A Delightful Jigsaw Puzzle

                                                                           

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle composed of fascinating, intricate images, each so fully realized that it can be enjoyed for itself. But as you marvel at the individual pieces, you begin to notice tantalizing glimpses of how one might connect to another.

Kate Atkinson's Big Sky is just such a puzzle--though I didn't tin of it as such whilst reading. Her writing and characters are so compelling that I didn't slow down to ask question--too swept up in the stories.

Each puzzle piece has a story and each takes several turns as narrator. Foremost is Jackson Brodie--the protagonist of three or four earlier Atkinson novels. Ex-police detective, ex-husband, ex-lover, Brodie is a complex and endearing character, especially in his relationship with his son and his ex-lover's dog. 

But, wait! There're more. A pair of Polish girls, arriving in the UK in search of good jobs, only to fall prey to a sex-trafficking operation. A pair of diminutive and determined Detective Constables, following a very cold case dealing with a pedophile ring. There's Vince, and his golfing friends (not friend friends) Tommy, Andy, and dodgy lawyer Steve.

Crystal, Tommy's wife is a Barbie look-alike with a hidden past. Her stepson Harry is a lad of surprising depths. Throw in a third-rate comedian and a drag queen named Bunny and you've got the makings of a complex drama.

The shifts in point of view are so deftly done, one never gets lost. And seeing the same event through different eyes can lend great clarity.

As the pieces of the puzzle begin to click into place, the novel hurtles to a satisfying conclusion, with some of the most unlikely characters demonstrating surprising strength.

I stayed up till midnight to finish this one, unable to put it down. 

Lost in England Again

After putting away the Christmas red and green, I began the new year as I hope to go on, and spent the weekend reading and writing. The writing is going well but I won't say more than that just now.

The reading took me to England -- first to the dreaming spires of serious, studious Oxford.  But in Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm's 1911 spoof of undergraduate life, "it is a silly place." (to appropriate a Monty Python line.)

And it's a silly book but such good fun as the beautiful Zuleika wreaks havoc among the stuffy Oxford scholars to the disapproval of onlooking ghosts and statues of Roman emperors. I enjoyed it immensely -- but then I have a penchant for somewhat overblown writing, melodrama, and general silliness.

Saying farewell to Oxford , I turned to Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.  England again -- and again and again -- from 1910 when Ursula is born to the Forties and WWII and beyond . . .

  The  gimmick (an inelegant word for an elegant contrivance) of the novel is that the book follows Ursula through the many turns her life might take as she meets various untimely ends only to be born once more in 1910 into the same family with not exactly full recall of her past lives but something closer to deja vu and sometimes a foreboding that allows her to move down a different path than the previous life.

The writing is beautiful. Atkinson is a skilled juggler of plot and character, making each permutation of Ursula's life seem completely believable. Highly recommended!

Thanks to my niece Amelia for reminding me that I needed to read this!

Review of Life After Life HERE

Gone to Brasstown . . .

The garden is hoed; the houseplants watered, and things are as close to in order as I can manage. Today I'm going down the road for a week of teaching at John C. Campbell Folk School. I know I'll be super busy so I won't be posting or blog visiting till next Sunday. 

I'll leave you with a couple of book recommendation -- Kate Atkinson's HUMAN CROQUET --which I finished reading the very same day my niece Amelia e-mailed  to praise Atkinson's LIFE AFTER LIFE and A GOD IN RUINS ( both of which I intend to seek out very soon.) HUMAN CROQUET was an enchanting and unusual story as well as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. I'm happy to know there are quite a few more Atkinson novels waiting for me.

(from Amazon) Part fairy tale, part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, this novel tells the story of Isobel Fairfax, a girl growing up in Lythe, a typical 1960s British suburb. But Lythe was once the heart of an Elizabethan feudal estate and home to a young English tutor named William Shakespeare, and as Isobel investigates the strange history of her family, her neighbors, and her village, she occasionally gets caught in Shakespearean time warps. Meanwhile, she gets closer to the shocking truths about her missing mother, her war-hero father, and the hidden lives of her close friends and classmates. A stunning feat of imagination and storytelling, Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet is rich with the disappointments and possibilities every family shares.

Another I really enjoyed was Colleen Oakley's BEFORE I GO --  a surprisingly un-maudlin novel about a young woman faced with terminal cancer. I found myself completely engrossed in the choices and decisions of the main character and, when I put the book down, having to remind myself that I am not a young woman nor do I have terminal cancer. Just that terminal condition called Life.