Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

The client, a woman in her mid-30s, was adopted from the Leeds area as a 2-year-old and wonders about her birth parents. Jackson Brodie, 50 and now a private eye of sorts after leaving unorthodox careers in the British army and in the coppers, is in Leeds on an assignment for a client in New Zealand. In Atkinson’s latest, Started Early, Took My Dog, the plot is as pleasingly intricate as ever and just as heavily populated with beautifully summed-up characters. So they go on forking over prizes to such tiresome writers as Salman Rushdie and ignoring people like Atkinson, who can write better prose in their sleep than Rushdie could if he were strapped to his computer for 100 years. Somewhere along the line, around the time Jackson Brodie began turning up as a character in her novels, Atkinson got classified in the mystery sections of bookstores and newspaper book reviews.īooker judges wouldn’t dream of acknowledging that such a genre as crime fiction even exists. She started out writing conventional novels, conventional in general form and intent that is, that were pretty much family dramas. One reason Kate Atkinson will never win the Booker is the crime novel thing. Actually it told a bunch of great hanging-in stories under one roof. It told a touching and funny story about characters hanging in there.

I would have given the prize two years ago to Jane Gardam for Old Filth. I want my novels to be about people, preferably people who bear up in the face of much angst and still manage a joke or two. I’m against novels for readers more than 12 that feature animals, especially animals that speak English. I never would have given the prize to Yann Martel and the book featuring the talkative tiger in the boat or whatever it was that The Life of Pi was all about. Or something that feels like an allegory. But, too bad, that’s not what usually wins the Booker.īooker committees like stuff that’s either ponderous or precious. She writes absorbing novels in clear prose with just the right number of jokes, tears and mysteries.

If I were on the committee that hands out the Man Booker Prize - dream on! - I would already have voted to give Kate Atkinson a couple of cheques.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson