A Queen of Little Hells: The Jackson Brodie Mysteries

Many literary writers think they have a genre novel in them: almost none are right. Whether it’s Sebastian Faulks doing P G Wodehouse, or William Boyd doing James Bond, the results are mixed and don’t enjoy the popularity of the original series. The literary author approaches the genre form with an attitude of whimsy or writing-exercise, only to find that it’s not so easy to write a story that is readable and makes sense. The literary author’s tricks of prose and style don’t help at all in the badlands of genre plotting, and I think genre writers face higher expectations from editors, as well – the hack crime author still has to make sure that the tells aren’t too visible and the continuity holes are plugged up.

Kate Atkinson seems to know this. Her Jackson Brodie novels are full of small parodies of genre conventions, from Martin Canning’s postwar nostalgia detective series, to the TV flagship crime drama Collier in which Jackson’s ex has a long arc. The plots of these novels sometimes stretch credibility, as well. A character topples a dead body out of his hotel window, into a skip – which is taken by the binmen the next morning, a crane operator hauling the skip onto the back of a pickup truck and driving away without comment. The style too is literary, which means there’s a lot of rambling, internal monologue. This is Jackson Brodie in one of his first scenes:

He shouldn’t have thought about coffee because now there was a dull ache in his bladder. When Woman’s Hour finished he put Allison Moorer’s Alabama Song on the CD player, an album which he found comfortingly melancholic. Bonjour Tristesse. Jackson was going to French classes with a view to the day when he could sell up and move abroad and do whatever people did when they retired early. Golf? Did the French play golf? Jackson couldn’t think of the names of any French golfers so that was a good sign because Jackson hated golf. Maybe he could just play boules and smoke himself to death. The French were good at smoking.

Do we need to know all this? Apparently so, because whenever a character looks like they’re about to do something the prose segues again into this babble of thoughts and memories. Plenty of authors do this, but Atkinson is more effective than most because she understands what the inside of people’s heads are like. People have their roles and obligations in life but often these take second place to the personal drama of thought, memory, associations, obsessions running through the mind like a fast flowing river. This technique is played out to heartbreaking effect in the character of Tilly Squires, who plays Collier’s mum in Collier. Tilly is an old woman who could have been a legendary actress, and she’s haunted by a lost child, a lost love, and old betrayals – and as cognitive decline sets in, her waking life is swamped by these intrusive scenes of the past. Cut, the director shouts at her. And Tilly thinks: cut? Cut what?

Because in Kate Atkinson’s world the past is near inescapable. The series opens with Jackson investigating a triptych of cold cases. The first centres around another lost child, whose sisters grow up haunted by this loss. One hides in a convent for the rest of her life. Another, Amelia, stays out in the world but is unable to move forward, she is stuck in a dead end job and can’t form meaningful relationships. (Atkinson gives Amelia a happy ending in this first novel but kills her off a couple of books later, of breast cancer.) Jackson himself is constantly looking back at his own impoverished childhood, of which he is the sole survivor. Everything is broken. Nothing is forgiven. The past is not insurmountable, Atkinson says, but you have to fight every day to escape it. And if you can’t or won’t do that, God help you.

The harsh realities of life in Jackson Brodie’s England are juxtaposed by a reckless, Dickensian sentimentality. Started Early, Took My Dog opens like a classic crime novel of Yorkshire’s cold-blooded old times, the Ripper and the Old Law. But because this is Kate Atkinson, what we get is a whimsical comedy of mistaken identity and the joys of raising children. There’s even authorial comment at times. When a young detective is shot in the line of duty, Atkinson writes that ‘His mother turned off his life support after a week so his funeral was just before Christmas. ‘Makes no difference to me,’ she said. ‘There’ll be no more Christmas now.’ The day after the funeral she jumped off the North Bridge at three in the morning. Give her a medal too.’ Give her a medal. That is pure Atkinson.

(It’s worth mentioning another Dickensian aspect here too – the use of grotesques. Atkinson has working class protagonists but they are strivers, as opposed to members of the working class who are not so much strivers: Reggie Chase’s ne’er-do-well brother Billy, Graham Hatter’s henchman Terence Smith, Neil Hunter’s criminal associates, the estate nominal Kelly Cross – all these are drawn as chav stereotypes that make Lionel Asbo look like Oscar Wilde. Kelly Cross is significant because of the lavish effort Atkinson expends on her appearance – ‘She looked worse close up – flat hair, grey corpse-skin, bloodshot vampire eyes and a junkie edginess to her that made Tracy want to step back’ – and because the ex-cop protagonist in that scene buys Cross’s young daughter from her, out of pity. Cross herself is later found murdered in a shitheap in Harehills.)

For all Started Early is a long haul, it has wonderful insights into the lives people make for themselves. You’re consistently impressed with Atkinson’s use of interiors, the way that a home reflects an inner life: the ex journalists Marilyn Nettles bangs out romance novels in a Whitby house that ‘was shabby, cat fur and dust floating on sunbeams. Nothing had been prepared or painted, or indeed washed, for a long time. Something uncomfortably hard behind the cushion at his back turned out to be an empty bottle of Beefeater. There were clothes draped on the sofa. Jackson didn’t like to look too closely in case they proved to be Marilyn Nettles’s undergarments. He got the impression that she slept, ate and worked in this one room.’

I never got to like Jackson Brodie, with his collection of godawful country music CDs and his smug manly piety and his dead family that he drags around like so many tin cans on a string. In Started Early he goes on a driving tour of England: ‘In the company of the Saab, he had been to Bath, Bristol, Brighton, the Devon coast, down to the toe of Cornwall, up to the Peak District, the Lakes’ and having reached Yorkshire he has a new mission: ‘to visit all of the Betty’s Tea Rooms – Ilkley, Northallerton, two in Harrogate, two in York’ and also enjoys ‘the great cathedral train shed of the National Railway Museum where he paid tribute to the Mallard, Yorkshire-built and the fastest steam train in the world, a record that could never be taken away from her.’ At times it’s like reading a thriller novel written by Alan Partridge – perhaps a version of Alan’s own detective series ‘Swallow,’ branched out into homicide.

But the Jackson Brodie novels are so often not really about Jackson – and you get to love the other characters a lot more. It was a pleasure to see Reggie Chase turn up in Big Sky, having made it as a police detective. And you feel for the other characters more, too. The last days of Laura Wyre are among the most chilling passages I have ever read in contemporary fiction. And the heart breaks for Crystal Holroyd, who thinks she has escaped the shadow of a historic child exploitation ring only to find that she has all along been living in a contemporary of the same horrible network. Big Sky is the latest and the best of the series: all the Jackson Brodie elements are there, but tightened up into a powerful psychological story about evil past and present. Some of the writing recalls Gordon Burn at his scariest.

The doctor in Sophie Hannah’s A Room Swept White describes ‘little hells of the mind’ – that people ‘can’t escape from and can’t talk about to anyone. Often they conceal those hells so expertly, they convince the world they’re happy and normal, even those closest to them.’ With the Jackson Brodie novels Kate Atkinson established herself as a queen of the little hells – and few escape her kingdom.

(Image: Kate Atkinson author site)

Caroline Flack and The Conversation

One of the best essays on mental health in recent years was from the Guardian journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson. Parkinson has been through the psychological mill, and has the scars to prove it. In 2018, she summed up a contemporary commonplace on the subject.

In recent years the discussion around mental health has hit the mainstream. I call it the Conversation. The Conversation is dominated by positivity and the memeification of a battle won. It isn’t a bad thing that we are all talking more about mental health; it would be silly to argue otherwise. But this does not mean it is not infuriating to come home from a secure hospital, suicidal, to a bunch of celebrity awareness-raising selfies and thousands of people saying that all you need to do is ask for help – when you’ve been asking for help and not getting it. There is a poster in my local pharmacy that exclaims, ‘Mental health can be complex – getting help doesn’t have to be!’ Each time I see it, I want to scream.

Parkinson’s point was that attitudes have changed for the better while the practical reality of treatment – appointments, clinics, beds, medications – has got worse.

When the news came last weekend that Caroline Flack had killed herself I expected the reactions to be sophisticated. I was drinking red wine and reading Robert Caro on LBJ – on a Saturday night, rock and roll, yeah? – and between chapters I would glance at my social media to keep up with the conversation.

And I am afraid that what I saw was one of the biggest piles of horseshit that I have witnessed in liberal left discourse.

These are a few examples.

I had no idea who Caroline Flack was until she died and read the about the hounding she got in #TheScum. Can we create #CarolinesLaw to stop the press abuse of people who have done no harm to anyone? Maybe call it #AmysLaw? Before it’s too late for Meghan.

—

The press hounded Princess Diana. After her death, we said it would never happen again. Then others. They splashed Amy Winehouse’s suffering across front pages. Meghan has been so attacked she had to leave. Our society hunts women down for kicks and can’t seem to stop.

—

Faceless keyboard warriors hounded her to her death – I know about this stuff after 8 years of abuse whilst trying to do my job & the devastating impact it has on your mental health. Life is precious & we are here too short a short time to waste it hating

You will think I’m being harsh – but consider. These aren’t just Twitter randos. They have large followings. And they wrote these takes on Saturday. No time to reflect or digest the news. No thought. I have not linked to them because I don’t want to embarrass the tweeters – but the takes are real.

And subsequent days have not matured the conversation. We have had press boycotts, calls for Leveson part two, further regulation of journalists, lectures against the evils of social media. The Society of Editors protested that ‘it is wrong to blame the media for [Flack’s] decision without knowing the facts. Indeed, the Samaritans guidance on reporting suicides makes clear that speculation over causes or presumptuous explanations often oversimplify the complex reasons behind an individual’s decision to end their life.’ Too late. Flack had already been enlisted in the service of a number of ailing liberal left culture war industries, from the Hacked Off brand to the Big Tech temperance movement. (On a lighter note, bookshops gave away copies of Matt Haig’s memoir to anyone who asked – because the Kübler-Ross model of woke grief is basically ‘shock… outrage… virtue signalling… Matt Haig’.)

Jim Waterson pointed out that ‘for all the public’s anger at celebrity news outlets whom many are blaming for hounding a woman to her death, privately people are flocking to tabloid sites to read every possible detail about her.’ It’s an irony that feeds into the creepy mythos that sometimes surrounds celebrity deaths, particularly of women. It’s not enough to say the paparazzi killed Diana, or Facebook killed Caroline. It’s the idea that we killed Caroline and Diana, that it’s our sins and prurience that killed them. It’s a horrible, reducing myth, that turns human beings into martyrs. And it is more misogynistic than the tabloids could ever get away with being.

The dead deserve better than this. So do the living. Philip Roth’s words have never been more true. ‘All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.’

Caroline Flack, 1979-2020. (Image: BBC)

Valhalla

This short story of mine has been published by the amazing Words of the Wild as part of their ‘Jungle’ edition. I’ve benefited from their terrific illustrations and layout – though I wouldn’t describe the piece as dystopian, more a what-if of the world would be like if (or when) AI absorbed basically all of human experience. Didn’t Douglas Coupland say that the computer is like humanity’s subconscious? Anyway, I hope you like it.

The Horse and the Man

There’s an episode of South Park where the town is shocked to hear that rival cartoon Family Guy are planning to show an image of the prophet Mohammed in their next episode. Cartman sets off to the studio to get the show shut down – not because he respects Islam or fears terror attacks, but simply because he dislikes the programme’s writing style. In an angry tirade he declares:

Do you have any idea what it’s like? Everywhere I go, ‘Hey Cartman, you must like Family Guy, right?’ ‘Hey, your sense of humor reminds me of Family Guy, Cartman.’ I am NOTHING like Family Guy! When I make jokes, they are inherent to a story! Deep, situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a POINT! Not just one interchangeable joke after another!

When al-Qaeda threaten retaliation, their spokesman criticises Family Guy in much the same tones that Cartman does. ‘Family Guy isn’t even that well written,’ says a scary-looking terror boss. ‘The jokes are interchangeable and usually irrelevant to the plot.’

Both these criticisms was South Park’s way of saying that the animation genre was running out of steam. We all remember watching Simpsons on BBC2 in the evenings but now this type of thing doesn’t have the same impact – although I still get belly laughs from Archer, King of the Hill and South Park.

Yet something different is happening with Bojack Horseman. It’s about a lazy, irresponsible Hollywood celebrity who drinks too much and just doesn’t care, the first few episodes are clever and funny but predictable, but around halfway through season one you start noticing things.

One aspect critics picked up on was the show’s eerie prescience. The 2017 Oscars farce when Faye Dunaway read off the wrong name mirrored a previous episode in which Bojack’s friend Mr Peanutbutter the celebrity dog is supposed to host the Oscars but he loses the list of winners and simply makes them up, getting several wrong. And the episode ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ underscored America’s acclimatisation to horrific gun violence to the extent that the phrase – perfunctorily reiterated by J K Simmons’s weathered film exec Lenny Turtletaub whenever a shooting occurred – has become shorthand for ineffective symbolic gestures in the face of preventable atrocities. (The line is even used in Don Winslow’s The Border when the bad guys are planning out the aftermath of a targeted assassination.)

There’s plenty more subtle stuff going on in the background. Bojack’s Hollywood is a city of man and beast, but the animals aren’t just humanised animals. They act like real animals. A woodpecker drills through his restaurant table, debutante horses dressage through a tony ballroom, and Bojack even helps a male seahorse give birth (‘yes, it’s a thing!’) Guest characters from one episode recur and recur through the series, glimpsed on sets and at parties: Lisa Hanawalt’s deft busy scenes ensure that we care about the little people in Bojack’s life even though Bojack never does.

Upfront is Bojack’s psychodrama and it doesn’t take long for the show to uncover his own formative demons. Bojack’s father was an narcissist, alcoholic and failed author, who like all narcissists rejects his son because he will never provide the true reflecting pool of himself that the narcissist craves. (The dad Butterscotch has a brilliant toxic masculine death – he’s killed in a duel with a book reviewer who criticised Butterscotch’s only published novel.) With no positive male influence to lean on, the boy Bojack becomes a huge fan of Secretariat – in this world, another hybrid celebrity horse. There is a moving scene, written from different angles over two episodes, where Secretariat in a chat show appearance reads out a letter from then nine year old Bojack and gives some advice on how Bojack can make his way in the world. But Bojack never hears of what Secretariat has to say because his parents start one of their predictable arguments and drown out the TV with yelling. Secretariat himself commits suicide soon afterward.

Bojack has come a long way since childhood – he has got rich from silly 1990s sitcom ‘Horsin’ Around’, he has a luxury home in the hills, while he doesn’t have a wife or family he can find sex and companionship any time he wants it. As Mr Peanutbutter says – in a rare moment of fury – ‘What more do you want? What else could the universe possibly owe you?’ In the first episode Bojack starts having panic attacks, and a doctor tells him to take it easy. To Bojack’s agent Princess Carolyn this advice is meaningless – Bojack does nothing but take it easy. So what’s causing the attacks? Bojack is in his fifties but doesn’t seem to fear old age or death, it’s not that he’s ashamed of the stupid commercial hit that made his name, in fact he’s proud of it, he feels that he delivered a great escapist comedy that would make people laugh and forget their aches and cares for a while. It often seems that Bojack is looking for that uncomplicated and predictable happiness of a half-hour’s good television.

Midway through the show develops its central theme of masculinity and its consequences. Bojack does a film tribute to his male role model Secretariat then moves on to a hardboiled cop show written – in a brilliant sendup of the auteur showrunner – by the obnoxious and self obsessed Flip McVicker. As Bojack goes on he accumulates more and more ghosts: the people he’s let down start to haunt his present, from the Horsin’ Around mentor who died of cancer to the ex colleague Sarah Lynn who overdosed on heroin under his care. Bojack is masculine but not toxic, even when he’s an asshole he’s warm and entertaining to be around, but as the show incorporated the real life MeToo events you’re constantly on edge for Bojack’s own reckoning.

One thing creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg empathised in the show was the importance of personal responsibility. At the end of season three Bojack’s sidekick Todd – voiced by Aaron ‘Pinkman’ Paul – finally tires of Bojack’s selfishness and rants:

You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself as if that makes it okay! You need to be better!

No! No, BoJack, just… Stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. It’s not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid. It’s you. Alright? It’s you.

Neither of them speak for a moment, and we’re taking in the trashed apartment, the words that can’t be taken back, and Todd adds: ‘Fuck, man…What else is there to say?’ Credits roll on a scene just as powerful as Paul ever did with Bryan Cranston, if not more.

All this is heavy going for a cartoon, and there’s times you think you’re in a graphic novel written by John Cheever, even F Scott Fitzgerald. The novel has abandoned this whole subject of life and death and happiness and responsibility, but apparently we still want to see it on TV, in particular a TV show about a talking horse.

Numerous episodes take the form of hallucinations experienced by characters in the throes of a drug binge or mental degeneration, and there is one – screening this weekend, if you’ve seen it you’ll know – that happens in purgatory. The cold tragedy of these moments can be a hard watch. Perhaps better than other artists, the comic animator has the skill to portray the finality of things broken that won’t be fixed, things done and said that can’t be undone or taken back, and the terrifying separation between human beings.

As against that there’s a warmth and essential goodness to the show, expressed in the wonderful set piece episodes: the comic funeral eulogy of ‘Free Churro,’ the quiz battle ‘Let’s Find Out,’ the multiple Halloween narratives of ‘Mr Peanutbutter’s Boos’ and the underwater odyssey of ‘Fish Out of Water’. All of it makes this a programme its hapless hero would love to have created – something that makes us laugh and forget our cares, even as it tells us how hard it is to be a horse, and a man.