the mounting tension in the novel is less appealing than the well-made characters and their histories, diversions and asides. Crystal’s stepson, with his love of all things theatrical, has a gallant, wounded nature at odds with his father’s coarse air In Big Sky you sometimes get the sort of moments great theatre brings where you aren’t just witnessing skilled acting, you feel something empirically true is taking place before you. Despite the novel’s melancholy, Atkinson is adept at showing us sharp moments of pleasure is a writer with the world in her hands.
The kind of book that invites readers to kick off their shoes, put up their feet, and settle into their comfiest reading chair with snacks and beverages close at hand in order to minimize the number of interruptions required to get up for refills. It's that good. Really ... Especially for readers who like the kind of mystery that starts out with seemingly unrelated storylines that gradually, cleverly, ever so slowly and surprisingly begin to intersect ... Reviewers have shied away from giving away much of the plot as it is an extremely complex one involving sinister elements. The focus has been on, as it is here, the stellar writing, the story development, the delicious dialogue, and the characters who walk off the page to sit across from you or on the edge of your bed as you read, nodding approvingly with every turn of the page ... the plot at first might seem to be all over the place, but don't be fooled. The author knows what she's doing, and if you can ignore the annoying overabundance of parenthetical asides, you will find this to be a satisfying, indulgent binge book guaranteed to release a flood of pleasurable endorphins.
Coincidences act as slow-burning fuses throughout the novel ... Atkinson’s layered narrative proceeds elegantly and relentlessly, its intersecting viewpoints gliding over one another in a plot as elaborately sinuous as it is geometrically precise. You could, indeed, draw a map of all the intersections; but you won’t, because this story holds you too close ... Atkinson’s deadpan wit is sharp as ever here, as is her depiction of England, from its seaside esplanades to its human cesspits. Most remarkable of all, however, is her enduring ability to place us inside the consciousness of each character as she conducts us through their overlapping lives. Readers new to Atkinson, always to be envied, will be lured back by Big Sky to her earlier novels.
In the book’s first hundred pages or so, Atkinson develops her characters at a leisurely pace, making them so interesting we almost forget this is supposed to be a mystery. Then a body turns up in a garden, head bashed in, and it’s off to the races, the plot careening at such a breakneck pace it’s hard to turn the pages fast enough ... Atkinson is not only skillful but playful with the elements of mystery writing. She ends one chapter with a literal cliff-hanger ... As in all the Brodie books, Atkinson marries crime fiction with the comic novel genre, wedding the grim and the humane, all powered by her witty and exuberant prose. Brodie might not want to seem too Chandleresque, but Raymond Chandler once wrote that the best mysteries are those you’d read even if the last chapter were torn out — because the writing and the characters are so compelling. Big Sky is one of those.
As always, Ms. Atkinson skillfully weaves together...multiple narratives, among others, in a complex tapestry of a murder mystery that will test what each character thinks they believe about themselves and everything they hold true. Fans will enjoy the callbacks to prior books in the series, but can be read as a standalone novel—even though, personally, I think everyone should at least read When Will There Be Good News?, the novel that first introduced Reggie to the world. It’s a treat to see how Reggie has grown up and how Jackson is dealing with aging as well as with parenting two children separated by a decade in age. All the moral dilemmas are treated with sensitivity and aplomb, and the plotlines wrap up with a naturalness that hearkens back to the best of Ms. Atkinson’s oeuvre. The nine years were well worth the wait; hopefully, it won’t be another nine until we see more of Jackson and my beloved Reggie in print again.
Both an entertaining caper fueled by coincidence and a sordid story of human trafficking ... After the main characters are all up and running, their personalities in high gear, events become gratifyingly sinister: Abduction, murder, enslavement, and the reverberation of past iniquities mark the plot, one which is spun out from the viewpoints of half a dozen characters. Their minds are constantly abuzz with unspoken, sardonic or self-deprecating commentary, a feature that, along with Atkinson’s quiet whimsy and mischievous liberality with coincidence, gives this writer’s work its unique comic flair and lightens the dark unraveling of monstrous crimes ... The plot of Big Sky is something of a ramshackle affair, but it hardly matters. Kate Atkinson is a wayward writer, her books are, in the end, uncategorizable. Her Jackson Brodie novels are both more than crime novels — and less. They are sui generis and they, like this one, are enormously enjoyable.
Policeman–turned–PI Jackson Brodie has been reduced to chasing cheating husbands and shuttling his teenage son and elderly dog around town ... This long-anticipated reappearance of fan-favorite Brodie following 2011’s Started Early, Took My Dog is ultimately disappointing ... The minimal action occurs toward the end, and the denouement feels contrived. Brodie has seen better days.
Ms Atkinson has been on the trail of lost children particularly girls since her very first novel. In the depiction of this despicable business, as in all Ms Atkinson’s fiction, she supplies gruesome discoveries and a strong helping of violence, all nevertheless relayed with a deft and witty touch Big Sky has all the sizzle of a British fry-up; Ms Atkinson’s evocation of the beauty and desolation of faded seaside resorts is unerring. As in the other Brodie novels, several stories are woven into a seamless plot, with the help of credible-seeming twists of fate. And there is just enough unfinished business to leave readers impatient for his next outing.
Using her signature narrative style, Atkinson not only tells the story from multiple points of view, but also moves back and forth in time, letting us see new sides of an incident from several characters’ perspectives. This technique feeds a rich kind of dramatic irony, as we know marginally more than the people in any one scene do, but never quite enough. As the lives of several Yorkshire couples slowly swirl out of control, with the ripples of dysfunction, buried abuse, and tightly held secrets gradually drawing Jackson into their red tide, we marvel at Atkinson’s rare ability to create in a relatively few but stunningly deft brushstrokes at least a half-dozen characters with the depth and complexity to own their own novel. Another dazzler from a writer whose talents know no bounds.
The crimes at the centre of Big Sky are of a particularly nasty, and rather topical, variety: a historical investigation into a paedophile ring of elite, establishment figures is reopened, while an active company traffic young women into the UK. Yet while Big Sky never makes light of such depravity, it also makes for an exuberant, entertaining read ... Atkinson’s work is always playful, and there’s a brisk, jaunty tone to Big Sky and much dry observational comedy.⁷ Her characters have their own, distinctly British gallows humour, and there are blackly comic asides in even the most heinous of situations. There’s a lot going on in Big Sky, and it can get bogged down in allusions to previous stories, especially from Brodie’s past. These half unpotted case histories feel unnecessary for existing fans, cumbersome for new readers. Atkinson is on surer territory with new characters – she has an almost cruel ability to capture a person in a line or two. But you also come to really know and love or loathe many of them. While this focus on character means Big Sky can lack the relentless propulsion associated with crime writing, getting to know a plethora of her tenacious, memorable characters seems like a fair trade, especially as they gently offer hope that, in the end, good will out.
A small cast of characters collides and careens in a manner that straddles Greek tragedy and screwball comedy. The humor is sly rather than slapstick, and Atkinson is keenly interested in inner lives and motivations. There are villains, certainly—human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children figure prominently here—but even the sympathetic characters are complicated and compromised. Jackson has a strong moral code, but his behavior is often less than ethical. The same is true of Vince, Crystal, and Reggie. The deaths and disappearances that Jackson investigates change with every book, but the human heart remains the central mystery. The welcome return of an existential detective.
Atkinson has been better at balancing personal and professional story lines, and the presence of a figure from Jackson’s past, now a cop involved in an inquiry looking at establishment figures, won’t resonate for first-timers. Series fans will best appreciate this outing. There’s a spoiled little girl in “Big Sky,” the long-overdue fifth book in Kate Atkinson’s irresistible Jackson Brodie private eye series, who has a closet full of princess costumes. Her mother wants her to grow up in a fairy tale, the kind where toy unicorns belong. Atkinson sneaks this into “Big Sky” so casually that it doesn’t resonate until exactly when the author wants it to. That’s her M.O. in all the Brodie books, but it’s never worked better than it does in “Big Sky.”
That’s because Brodie’s past is by now very complicated. So Atkinson has a lot of bread crumbs to toss around. And her new book’s plot is crowded in its own right, which means that “Big Sky” — the first Brodie novel since 2010 — begins as a leisurely panorama of new characters, favorite old ones like Reggie Chase, the teenage nanny and amateur sleuth from “When Will There Be Good News?,” now a full-fledged detective, vividly contrasting new settings a bawdy nightclub, a snobbish golf course and, finally, Brodie himself.
By some strange alchemy, Jackson Brodie is both the heart of these books and the least interesting character in them. Atkinson upstages him all the time. In “Big Sky,” he’s working a routine infidelity case on behalf of a suspicious wife whose husband, it is discovered, has “indulged in bridled passion” with his girlfriend when he stumbles onto something awful enough to subvert that little girl’s princess/unicorn fantasyland.But he doesn’t do it alone and there’s a lot else going on here, all of it rendered with Atkinson’s vastly enjoyable nonchalance. When Brodie has to take care of Dido, the dog of Brodie’s ex-partner Julia, with whom he shares a son it’s complicated and Dido growls at some rowdy teenage boys, Brodie asks her: “Really? You and what wolf?” Reggie and her female teammate are so tough that they earn the nickname “the Kray Twins,” after two of Britain’s most notorious killers. As Atkinson recently told The Guardian, “Big Sky” began as a screenplay with a female lead. Atkinson has said that she loves Netflix, attributes the same feeling to Brodie, and has had a previous Brodie book, “Case Histories,” adapted for PBS. It all shows. This book has a lot of drastic scene changes, is packed with minor characters and is in no hurry to get where it’s going.
But somehow Atkinson never seems to be treading water. As she introduces a crew of old buddies who gravitate toward the posh Belvedere Golf Club, she opens up a whole world of awful marriages, alarming betrayals and, in the case of the richest member of the group, a first wife who accidentally fell off a cliff before a second, trophy wife could be acquired. The other women in this circle tend to get very quiet when thinking about this.
Then there’s the early scene that establishes the plot: a scammy “businessman” who cons foreign women into coming to Yorkshire, where the book is set. We don’t know who he is or what he has to do with the rest of the story, but we know that human trafficking lies somewhere beneath the polite socializing with which Atkinson pairs it. It’s just a matter of time before she catalyzes Brodie, Reggie and the others to start tearing the scab off this thing.There is no stray anything in “Big Sky.” That’s one big reason Atkinson’s devotees love her. No detail is too small to come home to roost; as with Tana French, with whom she is justly compared for writing mayhem-centric books that should not be regarded as genre fiction, it’s worth rereading the beginning once you’ve finished this novel just to see how well the author has manipulated you. Atkinson is also adept at weaving the mundane details of her characters’ lives or perhaps her own into the Brodie books as a way of humanizing them, despite the stark malevolence that lurks beneath this workaday surface.
Brodie has been assailed for his unenlightened attitudes about women. Let’s just say he’s a retired cop who’s maybe a little old school, maybe a lot. Atkinson seems so determined to counter that criticism that in this book she puts Harvey Weinstein’s name on a list right between Trotsky’s and Hitler’s. She also pits Brodie against pedophiles and sexual predators in a story that’s all too credible today. But she’s not about to rebuild him from the ground up; when stuck minding the teenage son he barely knows, he’s a lousy parent and not sorry about it. (To be fair, he does get better: Once he learns to use the word “wankers,” he has an easier time communicating with his son.) Brodie has been Atkinson’s most popular character for good reason. He was interestingly broken, so she hasn’t fixed him.
Atkinson opens “Big Sky” with one perfect page. It’s a bit of a red herring, but it couldn’t do a better job of throwing the reader off base and commanding instant interest. It’s a short chapter called “Eloping,” and if you have a way of looking at it, do. It’s a prime example of how Atkinson tells a great story, toys with expectations, deceives by omission, blows smoke and also writes like she’s your favorite friend. Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over.