Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Review by Alison Crane on show august 2009
Kate Atkinson’s ‘Case Histories’ begins with 3 seemingly unrelated and shocking tales of loss – a small child disappears whilst camping with her sister in the family garden, an 18- year old is savagely murdered on her first day of work in her father’s office, and a young mother suffering from post natal depression kills her husband, after his carelessness wakes the baby one time too often.
These opening 3 chapters are compelling and Atkinson’s description of the ties that bind and repel human beings is wholly convincing; we have the boundless love felt by a father for his daughter, a young mother’s incomprehension at how her life turned out and the jostling for position of the 4 Land siblings, who were, Aktinson writes, ‘too close in age to be distinguishable to their mother so that they had evolved into a collective child’.
As the reader suspects, these 3 stories will prove to be interlinked; some years later, a private detective, Jackson Brodie, is called to investigate various ‘cold cases’. The reader is gradually made aware of connections between the lives of the protagonists of the case histories of the novel’s title, and Brodie himself.
So at its heart, the novel is a detective story. The reader, like the characters in the novel who employ Brodie, wants to find out the truth about these shocking crimes.
And for this reason, I feel the novel dips after the engaging opening; it seems to take one hell of a long time to find out the truth; Atkinson is constantly teasing the reader – stopping short of revealing the evidence that Brodie has unpicked. This would be all well and good if the central section of the novel was more compelling and pacey – but this isn’t the case. I didn’t find Brodie completely convincing and was not overly impressed with his detective skills. I realise the satisfaction from a detective story must come from drip feeding us information, but these drips seemed mightily slow. You just can’t help feeling that, in the real world, the detectives who had investigated the cases the first time round, or Brodie, if he’d just put a bit more effort into his job, would have actually solved the crimes more quickly than Atkinson would have us believe.
Towards the end of the novel Brodie finds out the truth of Olivia Land’s disappearance by saying to her mysterious sister Sylvia, who, as a child was prone to fainting fits and has lived in a convent all her adult life, ‘Tell me the truth about what happened to Olivia’. And she does. Just like that. Well, blow me down. What a shame he hadn’t thought of asking that before.

But perhaps I am missing the point. When we do find out the exact whys and wherefores of the crimes it is satisfying and the story ends on the same compelling and shocking note as the opening, although we could do without the final postscript chapter.
I suppose I feel this book is more about plot than the writing. The writing, in itself, was not always enough to hold my attention; at times, the plot and the depiction of the characters involved was. So when the plot dipped, in my eyes, so did the book itself.
To sum up, great opening and ending, slightly lacking in the middle, kind of like a chunky, full of promise, granary bread sandwich, with one slice of processed ham in the middle!