Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, $38.99
Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson's private detective who fumbles his way around cases with no great enthusiasm, is a peculiar character. He can be a bit of a tough guy. He sees a man beating a dog. He threatens the man and takes the dog, whose name turns out to be The Ambassador. A woman in a pet shop, on hearing this, suggests "that was a name for a bigger dog".
"He's big inside," Jackson says, defensively. This is a bit of whimsy, and there is a bit more of this sort of thing. He carts this dog about the place on his travels by popping it in a bag, which it agrees to, with some reluctance but obediently. Dogs are like that, they put up with a lot, especially when what they put up with previously was rather nastier.
In the meantime (of which there are a few too many), former cop Tracey Waterhouse, plain, plump, unloved, lover of beer, has retired early and is head of security at the sort of mall that makes you want to top yourself. Here, she sees a woman known to her as a druggie and prostitute, dragging a kid along behind her, roughly - much in the manner of The Ambassador on his rope. Tracey happens to have 5000 quid in her bag - to pay her builder. She offers the hooker 3000 quid for the kid, who is duly shoved her way. As the hooker makes her getaway, on the bus, she says: "But she's not..." Not what? Tracey wonders. Not the hooker's kid? This bothers her - buying a kid bothers her, she is now one of the crims she used to nab - but not too much.
The kid is not attractive: she's adenoidal, snotty, and possibly a bit thick. Does it matter whose kid she is? Perhaps there wasn't space to tell us. There's a lot of curious plot to get through, and some other ends to tie up.
Because meanwhile, a dotty old actress loses her bag at the mall and goes a bit klepto. Tilly is a sideline, or a sideshow. She's a sad character: childless, like Tracey (is that why she's here? To show what it's like to have wanted a child and to end up alone and dotty?), treated with contempt, she lives in her head which more and more often contains only a foggy version of a past in which reality and longing for another reality are blurred. She manages to be both laugh aloud funny, and a terrifyingly bleak portrait of old age.
Brodie is trying to find the birth parents of a woman in Christchurch. Much of Brodie's knowledge of New Zealand "came from watching The Piano", so naturally "he had always thought of New Zealanders as a rather gloomy race - Scots abroad". To mention this is to digress still further but this is a digressive read (there is another PI looking for the birth parents: his name is Brian Jackson) which will either enchant (in a bleakly gritty way) or irritate. Actually, it manages to do both, which is quite an achievement - perhaps not quite as much of one as Atkinson fans might have hoped for.
But as a series of portraits of strange, lonely people, it's wonderful.
Michele Hewitson is a Herald columnist.
