Women and children first…

I’ve been on a Kate Atkinson binge. This is the result of investing in a rowing machine. I can only row for the necessary 25-30 minutes while listening to crime novels. Enter

Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. I’m now on the fifth book, Big Sky – fortunately there is a sixth, so my exercise regime is safe for a while. Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, and, eventually, ex-millionaire (due to no fault of his own), is haunted by his family’s past, particularly the murder of his sister. ‘Lost girls’ are a motif right through the Brodie books – the casual, brutal violence that occurs routinely to women and children haunts all the novels as does a real sense of the changes in the social and political landscape of Britain. Brodie, a veteran of the Gulf War, grew up in poverty in Yorkshire – he’s in his early fifties by the fifth book – and is acutely conscious of the differences between his own childhood and that of his two children. This background of fractured domesticity grounds the character and Brodie’s cranky accounting of the way he was brought up as opposed to the expectations of his son and daughter are funny and familiar.

But it’s Atkinson’s writing that drives the series. The beginning of Case Histories, the first Brodie novel, introduces the reader to three separate crimes with no hint of a private investigator. I puzzled through this as I rowed. Where was Jackson Brodie? When he arrived on the scene, I nearly missed him. This was in the early days of the rowing machine, before I’d settled into a rhythm of stroking and before I’d settled into Atkinson’s plotting style.

I love Atkinson’s mix of dark content, sly digs at contemporary life and the literary references she sprinkles through the work. Jackson Brodie’s on-going relationship with the warm, dramatic and self-sufficient actor, Julia, complete with her own tragic past, provides a consistent counterpoint to the less careful and tender gender relationships throughout the novels. There’s a lovely wistfulness when Brodie contemplates his failures with Julia.

I hurtled through the first two books – row, row, row, your boat! – but it was the third book that stopped me in my tracks. If I’d struck the opening on a treadmill, I’d have fallen off. One of the reasons I hate treadmills. Strapped securely into my rowing machine, I missed a couple of strokes, open-mouthed, but didn’t drown. Yeah, sure, I get that there’s a fair bit of coincidence in the first half of the book which piles up events like a – well, like a train wreck. But, so what? There’s Reggie, the heart-breakingly resilient scrapper, fending for herself after the death of her mum. There’s Dr. Joanna Hunter as resolute as a character from Greek tragedy. There’s a married Louise Monroe who we’ve met before in Edinburgh in One Good Turn when Brodie, bankrolling a lack-lustre Fringe production for his girlfriend, Julia, unexpectedly finds himself witnessing real, rather than theatrical, violence.

If you listen to the books as I have, lickety-spit, you’ll hear the repetition – Brodie’s background is, necessarily, described in each novel as are his theories of life and marriage. But there’s a comfort in this – in old friendships there’s a similar recovering of ground. The theme of the ‘lost girls’ is equally repeated – but there’s no let up in violent acts against women and children either. And Atkinson’s writing remains as sparky and prickly as ever. She’s also – and this is interesting in the genre – unafraid to leave some plot-lines unresolved. Why is Courtney never reported as a missing child and what  is the significance of her Africa-shaped birthmark? Speculation abounds on the ‘net!

I took the title of this review from three principals of living that nerdy Harry’s shady businessman father allegedly operates by: ‘Don’t kick a man when he’s down. Women and children first. Don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing.’ In Atkinson’s fiction women and children are the first to be pushed off society’s lifeboats. The first to drown.

I needed a break from this, so I took Claire Keegan’s short story So Late in the Day, published in the New Yorker, and released last year as a stand-alone hard cover by Faber & Faber, on my most recent train ride. It wasn’t exactly a break. It was more of a continuation of the theme, although the violence was more emotional. This is a small gem of a story told in limited third person from the point of view of Cathal, a character we are inclined to empathise with from the first. Who hasn’t closed a file without saving it? How much worse that it’s a budget! Cathal’s encounters with his fellow-workers are brief. There’s a feeling, though, that something is not being said – that there’s some unnatural significance about this particular day. Cathal imagines, for example, that his regular bus won’t turn up, although it does. He sits next to another passenger, somewhat inclined to talk, to his discomfort. But then she takes out Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors and begins to read.
Of course, the title is significant. In a story this compressed, every word earns its keep. But Cathal abuses by omission and is both perpetuator and, in a way, victim. As Cathal’s lonely evening progresses, we learn in tight, focused prose the background to this particular night, which may have been an occasion of celebration had it not been for the joylessness of the emotionally stunted and miserly Cathal. Sabine, the woman he meets and proposes to is, in contrast, generous and is, in response treated with generosity – but not by Cathal. He resents the dirty dishes that accompany her nurturing meals, he parts reluctantly with 6 euros for fresh cherries so she can bake a clafoutis and he is overwhelmed by the objects she moves into his house. His emotional stupidity is inherited, of course. There’s a telling flashback at how his mother was treated and how casual brutality disguised as practical jokes was normalised in his family. But Cathal’s tragedy is that he can’t learn from this.

And that saddened as much as the crimes against women and children depicted by Atkinson in her Jackson Brodie series. Cathal believes – without irony – that the breakdown of his relationship with Sabine is because  ‘… she would not listen , and wanted to do a good half of thing her way.’ Even when he sees his own ugliness reflected in Sabine’s gaze, he remains obdurate – there is nothing wrong with him. Keegan’s minimalist dissection of the gender divide is not specific to Ireland, of course, although Cathal’s flashback feels as specific to a time and place as Jackson Brodie’s impoverished childhood – but that I suspect is naivety – or wishful thinking – on my part.

Sabine, despite, presumably, annoyance at having given up a lease on a flat in Rathgar, escapes a mean marriage with Cathal. She simply walks away. But, of course, that begs the question as to why we have to keep walking away.

Back to the rowing machine…