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Loading... Started Early, Took My Dog (2010)by Kate Atkinson
I am a big fan of Kate Atkinson and this latest book in the Jackson Brodie series did not disappoint. I read that there will be a TV series based on the character. While I am likely to check it out, I hope I am not disappointed when/if the TV characters do not match the images I have formed when reading the books. Case in point -- the Swedish language film versions (with English subtitles) of Henning Mankell's novels featuring Wallender are much better than the English versions -- the Swedish actor fit the image I had much more so than Kenneth Branaugh. (  ) Jcambridge | May 15, 2013 |  For me this, the latest chapter in Kate Atkinson's of Jackson Brodie books combines the best of the previous three novels, the darkness of 'Case Histories', the humour of 'One Good turn' and the complex plotting of 'When will there be Good News' As usual Atkinson deftly weaves the inter twining skeins of characters and their stories but this one really plays with your mind. “For example, there's not only Jackson Brodie on the case but (unknown to him) another private detective with the suspiciously similar name of Brian Jackson. Their investigations run on parallel tracks. Brodie and another former detective bump into each other, each unaware that the other holds the key to the case they are both working on, one of them having kidnapped a child, the other having kidnapped a dog. One of the other characters is an elderly actress called Tilly who's got a job playing the mother of a TV detective in a series somewhat like Heartbeat in which Jackson's former partner Julia also makes a brief appearance." And when Jackson meets Julia, you're not completely sure that he has done, so often does he have imaginary conversations with her in his head. Similarly, Tilly isn't quite sure whether what she's seeing is real or imaginary, because that's what happens when dementia is starting to take hold of an actress's mind in which so much fiction has already metastasised into fact.” Sad to hear that this might be the last Jackson Brodie for a while “Right now, though, says Atkinson, she needs a break from Brodie. "The first book was such a joy to write because I came to it absolutely fresh," she says. "It went so well that I carried on with a second novel, even though I had never intended to. With this one, although it helped that I could take him back to Yorkshire, the plotting was so complicated towards the end that it really made me realise that I needed a break. I know that I've got to come back fresh and I don't feel that at the moment. He's just got to develop offstage, and I need to go off and do something different. So the next time I see him might be in seven years' time, something like that." And then she offers me a tiny Emily Dickinson feather of hope. "But I might change my mind." I hope so as the world is a darker place without a Jackson Brodie book on the go... Quotes from http://living.scotsman.com/books/Kate-Atkinson-tells--.6479789.jp (  ) jan.fleming | May 2, 2013 | Great book! Challenging, interesting and engaging. ( ) aglater | Apr 9, 2013 | This was an audio book for me and at first I thought uh oh! The narrators voice had me drifting a bit but once I got further into the storyline I really enjoyed the book.it was a tragic story but very well written ( ) dragonflydee1 | Apr 3, 2013 | I">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/books/started-early-took-my-dog-by-kate-atkinson-revew.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28 I loved Case Histories, and may go back and re-read that at some point, but I don't think I will be reading any more new Kate Atkinson. Stylistically, this just didn't grab me: short, abrupt sentences, and a lot of switching from one character to another. There was an excess of characters and POVs - normally I like multiple POVs but there were so many that character development suffered. The plot had a decent twist - you're led to think you've solved a mystery which is in fact more complicated than it seems - but overall, I wasn't enthralled. (  ) JennyArch | Apr 3, 2013 |
 “Started Early, Took My Dog” — with a wonderful title from Emily Dickinson, summoning a poem that is as artfully enshrouded as this novel — is... jampacked with echoes, parallels, doppelgängers, sneaky omissions and authorial attempts to mislead. For Ms. Atkinson this is business as usual and often a source of final-act revelatory glee. But it doesn’t coalesce as neatly as this series’s earlier installments have. Kate Atkinson began as a prize-winning literary novelist with Behind the Scenes at the Museum and has, like Michael Dibdin and Ian Rankin before, reinvented herself by using the tropes of detective fiction. She's just as serious and formally interesting as ever, only her novels featuring the ex-policeman Jackson Brodie involve unravelling a couple of murders. With their startling first chapters, appealing cast of familiar characters and meticulous observation of contemporary reality they read like Elizabeth George crossed with Elizabeth Bowen. The fourth, Started Early, Took My Dog is about child abduction, and people who fall through the cracks of modern Britain unless somebody bothers to help. The narrative switches between the 1970s and today with dizzying, at times perplexing, skill. Tracy, its hefty heroine is, like Brodie, ex-police. As a young copper she found a starving, half-frozen child in a flat with his murdered mother. Tracy persists in asking questions, and the child disappears. Atkinson's detective novels capture the strangeness of modern times, and our supposedly atomised lives, with spiky wit, emotional intelligence and consummate cleverness. All her novels are about the choices that we make and the things we leave behind; about parenthood and the anguish that vulnerability brings. Above all, they scrutinise an England too few literary novelists seem to notice, or care about. So much of the narrative is retrospective or interior that there's not much urgency to unfolding events, however highly coloured. And there's a rhetorical whimsy reminiscent of some of Atkinson's earlier books, a devil-may-care gesturing at the novel's own fictionality, which can leave the characters threatening to float free of our trust in them. But we follow their digressive, meandering voices avidly as they circle around their own particular loves and losses, all knitted together with Atkinson's extraordinary combination of wit, plain-speaking, tenderness and control. She's an old hand at paradox now: "All roads lead home," says Julia. "All roads lead away from home," Jackson replies.
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Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective leading a quiet life, makes a snap decision to relieve habitual offender Kelly Cross of a young child he's been dragging around town. Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, detective Jackson Brodie embarks on a different sort of rescue--that of an abused dog.… (more)
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