Reviewed by Stephen Amidon
Sunday, November 12, 2006; BW05
ONE GOOD TURN
A Novel
By Kate Atkinson
Little, Brown. 418 pp. $24.99
The title of Kate Atkinson's relentlessly inventive new novel is somewhat misleading. There are in fact many turns in her elaborately constructed plot, and several of them are pretty good indeed. Set in contemporary Edinburgh during its famous late-summer arts festival, the story opens with a fender-bender on a crowded city street that quickly escalates into the sort of shocking public violence that has become commonplace in the British Isles. The driver of the lead car, a mysterious man who goes by the name of Paul Bradley, is savagely attacked with a baseball bat by the driver of the second car. Just as the attacker is about to strike the fatal blow, a crime writer named Martin Canning intervenes by smacking the assailant with a bag containing his laptop. Among the other witnesses to this spasm of street violence are Jackson Brodie, a retired English policeman who has come to town to watch his girlfriend perform in a play on the festival's fringe; Gloria Hatter, the disillusioned wife of a local property tycoon; and the tearaway 14-year-old son of a local police detective named Louise Monroe.
Although the road-rage attack ends without lasting injury or arrest, it reverberates throughout the lives of each of these characters. Martin's quiet, almost cloistered life -- his murder mysteries are strangely bloodless affairs involving a virginal Scottish detective -- is broken wide open when he accompanies Paul Bradley to the emergency room, only to discover that the man he has saved just might be a hired assassin. Brodie, meanwhile, stumbles on the body of a dead Russian girl the day after leaving the accident scene, a discovery that brings him into contact with the detective, Louise, after she is dispatched to investigate. Gloria Hatter's life also becomes increasingly complicated when her husband suffers a heart attack while in the arms of a prostitute who bears a striking resemblance to the dead girl Brodie discovers.
After revealing the narrative connections that hold her varied cast together, Atkinson gradually tightens them. Her plot is structured on a series of coincidences that range from the inevitable to the wildly improbable. The bat-wielding thug, it turns out, might be allied with Gloria's husband. A washed-up comedian who is murdered in Martin's house, meanwhile, appears to be involved with Jackson's actress girlfriend.
It is no accident that the novel's predominant image is that of the familiar matryoshka dolls, each fitting snugly into another, that Martin brings back from an ill-fated trip to Russia a year before the novel's action. "Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds," Jackson realizes near the novel's end. "Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world."
One Good Turn is a remarkable feat of storytelling bravado, though this is a quality that eventually works against the novel. In the early chapters, we can only sit back in admiration as Atkinson cracks open one perfectly formed narrative doll to reveal another. After a while, however, the conceit begins to wear thin. It seems as if the author is intent on drawing deeper and deeper connections among her characters no matter what the cost to the story's credibility. Indeed, the novel comes most powerfully alive when individual characters are able to escape the demands of Atkinson's rigorous plotting to express their own caustic humor.
Gloria is an attractive creation, a 59-year-old woman of considerable wit and humor who has only recently acknowledged that her life with an oafish, unprincipled husband has been wasted. Her meeting with the dominatrix who was with him when he was struck down is particularly funny. Curious, Gloria asks what degrading acts she made her husband perform. "Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog," the Russian explains. "Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?" the unfazed Gloria responds.
Atkinson also delivers with the mild-mannered Martin, who "thought of himself as someone who had been born middle-aged." His easy-listening crime novels are only obliquely mentioned, yet Atkinson still manages to evoke their sublime insipidity: "Put the gun down, Lord Hunterston! I know what happened out on the grouse shoot. Davy's death was no accident." The relationship between Jackson and his high-maintenance girlfriend, a minor-league actress who punctuates every sentence in her letters and e-mails with exclamation marks, also has its darkly comical dimension as she sends him jumping through hoops like one of the performers who clog Edinburgh's streets during the Festival.
In the end, however, these beguiling eruptions of personality are subsumed by the author's need to enlist her characters in her intricate plot. Revelations about Gloria's and Martin's secret lives in particular ring as hollow as those matryoshka dolls who fit together so well only because they are empty. ?
Stephen Amidon is the author of "The New City" and "Human Capital."