Minneapolis/St. Paul

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

by John Freeman
December 8, 2004

What is the proper way to grieve a dead child? Do you keep her room pristine, lay flowers on a grave every week? Or should you burn everything, have a new child, and try to forget that the first one ever existed? Theo Wyre certainly seems to be following the former path. "Closure, that was what they called it," thinks Wyre, one of three characters nursing a loss in Kate Atkinson's fourth novel, Case Histories. "It sounded so Californian. He had avoided the word, avoided the act, but he knew he couldn't get to his grave not knowing who the man in the yellow golfing sweater was."

Indeed, it's hard to blame him. Some 10 years previous a nondescript fellow of the same description waltzed into a law office looking for Theo, and, not finding him, killed his daughter instead. It's the kind of freak incident that news outlets feast upon like vampires, while some terribly unlucky mother and father sob themselves to sleep. Case Histories begins with the risky gambit of giving us not one, but three such incidents; the other two involve the abduction of a three-year-old girl, and a mother who takes an axe to the skull of her loutish husband.

All three of these case histories have landed on the desk of private investigator Jackson Brodie. A divorced Francophilic chain-smoker who has spent so much time in law enforcement that "nothing, but nothing that anyone did surprised him anymore," Brodie bumbles his way from one bemusing revelation to another like a sleepy, down-on-his luck Colombo. Suddenly, it seems like these three cases may, in fact, be one. "Amelia and Julia Land had found something," he notes, when the two adult sisters of a lost child discover their long lost sibling's toy in their father's home. "Theo Wyre had lost something. How easy life would be if it could be one and the same thing."

Although Atkinson's plot folds in on itself with a tidiness that approaches the facile, she never lets us forget that these three losses are utterly different, and, ultimately, unknowable to the people who unwittingly share them. In drawing this portrait of three disparate souls in search of a narrative, Atkinson suggests "closure" is a dream that only artificial forms like the novel can provide. It is a testament to her sorcery that you can finish Case Histories without the faintest aftertaste of aspartame.

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