3, which dates back to 1979, concerns a very young mother named Michelle, saddled with a screaming baby and an insensitive husband, trapped in a cottage "in the middle of nowhere." Her story ends with another gruesome image, rendered in language precise and chilling: "When you chopped logs with the axe and they split open they smelt beautiful, like Christmas. On her very first day at work, a man wearing "a yellow golfing sweater" walked into the office, pulled out a knife and "scythed through Laura's neck, carving through her carotid artery, sending a great plume of her precious, beautiful blood across the room."Ĭase History No. The second is the brutal slaying in 1994 of Laura Wyre, an 18-year-old who takes a job in her father's small law firm before heading off to college. The disappearance of Olivia Land is the first of the book's four "case histories" (a phrase more suggestive of a psychological profile than a crime). But in a breathtaking surprise, the youngest and most beloved of the children, Olivia, vanishes in the middle of the night along with her favorite stuffed animal, known as the Blue Mouse. 1, 1970, " suggests that something more sinister than a comedy of dysfunction is taking place. Only the title of the chapter, "Case History No. The book opens with the story of the Land family, and in 20 vivid, funny pages, Atkinson etches the characters and dynamics of their troubled clan during a heat wave in Cambridge, England: four young girls their harried, disappointed (with marriage, with life) mother and their distant mathematician father. The novel, the author's fourth (her first, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," was named Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995), is also a moving reminder that our capacity for hope, for redemption, is substantial - that people survive and endure, even in the aftermath of the unthinkable. Ostensibly a book about a series of seemingly unrelated murders, "Case Histories" transcends the limitations of the genre and offers a powerful, dramatic reminder that grief and loss go "on and on and on," even when the mystery is solved and the truth is revealed. As a character in one of the "case histories" of her title puts it, "Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on." As any thoughtful reader of mysteries will acknowledge, the resolution of the case accounts for a large part of the pleasure of the genre - the sense that no matter how horrible the crime, no matter how complex the plot, in the end the truth will emerge and the balance will be restored.īut Kate Atkinson, in her brilliant and engaging new novel, illuminates the lie at the heart of mystery fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
