Customer Reviews: Read 58 more reviews...
 Emotionally thin October 5, 2008
What a disappointment after Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, where Jackson Brodie made his appearance. Case Histories had the thrill of the quest and the art of detection, played out by emotionally weird yet disturbingly real families and individuals. It was quite outside genre.
One Good Turn takes place in Iain Rankin land but really, are any of the characters even as believable as Rankin's "Big Mo" Rafferty? Brodie's character seems to be slipping into the background; the hero Martin Canning is not quite believable and not quite interesting either. Rankin, le Carre and Eric Ambler can do the innocent caught up in horrible events; Atkinson evidently can't, though like most reviewers I did read the book to the end, and quite fast too.
No coincidence, surely, that in the novel Canning is being hectored by a publisher's editor to churn out fast-selling, mediocre thrillers.
Finally, I can live without English authors "doing" Edinburgh with a surfeit of name dropping and nonsense (maybe in another of her books) about "presbyterian genes".
 What Grows From One Incident September 16, 2008
A road rage incident is witnessed by a queue of people outside a lunchtime show at the Edinburgh Festival. The novel weaves together the seemingly disparate stories of some of the witnesses, all increasingly interlinking as the narrative unfolds.
The characters themselves at first, each in their seemingly disjointed and episodic narratives, all seem like typical thriller stereotypes. There is the wife of an unscrupulous and unfaithful property developer, a wimpish crime writer, a single-mother policewoman with a son on the verge of villainy, and Jackson Brodie: ex-army, ex-police, ex-private-eye and - at first - almost a walking cliche.
However, Atkinson, with deft touches of characterisation, breathes life and credibility into these various characters and weaves together the stories wittily and masterfully, akin to the set of nested Russian dolls that feature in the narrative. Atkinson creates a novel here that succeeds both as a thriller and as a study of character through emotional drama that would put many a so-called `literary novel' to shame.
 Not a patch on Case Histories September 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Case Histories was marvellous and original and I'd recommend it to anyone. This, however, is not a great follow up and I, for one, hope Atkinson moves on to something entirely new sooner rather than later. She is such a fine writer.
 Kate Atkinson manages to weave an incredible web August 27, 2008
This book is a masterpiece. Kate Atkinson manages to weave a web of storylines together with such mastery that you have to wonder where her starting point is.
Reading this book reminds me exactly what I loved about Behind the Scenes at the Museum and other great books by this author.
I wish I cared July 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This was the most frustrating book I've read in years. I finished it because I'd enjoyed Case Histories and so kept thinking it would improve, but it didn't. The book starts with a good piece of action and then drifts into the characters' streams of consciousness. As most of the characters aren't particularly interesting or else are not believable, their consciousness is never more than an irritating diversion from the occasional page of plot. I wish I cared about them or what they did, but I didn't. Sometimes authors should take a year or two off to think rather than write something fast to please their publishers. Kate Atkinson can certainly do better.
|
