I always find re-reading a book fascinating. In the last few years with so many good books out there (and also sat on my shelves) waiting to be read the first time I haven’t re-read nearly as much as I’d like to. It’s always reassuring to find a book which is as good the second time around as it was the first. It makes me feel like I’ve got in touch and am still in agreement with an earlier me. Occasionally, on second read the book doesn’t quite match the memories but it’s always a delightful surprise when on a re-read the book turns out to be even better than you remember and that is what has happened with this.
My records say I read this in 2005 and really enjoyed it rating it 4 stars. It did not make my end of year Top 10 that year in a list topped by “Middlesex” by Jeffery Eugenides and including real favourite authors of mine; a John Steinbeck, Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Bennett and Andrea Levy (I’m actually very impressed with what I read in 2005!) I had read Atkinson’s debut “Behind The Scenes At The Museum” (1995) some years before and had enjoyed that- another 4 star read. My relationship with this author changed when I read her stunning “Life After Life” (2013) and its five star associated novel “A God In Ruins” (2015). I decided I wanted to get back into her Jackson Brodie series of novels when the announcement was made that she was to publish “Big Sky” in 2019 but realised I could remember nothing at all about “Case Histories” and that I should start this series with a re-read of this title, especially as I hadn’t got round to reading any of the subsequent novels in this series.
I can see from my Book Journal that I first read this in August, at the height of the summer and it took me what seems like an astonishingly long time of 14 days to read (this time, perhaps thanks to lockdown I polished it off in four). I thought that this might have been the key to me not adoring it. Perhaps something was going on I was preoccupied with in 2005. That got me trawling through the loft to find 2005’s diary and discovering that I thought it was “a well-written, nicely plotted and tied up detective story”. This seems like faint praise for a novel which 15 years later I thought was excellent. That’s the magic of re-reads….
I actually didn’t have any of the plot recall that I would normally expect (even with a 15 year gap). It read like a book I hadn’t read before which does make me wonder what was going on in the summer of 2005! The novel starts in the summer of 1970, in a period of hot, unbroken weather and introduces us to the Land family, four girls, a distracted mother and a disinterested father. This forms the first of three historic cases which feature one after the other, one from 1994 and one 1979 which are brought to the attention of Jackson Brodie, an ex-policeman now working as a private detective. These cases make a marked change from Brodie’s usual trailing of suspected adulterous spouses and take his mind, temporarily, off his own fractured personal situation.
What stands this novel above much crime fiction is the sheer quality of the writing, a richness of cultural references which makes the events feel totally real. There’s so much in Atkinson’s writing, an ability to turn from humour to tragedy in a couple of sentences in a way which feels so plausible and convincing. She really does take the reader on a ride and this may very well be why a re-read works so well. There is so much to take in, so much that seems incidental to the plot but which adds to the wealth and richness of the novel. I’m really liking Jackson Brodie and hope it won’t be that long before I move onto the second of the five books in this celebrated series which has got off to an excellent start (even if it has taken me 15 years to recognise this).
Case Histories was published in 2005. I read a hardback edition but it is easily available as a Black Swan paperback in the UK.
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