Big Sky

Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books are a very distinctive kind of fiction. They are told with beautiful language, an innovative structure, wit, compassion and an understanding of moral frailty. They are filled with real people, described in ways that capture their individuality while setting them in a closely observed and finally nuanced landscape of class and power. The plots wrap themselves around something dark slithering its ways through the corrupt heart of English power and privilege. This darkness is challenged by Jackson Brodie: romantic pragmatist, ex-soldier, ex-policeman, ex-husband and everyday protector of the weak. Yet Jackson is not the true centre of the books. That place is held by the women who, in their different show more ways, decline to be victims and who do whatever is necessary to fight their way back to safety.

"Big Sky" like the last Jackson Brodie novel, "Started Early. Took My Dog" is breathtakingly good.

In the nine years since the last novel, Jackson has built a more stable life. His son is now a teenager. He has a strong relationship of the she's-my-ex-and-my-best-friend type. Hers is the voice he most often hears in his head when he's critiquing his own behaviour. He's now a private investigator in Yorkshire, mostly investigating cheating spouses.

The plot revolves around two current stains on English society, the institutionalisation of the sexual abuse of children by the powerful and the growing volume of foreign women being sold into sexual slavery. Both of those things are repellant and widespread. Take a look at the reports from the IICSA to see how well-organised the sexual abuse of children is. Visit the website of The Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, established by the 2015 Modern Slavery Act, and see the estimates that there are at least 13,000 victims of slavery in the UK. What Kate Atkinson does in "Big Sky" is to tell the story of the women and children and the men who abuse them in a way that makes it real without descending into voyeurism.

She achieves this partly by the people-centric structure of the story. Instead of pursuing a plot or a theme, Kate Atkinson follows a path of "serial immersion" dropping us into the minds of one character after another. In the beginning, we don't know the role of the people in the story or how they relate to each other. There isn't a central puzzle that they're all working to solve or to hide. Instead, we have the overlapping lives of people, good, bad, strong, weak, none of whom see the whole story and each of whom takes decisions that affect everyone else.

Here's an example. Chapter four opens with three men playing golf. We don't know who they are or how they relate to the story but we quickly find ourselves immersed in the world view of Vince, the most junior member of the trio:
There were different categories of friends, in Vince's opinion: golf friends, work friends, old school friends, shipboard friends, He'd been on a Mediterranean cruise a few years ago with Wendy, his about to be ex-wife, but Friend friends were harder to come by. Andy and Tommy were golf friends. Not to each other. With each other, they were friend friends. They'd known each other for years and had a relationship so tight that Vince always felt he was on the outside of something when he was with them. Not that he could put his finger on what it was her was excluded from exactly. He wondered sometimes if it wasn't so much that Tommy and Andy shared a secret so much as they liked to make him think they shared a secret. Men never really left the snigger of the schoolyard, they just grew bigger. That was his wife's opinion anyway, soon to be ex-wife.
Vince's taxonomy of friends tells us a great deal about him. It's more than an idle conceit. It's how he structures his life. It drives his actions and it will emerge again later when things turn nasty. His references to his soon to be ex-wife show his as nice but weak. His wife's voice is still in his head and he can't quite accept the truth that Wendy will no longer be his wife. The "Men never really leave the snigger of the schoolyard, they just grow bigger" comment, will be echoed by other female voices in the heads of other men as the book goes on.

The serial immersions mean that our understanding of the people comes ahead of and informs our understanding of the plot. This is what keeps the book human, driving anger at the abuse, compassion for the abused and insight into the abusers that is personal rather than abstract.

As this story is woven, Jackson Brodie is the warp, the static frame, around which the weftof the other characters shuttle to create the pattern. Jackson is the cowboy who thinks he's a sheriff and sometimes he is. He wants to do the right thing although he often can't work out what that is. His character is beautifully crafted. The times spent immersed in Jackson were the ones I enjoyed most. Here's an example of Jackson's interior monologue as he runs through a forest. He realises that he can't identify any tree except the oaks and even then only because they have funny shaped leave so he comes up with the idea that:
Somebody should invent a Shazam for trees and plants. They probably had. ¨Gap in the market' Jackson thought. Quite a niche market though. National Trust members mostly: middle-class, middle-income, the frail and over-burdened backbone of England. The kind of people who owned Labradors listened to "The Archers" and couldn't abide Reality TV. 'Me' Jackson thought, even if the Labrador was on loan and he didn't actually listen to "The Archers".
I was smiling as I listened to this. Like Jackson, I grew up in a working-class home and yet the National Trust / Labrador / Archers trinity is one I've worshipped at and I think Reality TV is an attack on the concept of truth. I like Jackson's ability to see these things and I like that he's constantly reviewing his place and the world, usually guided by the voices of women he has known. He provides a context that says that we ought to be aware of who we are and to own the decisions that we take.

The underlying emotion driving the book is deep anger at the long-term, consequence-free, systematic sexual abuse of women by rich and powerful men. Yet it is not an angry book. This is a book in which humanity and humour are synonymous. The women are shown as people who survive and take their revenge when they can. The book itself is a form of Romance, in the old sense of that word. It's a mystery and a quest. The heroes and heroines are brave and live to their values. There is also a sense of fate bringing together the people in whose minds we've been immersed and we trust that somehow they will converge and good will win through.

I listened to the audiobook which is expertly narrated by Jacob Issacs, who played Jackson Brodie in the TV series based on the books. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.
https://soundcloud.com/audiolibrary-a/big-sky-jackson-brodie-n-5-by-kate-atkinso... show less

The return of Jackson Brodie, Atkinson's brooding and trouble-racked PI, features not one but two reenactments of the immortal Marx Brothers crowded stateroom scene from A Night At The Opera. Brodie, the hero of four mysteries, has not been seen since 2010. In the interim, his celebrated creator wrote a pair of remarkable standalone novels (and one mediocre one). Her hero is older now, the father of two, attached to neither woman nor dog, and is muddling through the seeming twilight of his career with ridiculous cheating spouse cases on the East Coast of England when he's contacted by a faithful wife who suspects she's being followed. The author shoots her myriad plot arrows wildly at a target that doesn't emerge until the very end, and show more some readers just won't have the patience to see it through. Too bad, because the writing is brilliant. Brodie is the quintessential man out of his time, and he represents both universal befuddlement and the rewards of perseverance. You don't have to read the first four in the series, but you'll be well rewarded if you do. show less

I was so happy when I heard that Kate Atkinson was penning a new Jackson Brodie novel. It's been nine years, but oh it was worth the wait. Big Sky was a fantastic read.

I loved settling in to catch up with Brodie. Atkinson has moved things along in real time - the book is set in 2019. He's living in a seaside town with his old doh, has contact with his son and is working as a private investigator. Lot of 'catch them cheating' cases, but hey, they pay the bills. He's out walking one evening when he comes across a desperate man standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to end things. This chance encounter leads Brodie down a dark and twisted path.

Oh, I had missed Jackson's irreverent sense of humour, his inner dialogue and his innate ability show more to land himself in the thick of things. With a few side trips....

Atkinson's plotting is impeccable, detailed and so current. The crime could be inspired by many newspaper headlines. But Atkinson puts her own twist and delivery on the crime. And I wondered how all the threads were going to be connected by the end. Where Atkinson shines for me is in her characterizations and dialogue. Each character, including minor players, are fully fleshed out and so detailed. I love that we're privy to each player's inner thoughts. I was particularly fond of Crystal - a wife and mother trying to leave her past behind. Her stepson Harry was another character I was drawn to. Fans of the series will recognize Reggie - now grown up and a policewoman. She and her partner Ronnie are a great duo - I hope we see more of them. Just as detailed are her descriptions of time and place. The vaudeville-esqe theater, the boardwalk and it's tacky attractions and more.

Atkinson's work is meant to be savoured and enjoyed, taking in the details she provides in every aspect of the book. All four hundred delicious pages. Love, love, loved it! Here's hoping we don't have to wait another nine years for more of Jackson! show less

“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen”— The fifth novel in the Jackson Brody series was once again a satisfying read. Jackson remains the loaner, private detective, former cop who is staying in a coastal area of England spending time with his teenage son and his aging dog. He shares both with Julia, his former partner and the woman whose thoughts stay in his mind almost like a conscience. He’s mostly involved in cases of adultery, but in this one when he comes across a man named Vincent, possibly about to throw himself off a cliff, he becomes connected to an intricate Epstein like sex trafficking operation . The steaks are high and the women who have secrets to tell are constantly being threatened. One of the show more most interesting new characters is Crystal, who used to be one of the 14-year-old girls brought to parties to perform favors, but now has changed her life and has unknowingly become the housewife of one of the men involved in the kidnapping of foreign girls. “Crystal was hovering around thirty-nine years old and it took a lot of work to stay in this holding pattern. She was a construction, made from artificial materials—the acrylic nails, the silicone breasts, the polymer eyelashes. A continually renewed fake tan and a hairpiece fixed into her bleached-blond hair completed the synthetic that was Crystal. “. Like all of the former novels, the narrative shifts between several characters that all eventually intertwine to a satisfying conclusion to a complicated plot.

Lines:

Jackson’s son was thirteen and his ego was big enough to swallow planets whole.

Or Jackson himself, in the Army at sixteen, a youth broken into pieces by authority and put back together again by it as a man.

Jackson knew something dodgy about Barclay Jack, but he couldn’t get the knowledge to rise up from the seabed of his memory—a dismal place that was littered with the rusting wreckage and detritus of his brain cells.

she had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth and he had felt her tongue, probing his, like a sweet, mint-flavored slug.

British care homes were full of Filipinos because British people couldn’t take care of anything, least of all their own families. show less

Jackson Brodie is back! Kate Atkinson's private detective is living on the Yorkshire coast, mainly following errant husbands and seeing his teenage son on weekends. And then a few things pull him out of his complacency; he sees a girl get into a strange man's car and he is hired by a woman to find out who is following her.

The thing that makes this series such a delight is Atkinson's talent at throwing out so many plot threads, tangling them together so that nothing makes sense or is connected, and then flipping the mess over to display a perfect tapestry of a novel. This one's a little less tangled from the beginning, involving a small group of golf friends who are involved in sex trafficking, their victims, and their oblivious (or not show more so oblivious) spouses. Throw in a pair of intelligent and dogged detective constables, a drag queen and a few teenage boys and there's not a page of this novel that wasn't wonderful. Atkinson has a fondness for shiny, surgically enhanced women who are, frankly, a little terrifying and she includes a few characters from earlier books.

This was definitely the case of the right book at the right time. I wanted a book that I couldn't put down and that's what I got. It made me want to start right back at the beginning and read [Case Histories] again. show less

Jackson Brodie is back, this time against a setting on the Yorkshire coast where we seem to move back and forth at dizzying speeds between Whitby, Scarbro’ and Brid’, where most of us spent our childhood holidays — or, if we didn’t , we can at least imagine that we did. Atkinson confesses in an afterword that she has compressed the geography a little. She also takes the opportunity along the way to make fun of a few of our favourite TV detective shows and their fondness for this kind of nostalgic locations. But I have to admit that I was particularly drawn into this book by the way one of the opening scenes is set against the background of the Naval Battle in Peasholm Park, which is apparently still just as tacky as it was fifty show more years ago. Pure nostalgia…

Brodie himself is a bit too much of a generic detective to be really interesting on his own, but there are plenty of other viewpoint characters here, involved in different ways (investigators, victims, bystanders, etc.), it’s a complicated plot with different investigators converging on the same suspects, and there is a lot of interesting interplay between viewpoints. The biggest joy of the book, though, is in the character of Crystal, who looks like a mere caricature of a bimbo-trophy-wife when we first read about her, but reveals another fascinating and unexpected layer of personality every time she comes on stage. Funny in the way she keeps undermining our expectations, but also intensely realistic as a portrayal of the way people sometimes manage to reinvent themselves after a bad start in life. She reminded me of the kind of people I kept meeting when I was studying with the Open University. show less

I have had Big Sky on my tbr stack for a while partly, I think, because I've been in a bit of a reading slump. I gotta say, this helped me to snap out of it. This is the fifth book in the Jackson Brodie series but the first I have read - it will definitely not be my last. I really liked the Brodie character. There's a bit of angst & a little incompetence but it only made him more relatable & sympathetic. There are also a ton of other characters & the story switches between them but, somehow, Atkinson made them unique enough that it was easy to distinguish between them. The story touches on some rather controversial subjects but the author treats them with respect and empathy. I also liked how she deals with the often contrasting show more objectives of justice and law. Big Sky is well-written, compelling, and with a nice touch of humour. Definitely a high recommendation from me.

Thanks to Netgalley and Little, Brown, & Company for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review show less