January 2015 – Page 3 – She Reads Novels

My first introduction to Kate Atkinson’s work was Life After Life, which I read in 2013 and loved. I’ve been wanting to read more of her books and knowing that a lot of people speak very highly of her Jackson Brodie novels, I decided to start with the first one in the series, Case Histories.

In Case Histories, private detective Jackson Brodie is investigating three old cases that have remained unresolved for years:

Case History No. 1 – During the summer heatwave of 1970, three-year-old Olivia Land is sleeping in a tent in the garden with her older sister, Amelia. When Amelia wakes up, she finds that Olivia has disappeared without trace.

Case History No. 2 – In 1994, eighteen-year-old Laura Wyre is murdered on her first day working in her father’s office. Her killer has still not been found and no motive for the attack has ever been discovered.

Case History No. 3 – In 1979, Michelle Fletcher is living on an isolated farm with her new husband and baby daughter. Depressed, lonely and finding it hard to cope, an argument with her husband ends in a brutal murder.

The connection between these three stories is Jackson Brodie, who is contacted by family members hoping to have the cases reopened or looked at again. Amelia and Julia Land want to find out what happened to their little sister, Olivia, and whether she could still be alive; Laura’s father, Theo, wants to know who killed his beloved daughter and why; and Shirley Morrison is searching for her sister Michelle’s daughter, with whom she lost contact after the incident which tore their family apart. But Jackson has problems of his own and as he begins to investigate these three very different crimes, he is reminded of a tragedy in his own past and another ‘lost girl’ who disappeared from his life decades earlier.

I loved Case Histories. I know describing a book as unputdownable is a cliché, but it was true in this case – it really is the sort of book where once you start reading, you don’t want to stop until you reach the end. It’s a crime novel I would recommend even to readers who are not really interested in crime fiction because, while the three mysteries are quite interesting, the real strength of the book is in the characterisation. The story is not so much about the crimes themselves as about the effect they had on the people involved and how they have tried (and often failed) to move on from what has happened.

I liked Jackson and am looking forward to meeting him again in the rest of the series, but my favourites in this book were Amelia and Theo. Amelia, who is approaching middle age feeling friendless and unwanted, has invented an imaginary boyfriend to brighten up her non-existent social life, and Theo, for whom his daughter was the centre of his universe, is neglecting his health while he devotes his life to finding her killer, drawing up colour-coded charts of her friends and teachers and making yearly pilgrimages to the scene of her death. Their lives are sad, lonely and tragic, yet Atkinson injects just enough humour into their stories to turn them into characters who are amusing but not ridiculous, flawed but sympathetic.

I also thought the structure of the book was interesting, because the timeline is not entirely linear. We see events from one perspective in one chapter, then in the next chapter we go back several hours, days or weeks to see those same events from another character’s perspective, filling in gaps and adding to our knowledge of what is going on. Two of the case histories – Olivia’s disappearance and Laura’s murder – worked very well alongside each other, but the third one, involving Michelle and her sister, felt disconnected from the others and didn’t work quite as well. I think I had expected all three cases to be much more closely linked than they actually were and I was disappointed that they weren’t.

At the end of the book, after Jackson is sure he’s solved the crimes, there are still more twists to come. We are given enough information throughout the story so that we can guess at what may have happened and work out some parts of the mystery, but the final pieces of the puzzle are withheld from us until the very end.

That’s two Kate Atkinson books read and two enjoyed; now I can’t wait to read the second book in the Jackson Brodie series, One Good Turn.

Happy New Year! I had considered posting about my reading plans for 2015 today but, to be honest, I don’t really have any. I know I want to do some re-reading this year, as that’s something I’ve been neglecting, but apart from that I don’t have any specific goals in mind. I want to keep things stress-free and just read the books that I really want to read without worrying about challenges and targets. I do still have some December reads to tell you about, so I thought I would get on with writing about those instead…starting with Susanna Kearsley’s 2001 novel, Season of Storms.

Our narrator, Celia Sands, is a twenty-two-year-old actress who has been offered the lead role in a play being staged at an outdoor theatre in the grounds of Il Piacere, an Italian villa. The play – Il Prezzo – was written in the 1920s by the playwright Galeazzo D’Ascanio for his lover, another actress also called Celia Sands. The night before the play was due to have its first performance, the first Celia disappeared and was never seen again.

Now, decades later, the second Celia Sands (no relation to the first despite being named after her) has been invited by D’Ascanio’s grandson, Alessandro, to star in a renewed version of the play. Arriving at Il Piacere, she meets the other people involved with the play and soon becomes aware of tensions within the group; it seems to Celia that everyone has a secret to hide. As the preparations continue and rehearsals begin, strange things start to happen – a servant disappears without trace, a man is found dead, and Celia suspects that her room may be haunted – and the mysteries of the past become entwined with the mysteries of the present.

Season of Storms is the seventh Susanna Kearsley book I’ve read and the first one I’ve been slightly disappointed by. I think part of the problem was that the pace was very slow at the beginning and the story took a very long time to really get started; I think the book could probably have been a lot shorter without losing any essential plot points. By the time the various threads of the novel began to come together in the second half of the book I was struggling to stay interested.

Unlike some of Kearsley’s other books, this one is set almost entirely in the present with only a few flashbacks in which we are given some glimpses of Galeazzo D’Ascanio and the first Celia Sands. The connections between the past and present storylines weren’t strong enough and I felt that the historical one wasn’t resolved properly; I would have liked more focus on solving the mystery of the first Celia’s disappearance and on the supernatural aspects of the novel, which never really came to anything. I was also disappointed by the romantic side of the story – there was no real spark between Celia and her eventual romantic interest and he was not one of my favourite Kearsley heroes.

On a more positive note, Kearsley’s novels always have wonderful settings and this one is no exception! Il Piacere, the playwright’s villa, is on Lake Garda, somewhere I have never been but have always wanted to visit. The descriptions of the estate and the surrounding area are beautiful. Before arriving at Il Piacere, Celia spends some time in Venice, which is somewhere I have visited and I loved watching her explore St Mark’s Square and the Basilica, the canals and the bridges.

There were other things that I liked – the little theatrical touches such as dividing the story into Acts and Scenes and starting the chapters with quotes from plays; and Celia’s relationship with Bryan and Rupert, the gay couple who raised her when her glamorous actress mother neglected her – but there were too many negative points for me to really be able to say that I enjoyed this book.

Not a favourite, then, but I’m pleased I still have two more unread Susanna Kearsley novels to read – and a new one, A Desperate Fortune, to look forward to in 2015.