Costa Award winner Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky heralds the return of private detective Jackson Brodie. Having set up shop in a small fossil of a town along the U.K.’s north-eastern coast, Brodie must parent his surly teenage son Nathan and chaperone his ex-partner’s ageing labrador Dido, all the while shadowing the dullest cheating husband in the world. The town’s a shell of what it used to be — crumbling arcades, cobweb-filled tourist attractions, rundown theatres dot it and the town’s occupants are constantly down on their luck. But everybody remembers what it was, and memories of the past remain inconsolably present.
The re-opening of a cold case forces a collision between the skeletons forgotten and those yet to be found. Brodie’s instincts, honed from years of experience, must now contend with familial duties and the physical toll of ageing. Into the country club milieu of Big Sky , Atkinson brings back characters from previous novels — young Reggie Chase, who is also a detective now; the Russian honeypot, Tatiana; and Brodie’s ex-girlfriend and philosophical foil, Julia. There’s a host of new players as well — the alpha male Tommy; the luckless burnt-out Vince who has lost his job to employment cuts, his vicious wife to a fireman, and his self-esteem to both; Vince’s childhood friend and slick lawyer Steve; and hotel-owner Andy.
Tommy, Andy and Steve are bound together by more than just a common tee time — they run a criminal pipeline that supplies trafficked children for ‘entertainment’. But contrary to stereotypes about such evil masterminds, these men are caught up in the everyday rut of relationships. Through them, Atkinson takes a piercing look at suburban life in all its banal details. Atkinson’s liberal doses of dry British wit and humorous visual metaphors make the tantalising pace of the plot bearable. Case in point, when Vince compares his wife’s bonsai hobby to her “snipping at his soul, trimming him down to a dwarf version of himself”.
In Big Sky , Atkinson uses the small-town setting to speak for her characters. One gets the sense that time is an onion slowly being peeled. Each layer has a different coating of grime; each unpeeling reveals more rot and decay. There are so many layers at play that one wonders how they could possibly be connected. But they are and, ever so brilliantly, Atkinson unravels how . At the heart of Big Sky are characters breaking free from their base selves — getting even, serving justice, or simply taking control of their lives.
The writer is a freelance author and illustrator.
Big Sky; Kate Atkinson, Penguin Random House, ₹599
