Book Review by Robert Wiersema BIG SKY by Kate Atkinson I must admit, I am a little surprised – and delighted – to be writing this review. e fact that there is a new Jackson Brodie novel from Kate Atkinson in 2019 is a thrilling, and yes, surprising development. And one which, for most readers, will be most welcome. Atkinson rst introduced readers to Brodie, the former-soldier, former-police o cer now making a living as a private investigator, in Case Histories, published in 2004. Readers quickly took to the world-weary, self-critical Brodie, and the book became a bestseller. ree more titles followed and, a er a run of prizes, nominations and bestseller lists, the nal Brodie book, Started Early, TookMy Dog was published in 2010. Atkinson, who had begun her career as a literary writer, returned to that world with the prize-winning one-two punch of Life A er LifeandA God in Ruins, both of which won the Costa Book Award (in 2013 and 2015, respectively), and last year’s lauded Transcription. Jackson Brodie, it seemed, was a thing of the past. Atkinson had moved on. Or had she? is past winter, on the heels of Transcription, a surprise announcement was made to the book trade: Jackson Brodie would be back, in a new novel entitled Big Sky, in the summer of 2019, almost a decade a er his last appearance. I immediately wrote the date in my calendar and, a few weeks before publication, began a thorough read of the Brodie series in preparation. With the Brodie novels, Atkinson has always seemed to delight in breaking the rules one might expect to nd in a mystery or crime story, and Big Sky is no di erent. Brodie is older now, living in a small village in North Yorkshire, occasionally playing father to his teenaged son Nathan, but spending most of his time trying to pay the bills by pursuing adulterers. He is drawn into something when he encounters a distraught man on a cli ’s edge, but he’s not really sure what he’s stumbled into (a fairly common predicament for Brodie). Readers, however, are following several other stories in addition to Brodie’s, including a sex-tra cking ring, a murder by golf club, and a police investigation into a cold case concerning a ring of powerful child abusers (the echoes of the Jimmy Savile case are disturbing and deliberate), headed by a gure out of Brodie’s past. While a lot of the pleasure of Big Sky comes from trying to gure out just how everything connects, and anticipating how the storylines are going to come together (this isn’t a spoiler so much as it is a hallmark of the series and no, you likely won’t be able to imagine just how everything eventually resolves), the real appeal of this book − and the series as a whole − is Brodie himself. Mystery readers are accustomed to the su ering detective, approaching the world as an existential crisis, or the pro cient genius, able to see patterns invisible tomost mortals. Brodie’s self-e acing woundedness, however, his good-humoured cantankerousness, and his clear, if usually ine cient moral code make him not only a genre outlier, but damn near irresistible. e crimes inBig Skyare important (both to the book and as a reminder of the failings of our society) and the novel is well-cra ed and well-paced, but I think that most Brodie fans would be satis ed to just follow him through his days photographing unfaithful spouses, listening to country music on the car radio and thinking about his life and the world. It’s unclear where Jackson Brodie goes from here, or what plans Atkinson might have for him. If Big Sky is a victory lap, it’s a good one, and a good excuse to read, or reread, the whole series. I hope it’s not, though. e world is a better place with Jackson Brodie in it. CSANews | FALL 2019 | 51
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