Started Early, Took My Dog

Not everyone likes Kate Atkinson's books, but apparently everyone likes her character Jackson Brodie. This is the fourth book in which the former policeman appears, still searching for lost girls or lost childhoods, which he's been doing ever since his own sister was abducted and murdered when he was a child. In Started Early, Took My Dog, Brodie is older and wandering. He's starting to hear the voice of his ex (not quite wife) and he can't help getting muddled into the lives of other people even while he muddles his own.

Still, Brodie can be forgiven (as so many have forgiven him before) because he's returned to his old stomping grounds, chasing the ghostly childhood of a young woman now in Australia. She's eager to discover her origins which are strangely murky. While he's trying to rescue her childhood, Brodie also manages to rescue a dog from maltreatment, gets himself entangled in the lives of an actress suffering from dementia and an overweight, lonely former policewoman who is on the run with another lost child. There's a lot of time shift and character shift, and a lot of names to keep straight, but the book reads right along. Atkinson likes to throw out little tid-bits and then move on, which can be good in a mystery, but can be a bit maddening as well.

Brodie is a little tangential to the story even if he's there for the great denouement, on a train platform, no less: a classic ending for characters who don't know if they're coming or going. This book is all about missed connections. Brodie is almost always playing catch-up. He's always a step behind or ahead and he doesn't always know it. He's even running parallel to a man with his own name in reverse, B. Jackson. Started Early is about missing siblings, lost kids, lost women, and relationships that have crossed and recrossed themselves. Some things get tidied up in a neat little package and other things are left wide open. It's not clear how the policewoman's story will end, and Jackson's phone rings with a call from the past just as the book ends. I suppose there's a good chance there'll be another Jackson Brodie book sooner or later. I hope he's still interesting.

I just enjoy Atkinson's writing. She has some great throw away lines, for example she writes about a characater's "(misplaced) faith in exclamation points," which I can relate to. She nicely, if inaccurately sets up Started Early, Took my Dog with: Later, looking back, Jackson could see that his failed appointment with Linda Pallister was the moment when it all started to go wrong. If she had kept their rendezvous he would have spent a constructive hour or so, would have felt satisfied and purposeful, and might quite possibly have undergone another evening in a hotel, eating a room-service meal and watching a bad pay-for-view movie, instead of spending a restless time, blacking out for large portions of it, and having meaningless, promiscuous sex.

Well, it's lucky for us that Linda Pallister scarpered because it gave us this story.

If you haven't read any Kate Atkinson, read One Good Turn. Everyone raves on about Case Histories, but I really didn't like the obviousness of that one and I loved her second Jackson Brodie book, One Good Turn.

***the art work version of the book is a card from my 10 year old who loved the title, sight unseen, and made me a birthday card version.***