Book rant (sorry, Kate Atkinson)

[glittertigger]

I’m giving up on a book part way through. I very rarely do this, so I’m writing this to explain why, if only to myself. I liked Kate Atkinson’s first novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum”, a great deal. I found it engaging, well-plotted, quirky and full of talent and promise. I skipped her second novel because the blurb put me off (not fair, I admit) and recently read the third, “Emotionally Weird”. It contained some good ideas and characters but overall felt fragmented and unpolished and failed to really engage me. I finished it feeling like I wanted the last few hours of my life back, which is never a good result.

My mother just passed on one of Atkinson’s whodunnits, “When Will There Be Good News”, to me and as a friend had also recommended it I’ve given it a try. I almost gave up on page one due to clumsy prose (I *know* you can write better, Kate, and the first page matters) but persevered. The first chapter introduces some young children in lots of detail, before a stranger appears from nowhere and stabs two of them. This does get an emotional reaction from me; the reaction is irritation with the author for using cheap tricks. 20% of the way through the (long) book, this incident and the surviving child have, as far as I can tell, never been mentioned again. Chapter two is an interior monologue from a bloke who comes over as hideously creepy but is then revealed as a clever detective, so apparently he’s a hero instead. Then (in yet another setting) lots of time is spent introducing a 16-year-old girl with whom the author does start to succeed in engaging me. As this process is rather slow, an attempt is made to speed things up by mentioning both her parents dying in separate tragic incidents. That’s not necessary. And as if an editor has said “we need to know more about her family” the mother is described by a page long list: hair colour, age at marriage, job, names of friends and favourite author, catch-phrase, etc. That’s not introducing a character, that’s just copying your notes into the book.

The book seems to have no coherence, no warmth, no dialogue and the pace is turgid. The reviews quoted at the front of “When Will There Be Good News” tell me the author doesn’t bother tying up most of the plot strands at the end. They describe it as “subverting the genre”. I suspect that isn’t what I’d call it, but can’t be bothered to read another 400 pages of this to find out. The really frustrating thing is that I still want to read more from the author who wrote “Behind the Scenes at the Museum”, but she seems to have vanished.