When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie Novel #3) by Kate Atkinson: Signed First Edition (Doubleday, 2008)

It was my birthday a few weeks ago. I make mention of this not because I expect anyone reading this to care, nor, in the unlikely event that anyone reading this should care, to elicit belated birthday wishes or, more appositely, expressions of sympathy at my obtruding state of decrepitude, but because by dint of managing to stay alive for another year I received two signed books – one a present from my sister (who has form in this regard), the other a present from, er, myself. And since I'm in the midst of a run of posts on signed books, what better time to unveil them, beginning with the book I bought for myself, which I spotted on eBay for under a fiver and figured that I deserved as a modest birthday treat:

A first edition/first impression of When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, published in hardback by Doubleday in 2008, dust jacket photograph by Tim Kahane. The third novel in Atkinson's four-book (thus far) series featuring dour middle-aged private investigator Jackson Brodie, I have actually blogged about this edition before: I bought a secondhand copy in Oxfam Books in Brighton in 2011 and shortly after posted this missive, in which I made some snide remarks about the dust jacket copywriter (and assembled a Jackson Brodie first edition cover gallery, but that's by the by). As it turned out, those remarks were not only snide but ill-informed and wide of the mark: having since read the novel I've discovered that it does indeed shed "new light on to the nature of fate, and on to the human condition itself", and it has since become my favourite of the Jackson Brodie series: a warm, wise, witty, deeply affecting novel about love, loss and, as Neil Hannon once put it, the certainty of chance.

I'm not sure why When Will There Be Good News? struck more of a nerve with me than the other Jackson Brodie novels – Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006) and Started Early, Took My Dog (20010) – all of which I like a lot; certainly the tangled web of human interaction which drives the story, and which greatly appeals to me, is no more tangled – nor indeed web-like – here than in the other books. But the twists and turns do, I think, in this instance pack an additional punch, even for an emotional cripple like myself – no more so than at the midpoint, where Jackson makes a revelatory post-traumatic recovery, and in the penultimate chapter, where a cathartic reveal, also involving Jackson, neatly bookends the horrific prologue in the wheat field.

Anyway, whatever the reason, this signed first edition, bearing on the title page Atkinson's initials – as opposed to her full signature; see my first of her most recent novel, Life After Life – is a nice addition to my collection, and now nestles alongside my similarly signed first of the preceding Brodie novel, One Good Turn.

Signed editions of Kate Atkinson's various novels are in fairly plentiful supply – there are over 150 on AbeBooks alone, ten of which being the Doubleday first of When Will There Be Good News? – but signed books by the next author I'll be blogging about about are somewhat thinner on the ground. In fact there are just two signed copies that I know of among the eighteen novels in his backlist; and with my most recent birthday present from my sister, I now own both of them.

Choose Your Own Adventure: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2013); Signed First Edition

As I'm sure I've stated before, I don't buy many new (as in, newly written and published) novels; my tastes tend to run to older, usually mustier tomes (although those tomes, though frequently foxed and smelling of fags, are often as not "new" to me). But occasionally either a new novel will catch my eye – as was the case recently with Roger Hobbs's debut, Ghostman, which I bought and read shortly after publication (verdict: not bad at all) – or an author whose work I admire will publish a new novel and I might find myself inclined to pick it up. Which brings me to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.

I love Atkinson's four Jackson Brodie novels – I've blogged about them a few times – but I've never read any of her non-Brodie books, so I was in two minds whether or not to try Life After Life, which was published by Doubleday in March of this year under a dust jacket designed by Claire Ward. In the end, the prospect of securing a signed first edition at cover price swayed me, along with the novel's premise: a woman, Ursula, dies over and over again at various junctures of her life, from childhood to adulthood, throughout the twentieth century until she gets it "right". I'm a sucker for a World War II-related alternate history tale (which Life After Life in part is) – Len Deighton's SS-GB, Sarban's The Sound of His Horn, C. J. Sansom's Dominion – so for me the novel's science fiction trappings – to use the term loosely – were an additional lure, even though I knew going in that the hows and whys of Ursula's plight probably wouldn't be addressed.

Which of course they aren't. But in the event, it turns out Atkinson has inadvertently tapped into a rather different form of storytelling than the alternate history thriller (and it'll be no surprise to anyone familiar with Atkinson's work that Life After Life isn't a thriller, either, even though it opens with an assassination attempt on Hitler). Structurally, the form the novel most brought to mind for me was that of the video game, or perhaps more accurately those old "choose your own adventure" Fighting Fantasy books. Video games and Fighting Fantasy novels both hinge on a learning process: you get something wrong the first time, get killed, and have to start again either at the beginning or earlier in that level, and that's pretty much how Life After Life works too, both for Ursula and in a more passive sense for the reader. In fact, you could probably chop the novel up and rearrange it in the same manner as The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and it would still function reasonably well. ("If you want to retrieve the dolly Queen Solange from the snowy rooftop, turn to page 87; if you want to leave her where she is, turn to page 36.")

I say Atkinson has "inadvertently" alighted on this approach because I kind of doubt she's ever played a video game, or indeed read The Citadel of Chaos. In that sense, while the novel's structure might have more resonance and perhaps even be more familiar to younger generations than linear storytelling, it's not comparable to what, for instance, Christopher Brookmyre was getting at in a recent interview in SFX to promote his novel Bedlam (thank you to Book Glutton for bringing it to my attention) when he said that video games are changing storytelling, pointing to the film Source Code as possessing "the structure of playing a videogame, you have someone who has to keep reloading the game until he's got it right". It's more feasible that it's a side effect of a parallel development in home computing: word processing, which has made it far easier, far more natural-feeling, for writers to write in a disjointed, out of sequence fashion – something that many have always done anyway – noting random lines of dialogue, penning whole scenes before embarking on a book – but which writing on a word processor particularly lends itself to.

Mind you, I've no idea what Kate Atkinson uses to write with or on – computer, typewriter, pen and paper, an Etch A Sketch. From the little I've read about her, the scattershot, seemingly meandering quality of her novels is merely a symptom of how her mind works; witness the parenthetical asides which litter her books (Atkinson has said that she herself thinks in brackets). So the structure of Life After Life could simply be a case of Atkinson starting the novel over and over again, allowing Ursula to drift almost of her own accord into a succession of (slightly deadly) cul-de-sacs (where darkness, the "black bat", awaits her) and then rewinding and trying a different plot branch.

In the final analysis, it doesn't really matter how Atkinson arrived at the approach (thus making my musings in this post even more pointless than usual); the novel is what it is: enchanting, frustrating, breathless, confounding, but above all beautifully written – and in that sense at least the equal of the Jackson Brodie books. By way of illustration, I'll leave you with a passage from early in the novel, describing how the baby Ursula is regularly left alone in her pram in the garden by Bridget, the maid, at the behest of Ursula's mother, Sylvie, who has "inherited a fixation with fresh air from her own mother, Lottie":

Bare branches, buds, leaves – the world as she knew it came and went before Ursula's eyes. She observed the turn of the seasons for the first time. She was born with winter already in her bones, but then came the sharp promise of spring, the fattening of the buds, the indolent heat of summer, the mould and mushroom of autumn. From within the limited frame of the pram hood she saw it all. To say nothing of the somewhat random embellishments the seasons brought with them – sun, clouds, birds, a stray cricket ball arcing silently overhead, a rainbow once or twice, rain more often than she would have liked. (There was sometimes a tardiness to rescuing her from the elements.)

Once there had even been the stars and a rising moon – astonishing and terrifying in equal measure – when she had been forgotten one autumn evening. Bridget was castigated.

When Will There Be Good News? (Brighton Book Bargain), Plus a Kate Atkinson First Edition Cover Gallery

So, as I mentioned yesterday, around the same time I won that signed edition of Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn – the second in the novelist's series of four novels featuring Jackson Brodie – on eBay, serendipitously I also came across this in Oxfam Books in Brighton:

A UK hardback first edition/first printing of the third Jackson Brodie novel (purchased for the princely sum of £1.99), published by Doubleday in 2008. I haven't read this one yet, but it sees the return not only of the dour Mr. Brodie but of policewoman Louise Monroe from One Good Turn as well, now seemingly promoted if the dustjacket blurb is to be believed: 

In a quiet corner of rural Devon, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime.

Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime, Andrew Decker, is released from prison.

In Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Reggie, wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for a GP. But Dr Hunter has gone missing and Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried.

Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling towards her is an old friend – Jackson Brodie – himself on a journey that is about to be fatally interrupted.

In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson produces one of the most engrossing, brilliantly written and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. When Will There Be Good News? sheds new light on to the nature of fate, and on to the human condition itself.

Hmm, might be slightly overselling it there, copywriter person. If the previous two Brodie novels are anything to go by, I'm sure it's a fine read, but shedding new light on (er, "to", unnecessarily) the nature of fate and on (er, "to" again, equally unnecessarily) the human condition? Them's mighty big claims, pardner. But hey, maybe the copywriter is correct. I guess I'll find out when I read the book...

I can't tell you who designed the dustjacket on this edition because there's no credit, apart from one for the front cover photo, which is by Tim Kahane/Trigger Image. It's entirely possible Transworld's Claire Ward had a hand in it – she designed the jacket for 2010's fourth Jackson Brodie novel Started Early, Took My Dog – but that's pure conjecture on my part. However, now that I have all four of Atkinson's Brodie books, I reckon it's about time for a UK first edition cover gallery:

  
Case Histories, Doubleday, 2004; dustjacket illustration by Michelle Thompson

One Good Turn, Doubleday, 2006; dustjacket illustration by Neil Gower, dustjacket design by Gavin Morris

  
When Will There Be Good News?, Doubleday, 2008; dustjacket photo by Tim Kahane

  
Started Early, Took My Dog, Doubleday, 2010; front cover photo by Tracey Paterson, back cover photo by Mauritius/Alamy, patterns by Petra Bonner/Dutch Uncle, dustjacket design by Claire Ward/TW

Marvellous. Right then. Next up: a bunch of Lewes Book Bargains, namely some rather spiffing editions of SF author James Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy...

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday): A Signed First Edition and a Short Review Thereof

Aaaand I'm back. Slightly longer gap than planned there: unfortunately I had something of a family medical emergency to deal with over the weekend, so blogging had to take a back seat. But I did manage to have a thoroughly pleasant day out for my birthday on Friday before the crisis erupted, during which I visited a couple of my favourite secondhand bookshops – Camilla's in Eastbourne and Much Ado Books in Alfriston (plus sundry charity shops) – and ended up with a stack of novels by, among others, Adam Hall, Anthony Price and Gavin Lyall. Plus I got to scoff a massive cream tea in Alfriston:

Yum. So it hasn't all been doom and gloom (and, fingers crossed, the medical emergency has been resolved too). I'll be blogging about the books I bought down the line sometime, but so far as the rest of this week goes, all being well I'll have a few (unrelated) posts on literary crime writer Kate Atkinson and science fiction author James Blish. Starting with this:

A UK hardback first edition/first printing of Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn, published by Doubleday in 2006 with a dustjacket illustration by Neil Gower and jacket design by Gavin Morris (Gower and Morris have worked together on a number of book covers – and in fact Mr. Gower lives and works in the same East Sussex town as me, Lewes, and often designs the covers for local listings mag Viva Lewes). Ah, but this isn't just any first edition:

Because it's also signed, although in this instance not with a full signature but with Atkinson's initials, something I believe she's known for. I won this on eBay for not too much money at all, and read it in pretty short order thereafter; I loved Case Histories, the first in Atkinson's series of novels featuring misery guts middle-aged private investigator Jackson Brodie, so I devoured One Good Turn – which is the second book in the series – almost as soon as I got it.

Much as she did in Case Histories, Atkinson once again presents us with a number of seemingly unrelated narratives, all of which gradually intertwine, with Jackson at the heart of them. The backdrop is the Edinburgh Festival, to which Jackson's partner, Julia (with whom he became involved in Case Histories), has dragged the reluctant Mr. Brodie because she's starring in a fringe theatre production. For his part Jackson has nothing better to do, having inherited two million quid at the end of the previous book and retired from the P.I. business to live in a house in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Naturally he's now bored shitless, so when the dots begin to join between a road rage incident and a dead Russian girl, Jackson can't resist sticking his oar in.

It's those delicious coincidences and connections that make Atkinson's novels so special, but they wouldn't be quite so fascinating if the characters weren't so brilliantly drawn. Each chapter in One Good Turn is told from the perspective of, variously, a sad sack pseudonymous writer, a housewife with a newly comatose and hospitalized husband who's being investigated by the Specialist Fraud Unit, a single mum policewoman and Jackson himself, but in a sense it doesn't really matter whose head Atkinson has clambered inside: in her hands, even the most minor characters become utterly compelling.

Indeed, it's so enjoyable spending time in each of their companies – following their meandering thought processes, looking on as they're buffeted by events they have little control over – that, as with Case Histories, it's a real shame when the novel has to end. Thankfully, there are still two more Brodie mysteries for me to read – and as luck would have it, right around the same time as I won this copy of One Good Turn on eBay, I happened to find a first edition of the next book in the series in a charity shop in Brighton... a Brighton Book Bargain, if you will...

A Meandering Review of the Novel Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Well I fair plowed through this one. Considering Case Histories clocks in at around 300 pages and I only started reading it Wednesday last week, polishing it off by Monday isn't bad at all. It's understandable though: on this evidence, Kate Atkinson is a really good, compelling writer. I'm not going to post a proper summary/analysis here – I'm sure there's plenty of that online already – but for posterity, and for my own reference, some stray thoughts:

I loved all of the characters in Case Histories. Character is what Atkinson is all about. The various strands of the story proceed in fits and starts, rubbing up against each other and interweaving, but they're always related from the perspective of a particular character. Not in the first person, mind: Atkinson writes here in the omniscient third person. But she does get inside the heads of her characters brilliantly, so that a lot of the events in the book are related by people looking back on those events and attempting to interpret them, or experiencing them now and trying to interpret them as they go along, with all the intellectual and emotional muddle that entails.

Atkinson's secret is, she writes how people think. So, say, Theo, whose daughter was killed ten years ago (one of the case histories of the title), might be doing one thing but thinking another, or rather doing one thing that sets him thinking about another. Atkinson follows that thought process, sometimes revealing clues along the way, or at least hinting at them, sometimes just filling in background. At one point, private investigator Jackson Brodie – our ostensible hero, although the likes of bereaved sisters Amelia and Julia get just as much page time – visits Amelia and Julia's other surviving sister, Sylvia, in a convent. Sylvia has taken the name Sister Michael, which sets Jackson off ruminating on why high street store Marks & Spencer use St Michael as the name for their own-brand goods. It's the kind of inconsequential connection one's mind makes all the time, the sort of mental sidestep that can lead to inspiration or, just as likely, an interesting but ultimately useless cul-de-sac. Both eventualities are in abundance in Case Histories.

Towards the end of the novel, unexpectedly it becomes really funny, so much so that I laughed out loud a couple of times. Jackson in particular comes into his own in the second half of the book: he's increasingly put-upon and disaster-prone, lurching from humiliation at the hands of his ex-wife and her new partner, to being mugged (or not, as the case may be), to having his house blown up – a turn of events that stopped me in my tracks it was so unexpected – much of which results in repeated trips to the hospital.

The final revelations of the three main case histories don't come as much of a shock; I'd guessed most of them by that point anyway. But that doesn't matter: as ever, it's the journey that's important, and Case Histories is a winding, complicated excursion in the company of a disparate bunch of messed-up people who you nevertheless really wouldn't mind hanging out with again.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories, Started Early, Took My Dog, and Book Design

There's no rhyme nor reason to this week's posts (one could make a similar case for most weeks' posts...); I'm still trying to catch up on the backlog of books that's been building up, so, much like yesterday and the day before, the next few days will essentially consist of a random series of posts on whatever takes my fancy. And today, we have two books, starting with this:

A UK hardback first edition/first impression of Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, published by Doubleday in 2004, with an intriguingly abstract dustjacket illustration by Michelle Thompson. I've only just started reading it, and am enjoying it thus far (character and digression seem to be watchwords), but I've never read any other of Atkinson's books. So why, if I'm not familiar with her oeuvre, did I track down a first edition of this particular novel, I hear you cry? Excellent question. Well, as I say, I'd never read any of Atkinson's work, but I saw her new book, Started Early, Took My Dog, was out (published by Doubleday), and getting good notices. And of course Started Early is the fourth of Atkinson's novels to feature private investigator Jackson Brodie, and I couldn't very well buy the fourth book in a series without at least getting the first book in the series, now could I? I mean, that would be sheer madness.

So I bought Started Early, Took My Dog, ostensibly so Rachel (a.k.a. The Bird) could read it, as she's read a couple of the other Brodie books, and I found an inexpensive first edition of Case Histories so that I could start reading the series too. But I'm not very far into it yet, and I get the feeling Atkinson deserves more than my customary one-line largely-sight-unseen plot summary (Book Glutton, I know you're an Atkinson fan, so feel free to enlighten/elaborate in the comments). So... yeah. Really, this post is even more pointless than usual.

Ah, but of course I do have a point to make (there's a shock) and that's concerning the cover design on Started Early, Took My Dog. Now, as a rule, I'm not overly keen on contemporary cover design, at least not that which graces (disgraces?) novel dustjackets. The form for designers seems to be: find a nice font; alight on a vaguely relevant/failing-that-moody image of a person/house/if-all-else-fails-tree from an image library (which can lead to amusing duplication; The Rap Sheet has lots of examples of the same pics popping up on different covers); bung on a texture; job done. (The jacket for Case Histories is all about that unusual illustration, although I guess it at least displays a mind at work in the picking of that illo.) Truly distinctive or memorable jackets are few and far between, and cases are an afterthought, if that.

I'll hopefully be returning to this subject tomorrow (what was that about there being no rhyme or reason to this week's posts? Yeah, I might've lied there; there's always a plan, no matter how half-arsed), but there's usually an exception to every rule, however rambling that rule may be, and the UK hardback of Started Early, Took My Dog is such an exception:

That's a lovely piece of cover design, one of the best I've seen this year. What I like about it is there's evidently a lot of thought gone into it, not least because there are so many names listed on the jacket back flap it almost reads like the closing credits of a movie, or maybe a particularly elaborate band intro. We've got Tracey Paterson credited for the front cover image; Mauritius/Alamy credited for the back cover image (those pesky image libraries are never far away...); Petra Borner/Dutch Uncle on the patterns; and Claire Ward/TW on overall design (and John Bonham on the drums – good evening Norwich, we are here to rock you).

But let's not get too glib (...), because the end result is definitely worth the many cooks that brewed this particular broth. There's a great balance to the jacket, and a nice link between the jacket and the case, with that purple colour and Petra Borner's patterning present on both. The picture on the front continues to intrigue me; I think it's a painting, but I'm not completely certain, and I'm struggling to find anything on Tracey Paterson beyond this list of artists (if that even is her). In any case, the choice of the photo of the abbey on the back is a nice counterpoint to Tracey's front cover image, which I guess is down to Claire Ward, who I believe is creative director at Transworld, Doubleday's parent publisher.

There's clearly a lot of care and attention gone into the book as an object, something you hold in your hands, something tactile, something you'll want to keep and look after. The detailing extends to a subtle bit of embossing on the author's name on the front of the jacket, and even to the endpapers, where there's a nice stone effect instead of the standard flat colour:

It's a good example of how book design can still be beautiful and interesting, even in this age of InDesign, Photoshop, image libraries and all the rest. And the publisher has even seen fit to extend the design across Atkinson's backlist, repackaging the whole line:

Splendid stuff. Well done that publisher. And, as mentioned, more on cover design tomorrow.