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After an absence of some nine years, Jackson Brodie makes his return, this time to North Yorkshire, near the sea, where he now lives, mostly alone. At the moment, his former partner, Julia, is shooting the final episodes of a television police drama in which she has an on-going role and so Jackson has taken on the part-time care of Julia's son Nathan. (He's Brodie's son as well, but Brodie was kept in the dark about that for the first three years of Nathan's life) and Julia's elderly Labrador, Dido. As Jackson's cut back on his detective career and now spends his time doing quiet surveillance, skip-tracing, and collecting divorce evidence, he is well able to look after Nathan, now in his early teens and sinking into teen-age contempt for the older generation. He cannot, however, help contrasting his own life at age thirteen with his son's, though he certainly doesn't wish the tragedies of his past on the boy.
Brodie may be living in a bit of a backwater, but that does not mean that crime has given it a miss. The spectre of the real-life Yorkshireman Jimmy Savile, celebrity and sexual abuser of countless women and children, broods over the scene. Two fictional local entrepreneurs, Bassani, an ice cream purveyor, and Carmody, owner of seafront arcades, have been convicted similar abuses and their activities cling to these two irresistible childhood attractions like a bad smell, stealing their innocence. As we will learn, other local worthies are involved in sex trafficking, importing young women from abroad for servitude in seedy brothels, while the authorities and even their wives remain in ignorance of where the money is coming from.
The police are still interested in uncovering anyone who may have been involved with Bassani and Carmody, and the investigation brings Reggie Chase into the story. The former fifteen-year-old nanny who saved Jackson's life in the third Brodie book, WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? has now become a police detective and with her partner is interviewing those who might have some association with the pair.
If this is your first encounter with Jackson Brodie, let me reassure you that BIG SKY stands firmly on its own. There is considerable reminiscence along the way, but Atkinson is always careful to explain what needs explaining and to do it, as she does everything, with style. But if you are expecting a conventional approach to plot and narrative arc, you will be disappointed. Atkinson is a brilliant stylist and particularly adept at making time and sequence obey her will. An example: the book opens with what can only be called a prologue, entitled "Eloping." It is a sort of joke, and the punchline, so to speak, only arrives more than three hundred pages later. The very best detective fiction demands the reader stay alert and try to figure out the answer to any questions left open. That's part of the fun, isn't it?
The subject matter may be grim, but the book is not. It is often very funny and frequently purely delightful. Brodie is a character that evokes great affection in the reader, despite his shortcomings. He is, after all, a good man in a world in which these appear increasingly in short supply. He saves a kid from drowning, talks a man out of possibly killing himself, and does all he can to find and save a child from a possible kidnapper. And more. Much more. But despite all this, he disappears for large stretches of the novel, while other characters take over. He is not Wonder Detective, but an ordinary mortal after all.
In an interview with Lisa Allardice in The Guardian, Atkinson describes him: "He does have a sheepdog instinct. 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."
As I came to the end of BIG SKY, I began to worry that it was indeed Brodie's swan song. In a series of short chapters, many of which have as titles allusions to American popular culture (which may explain the book's enigmatic title), Atkinson tells us precisely what happens next and she dispenses justice as we would have it dispensed and not as it too frequently issues from courts of law. There was a finality about it all that made me concerned. But in that same Guardian interview, Atkinson says that she is working on another Brodie, this one to be "a very funny book: an Agatha Christie homage." Since she says she's already written the ending, let's hope it appears very soon. Atkinson says the current world is "a darker place and it is an angrier place and it is a more bitter place" than it was when Brodie first appeared. And it is precisely for that reason that we need Jackson Brodie and the brilliant writer who created him to give us reasons to hope despite all appearances.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, June 2019
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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