Case Histories

The three "case histories" of Kate Atkinson's title are all narratives of criminal cases gone awry or unsolved.  But, as the quiet pun suggests, they are also clinical histories of psychosis and melancholia. Atkinson's fragmented and sometimes refractory narrative structure complements the novel's shattered emotional landscape: characters move through a world in which not a single family survives intact, whether the underlying cause is sexual abuse, adultery, murder, divorce, or disease.  Into this world comes Jackson Brodie, a relatively unsuccessful PI and ex-cop, whose own "case history" braids the other three stories together.

Given Brodie's presence, the reader expects a detective novel.  At the Litblog Co-Op, the dissenting opinion argues that "Atkinson makes an effort to elevate the conventions of mystery fiction to a higher plane, to use them as a way to explore such things as isolation, loss, missed connections, class issues, and random violence, but the novel never really reaches a point where the writing or approach feels fresh enough to justify the exercise."  It's not clear that "elevate" is quite the verb required here.  There's nothing original in noting that, as genre fiction goes, even the most generic mystery novel often dwells at great and self-reflexive length on the mechanisms of plotting and interpretation.  Atkinson's efforts in that line--especially her interest in the stories characters tell themselves about their motivation or agency--don't break the mold.  Similarly, the somewhat run-down and automobile-obsessed Jackson doesn't differ noticeably from other divorced detectives.  The novel's refusal to deal out legal justice to the murderers in the three main plots has its own illustrious pedigree, ranging from Sherlock Holmes' flexibility when it comes to handing criminals over to the police to the Golden Age detective's habit of tactfully leaving the murderer a gun with which to kill himself.   And contemporary British mystery novelists like Ian Rankin or Reginald Hill might be startled to hear that they don't deal in "higher" themes.  (In fact, Hill's Death's Jest Book, which is admittedly a bit of a mess, shares Case Histories' interest in destroyed families and the trauma of loss.) 

In other words, Case Histories isn't trying to be something other or more "elevated" than a mystery novel; it is a mystery novel.  This is not to argue that the novel has nothing to say about the mystery genre.  I agree with other readers that the ending is the novel's least successful part, but it's also the point at which the novel tries to call at least one genre convention into question--that is, the significance of solving crimes in the first place.  By the end of the novel, Amelia and Julia Land have learned who murdered their sister, but have no plans to expose her; Theo Wyre knows who murdered his daughter, but prefers to devote himself to his newly-acquired "child," Lily-Rose (herself a refugee from a different plot); and Caroline, the framed murderess, continues to act out her chameleonic liberty.  Jackson, meanwhile, retires after receiving an inheritance out of the blue.  Given that this novel practically defines England as a nation of the walking psychologically wounded, it's not  surprising that the novel's ending undercuts all of the solutions; the characters must decide to solve their own problems, instead of asking the detective to act as savior--even if Jackson provides some necessary help along the way.  In other words, the novel "kills off" the detective's role as society's last resort in a chaotic world.