One Good Turn

Beyond the Fringe

The dead are alive and well in Kate Atkinson’s fifth novel, One Good Turn. They populate the lives of the three main characters in this sequel to her bestselling Case Histories as surely as the fringe performers populate the streets of Atkinson’s festival-infested Edinburgh landscape.

We meet again Jackson Brodie, ex-policeman, ex-husband and now ex-private detective, retired and bored and living in France with the increasingly elusive and unsatisfying Julia at whose behest he finds himself, somewhat reluctantly, at the Edinburgh Festival. Also in Edinburgh is Martin Canning, successful crime fiction writer, but a man paralysed by the past and desperate to live the sort of existence his literary agent would like him to live. And Gloria Hatter, forty years a housewife in one of Edinburgh’s better suburbs, who at 59 comes to the sudden and daunting realisation that the life-changing decision she made in a pub in 1965 was, in fact, the wrong one.

All three have notched up an impressive array of dead relatives between them, and the dead continue to have a tangible and ongoing impact on the lives of the living. Frozen by the events of the past, all three are disillusioned and disappointed, searching yet with no real idea of what it is that they have mislaid.

One Good Turn is a book that leaps out of the starting blocks when a moment of commonplace road rage descends into violence. This is a scene which will impact on each of the characters that witness it and sets the pace for what is to follow over four bloody and chaotic days of the Edinburgh Festival. And this is a Festival, seen through the eyes of Atkinson writing about her adopted city, which is an unstoppable behemoth of hollow yet self-indulgent folly, and very much a character in its own right.

Bad things tend to happen to people in Kate Atkinson novels and this one is no exception: two Russians, a comedian, a Rottweiler and a basketful of kittens are quickly dispatched. And those little Russian dolls pop up all over the place, both literally and figuratively, one inside another inside another, endlessly producing new and ever-decreasing miniatures of itself and the layers of Atkinson’s intricately constructed plot are unfolded piece by piece too, to reveal each new twist and, ultimately, the kernel at the heart of the story.

Dead kittens, bloodied baseball bats, exotic foreign cleaners in pink overalls – it all smacks uncomfortably of farce, a farce lodged somewhere between comic strip and Eighties’ sitcom. It’s difficult to care for characters whose existence borders on that of a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Atkinson’s writing, however, and above all her, at times, breathtaking wit are enough to pull you through. And ultimately, a Kate Atkinson novel is a safer bet than a piece of Edinburgh Festival fringe theatre.