When Will There Be Good News?

Kate Atkinson was born in York in 1951, where her parents ran a surgical supplies shop, and spent a lot of time reading as a child. She’s even commented that being an only child and learning to enjoy her own company, combined with her love of books, probably helped prepare her well for the solitary life of the writer. Atkinson then attended the University of Dundee, where she studied literature and completed a doctoral thesis on the history of the short story form, and came close to pursuing an academic career. However, it was when she left the university and began writing fiction as an escape from the day-to-day domesticity of child-raising and home-making that the seeds of Atkinson’s true calling appeared — the first story she ever sent off for consideration won a major prize, the Woman’s Own Short Story Competition. As she’s explained in one interview, “That was how I became a writer, really. It was a very slow burn. That was from first putting pen to paper around 1982 to winning that competition in 1986 to a novel being accepted in 1994.” That first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, went on to win the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year in 1995.

Ever since, Kate Atkinson has been an internationally bestselling author. Her next novels, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000), were followed by a collection of short stories called Not the End of the World (2002). It was with this book that Atkinson began to experiment with other narrative points of view. As she explained in one interview, “I had really had enough of the first person by the time I had done with the third book… It was one of the many reasons I wrote a collection of stories at that point, because I wanted to break that voice and get away from it, as well as explore other voices. With stories you can get away with more, and move around, try things on… Once I got the hang of it I found it very liberating, because once you know that character and you want to write them, you just step into their head and think like they think and you write it down, so you can be very fluid and direct.”

Next came Case Histories(2004), a novel that marked Atkinson’s first foray into crime fiction — a label that Atkinson finds to be quite limiting, considering that all of her books have involved mystery or crime elements, and genre classification can be so narrow-minded and elitist. As she explained in one interview, “There are good books, bad books, mediocre books. Why is it necessary to say it’s not any good because it is a crime novel, a romance, or whatever? Jane Austen wrote romance for heaven’s sake. Dickens wrote crime novels.” At the same time, though, Atkinson is a fan of crime fiction herself, so the label doesn’t really bother her — just those people who use it pejoratively. Anyway, the critics and award panels have agreed with Atkinson: Case Histories won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster, and has received worldwide acclaim. As the Guardian reviewer put it, the novel was her “best book yet, an astonishingly complex and moving literary detective story that made me sob but also snort with laughter. It’s the sort of novel you have to start rereading the minute you've finished it.”

Case Histories also marks the first appearance of private detective Jackson Brodie (who has proven to be immensely popular with readers), as he attempts to unravel the truth behind three crime files that have been left stagnant for years. And it is in this story — or rather the multiple storylines that make it up — that Atkinson truly begins to play with using different perspectives to gradually unveil her plot. The New York Times described her style as having a “cinematic cleverness,” where characters are left out when you’d expect them to be present, or the point of view changes abruptly, or small “hiccups in time” can add new layers of meaning. Atkinson would bring back both Jackson Brodie and this narrative style with her novel One Good Turn (2006), which is set during the Edinburgh Festival and once again places Brodie at the heart of multiple intersecting mysteries. “The most fun I’ve had with a novel this year,” Ian Rankin noted.

Atkinson’s latest novel, When Will There be Good News?, is the third to feature Jackson Brodie, although the author says she “never thought of it as a trilogy”: “I just thought of it as three books with the same character moving on and evolving, I think, so that by the end of book three, Jackson is in a very different place to what he was at the beginning of book one.” And while Atkinson is herself moving on with her next project — an unrelated novel featuring two female characters at a murder mystery weekend — she does hope to return to Jackson Brodie one day. But for now she feels that the end of When Will There Be Good News? is a “good place to leave him, because he needs to recover, I think, from all kinds of things that have happened to him.”


From the Hardcover edition.