What Book to Read?

Or maybe just weird. Kate Atkinson burst onto the literary scene in 1995, her first novel, Behind the scenes at the museum, winning the Whitbread Book Award (now the Costa Book Award) which is given to the ‘most enjoyable’ book of the year. It is about a young woman and several generations of her family. This was followed by a couple of other novels about young women growing up, and their family circumstances. But the first of her books I read was Case histories (2004), which is a thoroughly enjoyable detective story. I quickly read the next two – One good turn: a jolly murder mystery (2006) and When will there be good news (2008). These all feature Jackson Brodie, a police inspector turned private detective. Having a detective as the main character may make them genre novels, but they are so well written that they feel like literary fiction that happens to be about crime and detection, amongst other things. There is a new one, Started early, took my dog (2010), but while waiting to get hold of it, I went back to try one of the earlier ones I hadn’t read, Emotionally weird (2000). A mistake.

The book is subtitled ‘a comic novel’. I can see that some people might find it funny. I just don’t.

It is 1972 and Effie and her mother Nora are alone on a tiny windswept island off the coast of Scotland. They tell each other how they came to be there, which Effie hopes will explain her peculiar childhood; always on the move, no father or other relations and a mother who claims to be a virgin. ‘We can be sure of nothing, it seems’, says Effie.

Most of the book is narrated by Effie; Nora is very reluctant to tell her story. Until recently, Effie, who is nearly 21, has been a student doing an English major at Dundee University. In fact the story starts with an extract from a detective story that is part of an assignment for the creative writing course she is doing, and there are further instalments scattered through the book. An essay she is writing about George Eliot gets rather less space. Most of Effie’s story is made up events told from her point of view, though at times Nora interrupts, and even objects to what is going on and demands a different outcome. When she complains about lack of a plot in Effie’s story, Effie replies that plot ‘Is not necessary in this post-modern day and age’. ‘You’ll never make a crime writer’, says Nora. ‘This isn’t a crime story. It’s a comic novel’, says Effie, though of course she is writing a crime story for her assignment. I think it is meant as a joke that a consciously post-modern story that plays with the concept of fiction is consciously presented by the narrator as post-modern. All this sounds promising, and indeed I find it quite diverting.

The problem for me lies in the story Effie is telling about her time at university. Slovenly students, dysfunctional communes, eccentric staff, batty professors and post-modern literary criticism rendered unintelligible – for me, these are simply not funny. They are such easy targets. I feel impatient, not charmed, by the crazy situations Effie finds herself in. There is a plot of sorts, but so meandering that I don’t really care if it gets lost.

Perhaps this says more about my sense of humour (or lack thereof) than it does about the book. I’d be pleased to hear what someone else thinks. In the meantime, I look forward to reading her next crime story, because she certainly can write those.

You can find more about Kate Atkinson here and about the Costa Book Award here.