Many stories woven into a tight knot
Case Histories
By Kate Atkinson
Little Brown, 312 pp., $23.95
''Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson is an interesting hybrid of a novel: a family chronicle and thriller all at once. What makes it worth talking about is its verve, fine writing, and subject matter. This is a novel that looks at murder and the profound loss that accompanies it with an unusually clear eye.
Yet its pleasures are curious. Unlike those novels whose characters grab us by the lapels and drag us into their stories, this one is more like an amazing performance. Its primary pleasure comes from watching this skillful author (a winner of England's Whitbread Book Award for her first book, ''Behind the Scenes at the Museum") thrust a large cast of characters into serious and sometimes graphically violent traumas, then somehow connect their stories, and ultimately resolve their mysteries. Rather like watching two accomplished people play a game of chess. The problem is that as events and characters pile up, the game gets played faster and faster until everything becomes a bit blurry. When we finally reach the end we realize we have been reading a modern fairy tale, complete with the almost satiric ''happy ending." Indeed, this novel is as complex and capricious as anything by the Brothers Grimm.
The book begins with three unrelated case histories. One involves a dysfunctional family, the Lands, who are expecting their fifth child and whose fourth child, 3-year-old Olivia, disappears in the night during the very hot summer of 1970, never to be seen again. The second is more graphically gory: a 19-year-old named Laura Wyre, whose mother has died and whose father, Theo, is abnormally anxious about her safety, is brutally murdered while working as a temp in her father's office in 1994. The third is also gruesome: A young woman named Michelle, ''shackled" with a new baby, is suffering from an extended postpartum depression and has apparently killed her husband, Keith, with an ax.
Solving one of these mysteries might have made a satisfying novel. But Atkinson has something different in mind. After laying out these horrendous ''cases," she fast-forwards us to the linchpin of the novel: private detective Jackson Brodie. Brodie is divorced from his wife, Josie, with whom he shares custody of their young daughter Marlee, is living in Cambridge, loves country music, is undergoing a lot of dental work, and is learning French because France is where he wants to live someday. However, he is only in his late 40s and still has to work, so he is tailing a young woman whose husband thinks she's unfaithful. But although ''nothing . . . that anyone did surprised him anymore," Brodie thought ''his job was to help people be good rather than punishing them for being bad." So when he gets two seemingly unconnected calls from Olivia's sisters and from Theo Wyre, he is more than ready.
For the rest of the book we lurch from one point of view to another as the two cases are solved and with them, the true story of the ax-murderer is revealed. As a thriller the novel works, though it is more akin to cinema than to fiction. On another level, the reader feels manipulated by snippets that tease, fascinate, amuse, and ultimately shock but that don't truly move us or give us any insights. Where I felt most cheated was in the telling of Brodie's own story, which I won't reveal, but which has echoes of the famous case of the disappearance of Martin Amis's cousin. Brodie's is the fourth case history and is at the heart of this novel. Yet as soon as we are given the bare bones, we are brought up short and plunged into the contemporary events, which include two attempts on Brodie's life and the untangling of those as well as the adjacent mysteries -- all at breakneck pace.
The themes in this book -- parental and sibling love, incest, loss of children, and sheer survival in perilous times -- are important and timely. And Atkinson is an uncommonly talented writer who writes precise and often surprising prose. Moreover, she can write believably about people who are deeply troubled. Here is Rosemary on her love for her daughter Olivia: ''Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. . . . Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe."
The safety of daughters is a major theme of this novel and a worthy subject for any contemporary novelist. Perhaps in her next book Atkinson will take her time and let her fertile imagination take hold of one story and develop it. Hopefully, then she will create the resonant family novel that is buried inside ''Case Histories" instead of just a ''great read."
Roberta Silman's latest novel is ''Beginning the World Again, a Novel of Los Alamos." Her website is www.robertasilman.com. 