Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn
Crime fiction can be stretched and pulled in many directions, toward the literary, toward the pulp. Kate Atkinson delivered CASE HISTORIES a few years back, a reluctant crime novel that introduced Jackson Brodie the thinking PI. One of the many pleasures of the book was the author’s fresh view of the baroque world of good and evil; Atkinson has a dangerous sense of humor, one that leaves the reader not quite sure which side of the great divide she stands on.
ONE GOOD TURN takes the parable of the Good Samaritan on a fast tour of Scotland where criminal enterprises are a cottage industry. Jackson Brodie is back from France, a tourist in Edinborough. His girlfriend, Julia, is appearing in a stage production, one of those fringe theater undertakings that friends and loved ones are required to attend. Jackson senses a certain detachment in Julia, an insight akin to noticing a tornado has touched down in your garden. If this were the good old days and ONE GOOD TURN was at the local drivein, patrons would be standing on the roofs of their cars begging Jackson to wake up.
Jackson’s state of mind is crucial to this narrative because we spend vast amounts of time in Jackson’s head fretting about Julia. There are other things to occupy him: mysterious Russian maids, a dead body that vanishes in a tidal pool, a deranged killer bumping off witnesses to a road rage incident, a feckless writer, and the utterly brilliant housewife, Gloria.
ONE GOOD TURN never quite finds a unity of purpose with social satire competing for the lead followed by a crime story wrapped in the doom of failed relationships. The top of Jackson’s emotional range is confusion. He’s a man lost in an array of choices presented by financial independence but isolation is his default position.
There are excellent character studies to be found here although Martin Canning, himself a crime writer, is too much of a caricature, victimized so often and so freely that his presence on the page wears thin. Events offstage embroil point of view characters in criminal conspiracies. Thus the innocent Gloria meets the wily Tatiana while Gloria’s husband, Graham, beeps toward oblivion in ICU. Graham’s misdeeds have set off much of the story’s action catalogued by the author through witty observation.
Kate Atkinson loves misdirection, ensnaring the reader in set pieces that seemed disjointed but have a purpose. Great swathes of this novel are fun to read, others are frustrating. ONE GOOD TURN is to crime novels what Doris Day movies were to comedy if Doris stepped out of character to launder money rather than iron shirts.