High Browse Online

Case Histories
Kate Atkinson
2004, New York: Little, Brown and Company
Call No.: ATK -[MY]

I have not been inspired to do a proper review of an adult’s book since college, but this time I had to skip over all my recent children/young adult fantasy reads to laud Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. I picked up the book on the most superficial premise: the cover caught my eye. That and the publishers have marketed it along with a byline from Stephen King, who reportedly named Case Histories as “The Best Mystery of the Decade”. When had Stephen King become a connoisseur of mysteries? I started on the book, expecting a whodunnit along the likes of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers -British authors give me hope- and three hours later, I was reeling from one of the most powerful stories I had read in a while about the broken and the brittle, which just happens to feature a private investiogator, murder and missing persons.

The book starts with its namesake: case histories. Three short stories set out the setting, the place, the characters, the human emotions vested, and the complicated human relationships leading to three distinct cases: 1) a missing young girl; 2) a random attack and brutal murder of a young office worker and 3) a bloody murder within a household. These three chapters could have stood as short stories each in their own right, given the amount and richness of detail given to each character’ appearances, thoughts and desires, however minor they are in the scheme of things. From the outset, the writing was brilliant, as the reader rediscovers the wonders that is hidden in the adjective and the adverb, long disposed of in modern writing. Atkinson fleets in and out of each character, immersing the reader in the psyche of each of them in such an empathetic manner that you cannot help but feel strongly for them, even without knowing whether they are victims or perpetrators of the crimes. And this is before the story actually begins!

The story moves on quickly to introduce the protagonist, the private investigator, Jackson Brodie, who will now be involved in each of these cases. Brodie is a world-weary man, dreaming of retirement in France even as he struggles to maintain his relationship with his eight-year old daughter after a bitter divorce. Each of the cases begin to unravel slowly, as Brodie interacts with different people connected with the cases. The plot thickens in tandem in each of these three cases, and with every page, the reader asks: how are the cases related? How can you tell what has happened in the past from the list of characters in the present: an asexual woman and her sisters, a harlot and a nun, getting their lives together after their dogmatic mathematician father’s death; an obese lawyer struggling to love his daughter, a young teen who looks like a drug addict and yet loiters the street with a beautifully groomed dog; a young wife wary of her pregnancy and falling in love with a priest? Here, I thought Atkinson is absolutely genius – she moves seamlessly between past and present, in between three different cases, within the minds of different characters, all held together with a strong narrative voice and the sparse appearances of Brodie, and succeeds in not losing the reader along the way! To up the ante, she strings the reader to the solution to each of the cases, dropping the subtlest of hints within her use of words.

In the end, the three cases were retold from the third case first. A character study of one of the victims (and I include the families of the victims in this term, since they too suffered for the crime perpetrated) preceded a recount of the crime as it had happened. It was a good plot device, echoing the beginnings of the book, and thus drawing the reader to a closure. The actual crime ceases to matter after the reader is brought through the minds of the characters – the impact, the psychological aftermath are far, far larger than the act itself. On first account, the “solutions” to the cases come across as unexpected, shocking even, but I realise belatedly that had I been more sensitive to Atkinson’s descriptions of the characters, I would have picked up some of these clues already.

John Hobbes would have been proud: Atkinson had managed to embody every single word in his famous phrase in this book – this is a study of how “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” human existence is. Unlike the end of Sherlock Holmes or Herbert Poirot mysteries, I had not walked away thinking, what brilliant mysteries, what brilliant crimes, how damn intelligent and how on earth did I not see that coming. Instead, I walk away from Case Histories mourning, having cared so deeply for the pains and sorrows of each individual character, whose lives were never the same again for the crimes; I walk away keenly aware of the fraility of human nature, and I walk away with another Atkinson book in hand.

~ Contributed by Dest

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