Book Review: Big Sky

Shadowy pasts come to the fore in this crime novel

Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky sees the return of Jackson Brodie, now a private investigator, in a follow up to the author’s previous crime novels. It is a work that stands well enough on its own even if one hasn’t read the preceding books. In Big Sky, there are mysteries and secrets and a fair bit of intrigue.

On the face of it, the North Yorkshire village Brodie finds himself in is rather serene. There are stage shows and World War II commemorations, and the woodlands. It might have been idyllic, except that Brodie’s son Nathan is young and bored and rude, his dog Dido is ageing although friendly, and he finds himself entangled in a very peculiar mess.

Big Sky begins with a bewildering cast of characters. Chapters switch between third-person perspectives as more and more individuals are introduced, and this does get confusing. There is the insecure and very depressed Vince, trying to fit in with a group of friends who won’t let him in. Vince’s life is in shambles. He has lost his job, his marriage is on the rocks, and his daughter is off abroad on holiday. Nothing seems to be going right. To top it all, he goes golfing with three men he just cannot seem to befriend.

Crystal is married to one of Vince’s ‘friends.’ An outwardly glamorous, health-conscious woman who dotes on her daughter and stepson, she has a shadowy past she tries to keep hidden. The trouble is, her husband has secrets of his own as well.

There’s Harry, Crystal’s aforementioned stepson, who works part-time at the World, where the performers are as varied as they are cranky. More characters are introduced.

Perspectives shift to the enigmatic Polish girls Nadja and Katja. And then you follow Brodie again as he tries to cope with his son’s borderline rude retorts, Vince having trouble with his not-friends, and Crystal again. And then there’s Andy, ferrying foreign girls to dilapidated nursing homes. Detective constables Ronnie and Reggie, who are trying to investigate an old crime. Nobody takes them as seriously as they should because they are young.

Hanging over it all is the not-yet-forgotten shadow of Bassani and Carmody, who were influential and wealthy and held ‘parties’ for children.

It does, at first, seem like a jumble of events and characters and pop culture references that are at times difficult to follow. There are a lot of coincidences in Big Sky and many characters have old secrets that are all linked to each other. But the story does move smoothly enough, and the loose ends are tied up neatly by the time it finishes, even if the resolutions are sometimes a little too convenient.

Although they are numerous and introduced in quick succession, characters are memorable and easy to empathise with, even the little girl who has a unicorn backpack that Brodie becomes obsessed with finding. All of the individuals have their quirks in Big Sky. From the health food-obsessed Crystal to the bewildered Brodie trying to deal with his son. Or even the elderly dog, Dido. The narrative has a wry sense of humour running through it.

As for Jackson Brodie, he is a likeable figure. Most of the time, he is made to feel old and snubbed by his young son Nathan. There is history and art and culture he would like to talk about to his son. Except that his son is mostly on social media and couldn’t care a whit. He stumbles into the crimes in this novel without actively pursuing them, it seems. Things just happen and he finds himself in the middle of it all.

The novel grapples with dark and disturbing subjects — of human trafficking and deception and fake websites luring impressionable young women into a web of deceit. There are also careless references tossed around here and there, and some of the characters have borderline racist undertones to their thinking. Imagining that the Filipino girls brought into the country for nefarious purposes eat strange food, for example, on page 127. “They ate all kinds of crap where they came from — chicken feet and fried insects and God knows what. They were excited by the supermarket.” Poor girls. Obviously there are no supermarkets where they came from, according to the worldly wise Andy, once of Vince’s not-friends.

Big Sky is, overall, an interesting novel that handles its themes very well. Characterisation is treated deftly, capturing the nuances of feeling. The crimes of trafficking and abuse are expertly handled without explicit details. There is enough in the text to give the reader an idea of what transpired without undue elaboration, and it is a technique that works.