One Good Turn
Review of the novel by Kate Atkinson (#2 in the Jackson Brodie series)
Beware. If you have important work to do, do it. Don’t pick up this novel. The slow confusing start will fool you. Then you’ll be trapped for hours, unable to do anything but read to the finish, where the multiple plot lines and crimes intersect in surprising yet convincing ways.
The narrative structure is like Russian dolls, one embedded inside another, like the physical dolls that one of the characters, an mystery writer, shopped for in St. Petersburg. “”…thousands of dolls, legion upon legion of matryoshka, not just the ones you could see but also ones you couldn’t — dolls within dolls, endlessly replicating and diminishing, like an infinite series of mirrors. Martin imagined writing a story, a Borges-like construction where each story contained the kernel of the next and so on.” pp. 242–243
Other memorable passages —
“If people asked him … why he had become a writer, Martin usually answered that as he spent most of his time in his imagination it had seemed like a good idea to get paid for it.” p. 27
“He sent up a prayer to whatever god was on duty that afternoon…” p. 141
“Now that her sister was dead, Gloria was the only person who remembered her brother. It was extraordinary how quickly a person could be erased. Death triumphant.” p. 264
“… there was no such thing as ‘historic reality,’ reality ws this nanosecond, right now, not even a breath but an atom of a breath, the littlest littlest thig. Before and after didn’t exist.” p. 279
“… new daffodil shoots spearing their way out of their earth silos.” p. 280
“… and ate scampi and chips in a pub with an eager-breasted woman.” p. 293
“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” p. 356
