Case Histories by Kate Atkinson is more ambitious than your average crime novel. It’s no simple whodunit. The focus of much of the novel is on those who are left behind to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. The novel asks a question that Brodie later asks himself: What do you do when the worst thing that could happen to you has already happened – how do you live your life then?
Atkinson uses all her skills as a sublime teller of tales to depict what happens to those who lose someone close, forced to live with their memories and their pain. As such, the novel opens with each of the first three chapters devoted to a particular crime – the disappearance of a young child in 1970, the murder of a beloved daughter at work by an apparent stranger in 1994 and the axe murder of a husband in 1979.
The novel’s hero Jackson Brodie doesn’t make an appearance until your almost 60 pages in. But by then Kate Atkinson has created three very different worlds and a myriad of well-rounded characters to populate them.
Atkinson is a master storyteller with a keen eye for the human condition. This comes to the fore not only in her ability to create a rich range of characters along with their own specific inner monologues, but is also evident in the way she skilfully manages to wrap up the three very different and seemingly unconnected crimes by the end of the novel. I was so intrigued by the conceit that by the time I was 300 pages in I had to keep on reading so I could see how she pulled it off.
It helps too that you have a likable and capable hero in Jackson Brodie whose own tragic past is only laid bare towards the end of the novel. Given all he has been through and all he has done, it’s even more commendable that Brodie still thinks ‘that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad.’
Another added plus is Atkinson’s sense of humour, often to be appreciated in the form of parenthetical asides as well as those moments when the penny drops and you realise that yet another piece of the jigsaw is being slotted into place.
All in all, Case Histories was a fantastic read. As someone who reads a lot of crime novels, I appreciated the different take by Atkinson, making the reader for once acutely aware that for families such as the Lands and the Wyres, the crimes are never history but rather a continual living present.
