Note added July 27, 2011. This was my original post about Started early, took my dog. Near the end I mention that birthmark. This resulted in various theories being discussed in the Comments at the end of the post. And – July 12 2011 – I’d just re-read Started Early and posted what I think are some conclusions along with a few other thoughts
I was surprised to find, in the book I’m currently reading (‘Hitler’s private library’, of which more another day), ‘Mein Kampf’ described as “Dickensian”, because that is precisely the adjective that invariably springs to mind (or mine at least) when considering the novels of Kate Atkinson. Along with the varied cast of quirky individuals all with their own tales and the tangled web of the plots, we get the moral outrage more usually associated with Charles Dickens and the deep cynicism about the way the world (especially the modern world) works, but also, a broad compassion for the good people who must live in it. And this one’s plot revolves around adoptions and orphanages for good Dickensian measure. The prose is less convoluted but loses nothing for that.
‘Started early, took my dog‘ (Doubleday, 2010) starts off with, in separate incidents, the bad treatment in a public place – a shopping mall – of a child and a dog; both are rescued in spontaneous acts of practical charity. A woman buys the child, which is a big part of the book, while the dog is rescued by Jackson Brodie, the sort-of private eye making his fourth appearance in this sequence of novels. There are unpleasant crimes at the heart of ‘Started early‘ but the book covers so much more. Brodie is dossing around the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire while vaguely pursuing an enquiry which involves taking in events in swinging ’60s London and mid-70s Leeds at the time of the Ripper.
Jackson Brodie is one of the great literary creations of the era and you get an entertaining retelling of his back story that just makes me want to visit the previous books all over again, but new readers can start in on the sequence here with safety. Currently unattached, what emerges is a penchant for women whose names begin with J; a first wife, Josie, a second, Julia, who functions as a caustically affectionate significant other in his head, and a Sat-nav called Jane. This J connection isn’t spelt out but it’s the sort of fun Kate Atkinson has. The delicious tangents she characteristically spins off on are still in full working order – here’s a small but perfectly formed example; Jackson has been catching up on literature:
“What he discovered was the great novels of the world were about three things – death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”
I guess you either love it or look the other way. A spotty youth, “looked like he had been swimming in a very small gene pool.” A policeman’s wife, “was always rigged out ready for an impromptu invitation to lunch with the queen.” Fish and chips are “Northern soul food.” You can quote one-liners endlessly. Here’s another one, much in tenor with the overall mood of the book:
“More and more these days he had noticed he felt like a visitor from another planet. or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn’t just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.”
Hey, but we keep on keeping on. At a certain stage near the end he puts a Mary Gauthier CD into his car stereo. It’s not a song I knew and nothing is quoted save the title, ‘Mercy now’ but I felt compelled to seek it out:
“We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us
Could use some mercy now”
There’s a beautiful,sad and terrible twist of an ending to one of the minor character’s tales – it would be a spoiler to say any more. It’s a tremendous, lovely book. I should have savoured it more, read it at such a pace that I’m not sure if everything is resolved. Like who the child rescued in the shopping mall actually is. I’ve told others I know will read it to keep an eye open for a birthmark the shape of Africa. And it really is time I read some Emily Dickinson, who gets the last word.
(As mentioned at the top of this post, there is more discussion of Courtney and her birthmark in the Comments at the end of this post. And – July 12 2011 – after re-reading Started Early I have posted what I think are some conclusions along with a few other thoughts).
A final thought: Kate is undoubtedly ‘one of us’. Who are we? Among many things we are the people who wonder why they never switch the lights on in TV crime thrillers:
“Tracy put the light on. No one ever switched the light on […] in TV crime thrillers. For the atmosphere, Tracy supposed. She could live without atmosphere.”
And at a complete tangent, atmosphere enough when I went to newly promoted to the Football League Stevenage‘s new ground in the company of a couple of avowed groundhoppers on Saturday. I was the one of the 3,431 crowd watching a one-all draw ‘twixt Stevenage and Crewe Alexandra, which the Alex should have won. The home fans already give a well-developed and spirited musical performance from the terraces – a good atmosphere. Bizarrely, because of a late-diagnosed clash of kits, Crewe had to play in Stevenage’s all yellow away kit; Alex fans not long in working up a chant of “Yell-Ows”. But the outstanding memory will be of 16 year old Nick Powell‘s coming on as sub 2/3rds of the way through. Another from the famed Dario Gradi academy, suddenly a metaphorical sun came out from the behind the clouds of endeavour on the pitch – grey in the first half, brightening somewhat in the second – speed, trickery, energy and wit way above anything else seen on the pitch all match. They couldn’t live with him (even his own team mates at times not seeing what he saw) and he was fouled relentlessly, just got up and carried on. Phew! I can safely say that a couple of you will have read that name here first!
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I was left wondering the same thing. Not sure if we missed the too-subtle clues, or whether Kate Atkinson’s inner literary author was breaking through her cri-fi re-birth, prompting her to leave pointlessly unsolved mysteries for the sake of spray-on profundity. The former, I fervently hope!
I’ve got two people looking out for me with instructions to notice that birthmark. I’m fairly sure it is mentioned earlier on. I can live with her ‘inner literary author’; it’s where much of the charm comes from.
OK. Nothing is resolved, Kate Atkinson is a big tease. Very early on there’s a seemingly unrelated episode described as happening 6 months earlier. Jackson Brodie, although not identified by name, is in Germany working with someone called Mitch, snatching back a child from an absconding father, on behalf of – and in the pay of – the chld’s rightful custodian, the mother. Mitch, it transpires, on page 261 of the hardback, runs “an investigative outfit that looked for missing kids worldwide” and he keeps a dossier:
So the fairy-costumed child was almost certainly not taken from her mother, but we knew that already. Any number of loose ends dangling for Book 5 of the series, then. Lucky us.
Birthmark is on Courtney’s arm – mentioned on p84 of hardback when Tracy puts her in bath.
Hi Lindsay. And it’s mentioned again with reference to Courtney in the final pages. You think, Hang on – that rings a bell. As indeed it does, but it still doesn’t tell us who Courtney actually is. It’s a big tease.
At the end of the book Jackson mentions that he has never found the brother of the girl that he “recovered” in Germany at the beginning of the book. I took this to mean that this missing brother had a birthmark shaped like Africa on his arm, which meant the brother is Courtney. Which totally threw me because I thought Courtney was a girl. But I didn’t go back and check whether Courtney was actually referred to as a girl or whether I assumed that because she/he was wearing a fairy outfit throughout. I had borrowed it so can no longer check, but would be very curious to see if this is possibly the answer.
Very interesting, Emma. Thanks for that. Like you, the copy I read was not my own – borrowed from a currently beleagured institutions, a public library – but the paperback is out next month. I shall re-read it avidly, keeping an eye out for Courtney’s gender. I look forward to it; re-reading Kate Atkinson you pick up on what you missed the first time around because you were laughing so hard. Yes, given the name along with the fairy costume I just presumed she’s a girl, but if you look at Wikipedia’s entry for ‘Courtney’ as a given name, the ‘notable’ male examples – how could one forget saxophonist Courteney Pine or that fine West Indian fast bowler Courtney Walsh? – outnumber and pre-date the women. (I like the transgender entry at the end: “Courtney Act – stage name of singer Shane Jenek and semi-finalist in Australian Idol in 2003.”). Even if you are right, though, emma, there’s still ambiguity, a coincidence of Victorian novel proportions remains. How, why there, then? Is anything really resolved? Kate Atkinson as trickster or big tease? Will the next book in the sequence pick up the strand?
Yes I agree, she is a big tease and likes to lay little clues that we will find the meaning of much later, perhaps as you say, in the next book. I quite like that and don’t mind too much not finding the answer, but I’ll be checking the gender question as soon as I can!
I did like the gender twist regarding Courtney, however it seems less likely when you remember the alternative names Tracy invents for their ‘alternative life’. Courtney may be gender ambiguous but Lucy is pretty specific. I do feel the birthmark description was too unique to have been a coincidence, so must, from the authors past form, be coming back at some future point. I think there may be more information to come about Jackson’s time in Germany. This is a great twist, Kate Atkinson isn’t going to waste it.
I was thrown by the ending too. I’ve kept my paperback copy, so I’ll go back through it yet again; as soon as I finished the book, I started to re-read it.
When Tracy first spots Courtney, she describes her face as ‘androgynous’. I thought that maybe when she bathed Courtney, Tracy was one of those people who should have gone to Specsavers, and so didn’t notice that the girl was in fact a boy.
There’s nothing in the book about Courtney looking half-Egyptian, like Jennifer, the girl Jackson rescues in Germany. But then, that would probably be a clue too many.
What is Kelly saying to Tracy just after she sells her: ‘She’s not…’?
When Kelly’s running through the shopping mall, is she perhaps trying to escape people who are trying to get Courtney back on behalf of his/her father? Is that maybe why she’s so glad to get shot of the child (it’s not just about the money that Tracy pays her), and is that why she’s murdered?
But why has the brother been billetted with Kelly, rather than being restored to her mother’s home in Tring?
Are the objects in Courtney’s rucksack some sort of clue?
There must be a connection with the girl rescued in Germany, otherwise, why would that episode be in there?
Thanks for that. Labyrinth? Layers of the onion? It’s fascinating. Apart from the odd glitch – Kinks or Stony Stratford Library related – this is over time consistently the most visited page on this blog, due no doubt to all the fellow seekers who’ve contributed above. I’ve had the paperback for a while now but the demands of the Reading Group I’m a member of – who picked Middlemarch? – mean I haven’t had the time to re-read it yet.
There is a sort of reason for the Germany episode – it puts the idea of a possible sibling into Jackson’s mind (see last-but-one page of book). But I agree with other readers – there may be more to follow on this in the next book.
I liked this book a whole lot better than “Behind the scenes at the museum” where I couldn’t stand the narrator’s voice and gave up reading quite early.
I do think crime novels offer an amazing variety these days, from the banal one-word sentences of Lee Child and the like, to the wonderful prose of Kate Atkinson, the comic timing of Reginald Hill, the sinister convolutions of Barbara Vine… etc etc. Whereas “literary” novels are more and more becoming the same (different narrative voices, lots of flashbacks, a scatter of foreign locations, a pinch of sex), reading like film scripts rather than novels. Anyone agree?
Hi Kathy. Well, it all depends; I know what you mean about the short lists for prizes like the Man Booker, especially with English writers. But I was rivetted by C.J.Sansom’s Shardlake sequence of historical crime novels set in Henry VIII’s time and then along comes Booker prize-winning Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ with Thomas Cromwell, a shady but powerful figure best kept at some distance in Sansom’s books, at its centre – the hero, no less – and I’m blown away. I read a fair amount of crime – I keep up with Rankin, Harvey and Robinson, love Florida’s Carl Hiassen for his humour and integrity, rate Martin Edward’s Lake District novels highly, and wish John Baker would return to off-beat crime fiction, though I know he doesn’t want to – and am prepared to argue that as far as ‘state of the nation’ fiction goes, the artistic validity of crime fiction is underestimated. But I’m not convinced crime writers are better writers per se. I do think that unfortunately on the whole the Americans are more interesting with the non-genre novel, though, and cannot get on with Barbara Vine or P.D.James, the more literary of our crime writers. To tell the truth I don’t really see Kate Atkinson as a crime writer, I read and enjoy the Brodies as novels; they share what I like about her ‘straight’ writing – the tangents for starters! Don’t necessarily dismiss ‘Human croquet’ either, Kathy.
I kept a close eye on Courtneys gender as I initially thought that Kelly may have been about to say “She’s not … a girl”
I thought this may come to light when Tracy bathed her but the next paragraph after describing her birthmark begins
“Courtney sat passively while Tracy soaped and rinsed her”
After this Courtney is described as she or her throughout the book so I think we can assume she is in fact female
Thanks for that, Della. Another theory bites the dust. Has anyone tried to asked Kate Atkinson herself, one wonders. I would like to think she keeps her silence, or gives some sort of zen response. Or, indeed, an admission that it’s a puzzle she’s set herself to work out. Nevertheless, soundtrack for these exchanges has to be Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ song “We call upon the author” on the wonderfully titled ‘Dig, Lazarus, dig!’ album. Next words of the lyric being, of course, “to explain”. You could do an awfully lot worse than spend three and a half minutes of your time viewing the official video for the title track ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kV5XkBQsKU ). It’s a hoot. Really good album too.
The birth mark clue is in a huge list of identifying marks kept by Mitch … I don’t think it anything to do with Jennifer, the Munich girl…BUT it means she was a missing child…Kelly was holding her illegally and took the money rather than carry on with it…then was killed by the organised crime gang that had taken Courtenay. I read this on download kindle and it is, of course, so easy to back check details. Just as it makes serious research a thousand times faster than library book days of long ago.
Thanks, Avril Mary. Not sure there’s any advance to be had after that, but we’ll have to see. Having just read ‘Middlemarch’ on an iPad I’m beginning to see the attraction of eBooks – highlighting and notes free of the guilt of vandalism, even when it is your own book! But I think the public libraries we are fighting to save still have a necessary and vital role to play in our communities at a lower level than the serious research you speak of.
Back to Courtney and her race. Could that be why Silly Tilly was so desperate to save her? Could not forget her?
Having re-read ‘Started early’ I’ve just posted my conclusions and some other thoughts, including a brief look at the TV shows, at
http://wp.me/pBz1o-n7.
Or follow the Kate Atkinson tag in the right side bar.
Cheers.
[…] quote from a post back in 2009 (linked here for the purposes of proof but for your convenience repeated immediately below anyway): […]
The birthmark was mentioned in a long list of attributes, not of one child, but of all the dossiers Jackson read when in the employ of the man who found lost children. Courtney is the girl with the birthmark- we know this from Tracy bathing her- but Jackson has seen only her face in his rear-view mirror, and hasn’t connected that face to the (probable) photo in a dossier he’s seen.
Yup, we’re just left dangling, looking for a connection. A bit like real life. Any hopes of resolution with a sequel have been dashed with the publication of the standalone ‘Life after life’ and KA saying she might return to Jackson Brodie, but nothing more than that in prospect.
[…] on Started early, took my dog, the novel that has won a fair number of hits on Lillabullero due to the discussion around the identity in the book of Courtney, the child the Victoria Wood character runs away with on tv. Things are less opaque on the box: […]
ah! I think the clue was ever present snail of snot and the missing adenoids, rather than any birthmark
I’m just going to leave this here. You may be on to something; others may confirm or not.
[…] Lillabullero is also thankful to Kate Atkinson for generating a lot of the traffic here, second only as far as regular hits go, to the systematic treatment given to Peter Robinson‘s Alan (variously DI, DCI etc) Banks sequence of crime novels. We are not a busy website, but an ambiguity involving a child with a ‘birthmark the shape of Africa’ has been puzzling readers ever since the last Jackson Brodie novel, Started early, took my dog, was published back in 2011, and there’s hardly a day goes by without another visitor. You can find my original post about it here: https://quavid.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/started-early-took-my-dog/ […]