![]() ![]() The three novels featuring retired police inspector Jackson Brodie - Case Histories, One Good Turn and now When Will There Be Good News? - are delightful evidence of an author unbound. Frankly, it's hard to care when the results are this good. Perhaps she wanted to see if the limitations of genre were paradoxically liberating, or perhaps she just wanted to play literary pranks of a more subtle variety. A Literary writer with a capital L (though one with a nicely disreputable sense of fun), Atkinson unexpectedly turned to crime fiction. ![]() Depending on how you chose to look at it, she was either breaking the rules of narrative in the grand tradition of Sterne or writing herself into a meta-fictional corner.Īnd then came the switch. She began twisting her plots into ever more elaborate shapes and playing games with literary in-jokes, varying fonts and pages of blackness. ![]() Atkinson's next two novels, Human Croquet and especially Emotionally Weird, covered similar material (with some swipes at academia woven in) but were increasingly formally complex, and not always happily so. Behind the Scenes began, like Tristram Shandy, with the conception of its narrator, and then ploughed through the rest of her life with tremendous energy and subversive humour. ![]()
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