Thirty years later, Joanna is now Dr Joanna Hunter, a successful GP in Edinburgh with a baby, married to Neil, a local businessman. Joanna hides in the long grass and is saved, but her brother, sister and mother are stabbed to death. Six-year-old Joanna is out walking with sister Jessica, baby brother Joseph and mother Gabrielle when they're suddenly attacked by Andrew Decker, a complete stranger. When Will There Be Good News? opens with an act of shocking violence. By becoming a crime writer, she has - in a way that other "literary" types may wish to note - become a better literary writer than ever: funny, bracingly intelligent and delightfully prickly. Swiping a polished dagger through her Gordian knot, Atkinson began tackling life and death and fate and love with a freedom and fluency unseen in her earlier novels.
The three novels featuring retired police inspector Jackson Brodie - Case Histories, One Good Turn and now When Will There Be Good News? - are delightful evidence of an author unbound. Frankly, it's hard to care when the results are this good. Perhaps she wanted to see if the limitations of genre were paradoxically liberating, or perhaps she just wanted to play literary pranks of a more subtle variety. A Literary writer with a capital L (though one with a nicely disreputable sense of fun), Atkinson unexpectedly turned to crime fiction. Depending on how you chose to look at it, she was either breaking the rules of narrative in the grand tradition of Sterne or writing herself into a meta-fictional corner.Īnd then came the switch. She began twisting her plots into ever more elaborate shapes and playing games with literary in-jokes, varying fonts and pages of blackness. Atkinson's next two novels, Human Croquet and especially Emotionally Weird, covered similar material (with some swipes at academia woven in) but were increasingly formally complex, and not always happily so. Behind the Scenes began, like Tristram Shandy, with the conception of its narrator, and then ploughed through the rest of her life with tremendous energy and subversive humour.
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