Kate Atkinson's One Good Turn revisits some of the characters and territory she explored in Case Histories. Once again, Atkinson tests the limits of that most metafictional of popular genres, the detective novel; once again, she features her somewhat sadsack PI, Jackson Brodie (now unhappily retired to France). While the title immediately refers to how characters find themselves enmeshed in the novel's plot--namely, by doing favors (or, sometimes, "favors") for strangers, near-strangers, unloved acquaintances, and loathed loved ones--it also suggests the extent to which Atkinson turns the screw, as it were, on her readers. (As one character puts it: "Another turn of the corkscrew" [386]). As we discover at the end, the beginning was not quite the beginning.
One Good Turn's plot funnels through the POVs of several characters, always in free indirect discourse: Brodie, feeling useless and worrying about his fast-decaying love affair; Martin Canning, a novelist whose series detective is a bizarre cross between Nancy Drew and Tuppence; Gloria Hatter, the aging wife of a criminal real estate mogul; and Louise Monroe, an ambitious detective and single mother. Other characters occasionally lend a word, including Paul (victim of the road rage incident that jumpstarts the plot), Archie (Louise's aggravatingly adolescent son), and Richard Mott (a failed comic who has the misfortune of being mistaken for Martin). In good Dickensian fashion, all of these characters interlock through one thug's mysterious assault on Paul.
At one point, Gloria tartly denies that she is, in a friend's words, "a woman of secrets" (29), but even the most open characters in this novel have sometimes incriminating secrets. Martin is haunted by an "incident" (as he repeatedly describes it) from a wretched trip to Russia. Louise has never told Archie's father that he has a son. Paul, for some reason, is toting around a gun best suited for assassinations. And Gloria's secret is so big that it amounts, in fact, to the novel's "real" plot--one of Atkinson's sly digs at the genre. Characters withhold clues that are essential to the investigation; conversely, they discover that clues obscure rather than reveal the secrets of life and love. Thus, when Jackson discovers his girlfriend's positive pregnancy test, he joyously imagines that the deaths that have scarred their lives will be magically healed: "A baby would heal Julia. The lost Olivia would somehow be reborn in Julia's own baby. A baby would make everything right for Julia, and for the two of them" (385). Alas, Jackson is not the father--as the other clues scattered through the plot should have led him to realize--and the baby marks the end of their relationship.
In seizing on fatherhood as the solution to all his problems, Jackson also speaks to one of the novel's running themes: the problem of defining masculinity. Julia accuses Jackson of "feel[ing] unmanned without a car" (39), but Jackson's response--"No, I don't [...] I feel as if I can't get anywhere"--inadvertently reveals a more significant problem: lolling around in France on an inheritance has left him without either purpose or identity. Meanwhile, Martin has effectively been neutered by both his father's contempt and the Russian "incident." In one running joke, characters mistake his celibacy for homosexuality (at one point, he and Jackson wind up posing as a gay couple)--thereby misreading the clues, once again. Martin twice asserts himself through violence, but both instances, while helpful to others, prove self-destructive. Louise muses on the mystery of Archie's exploding puberty; Archie tries to rebel against Louise by shoplifting. And Gloria spends much of the novel reflecting on her husband's sheer thuggishness, a thuggishness she identifies more generally with violence against helpless things like children and kittens. Atkinson sets these knotty tangles against the sordid backdrop of prostitution and the international sex trade, all driven by the economics of lust.
Martin's inability to lust, however, has an unfortunate effect on his novels, which are as devoid of potency as he is. He sets his novels in the post-WWII era because "[i]t was an era in history that Martin felt particularly drawn to, the monochrome deprivation of it, the undertow of seedy disappointment in the wake of heroism" (9); it's an age, in other words, that is less postmodern than simply post-. (It's "belated," we might say, only in a much grimmer sense than Harold Bloom intends.) His heroine, Nina Riley--a tip of the hat to The Band Wagon's already-parodic Rod Riley?--is "remarkably chaste" (9), rather like Martin himself, and solves an amazing variety of crimes without much in the way of plausibility. More importantly, however, Martin glumly decries his own fiction as "trite and formulaic" (13), narrative comfort food served up on a menu of pure commercialism. Martin aspires to something greater, but his attempts to create "art" by literally changing his location (buying a house, getting an office to write in) instead of changing his approach rather spectacularly miss the point.
For all that chaste Nina Riley shares Martin's sexlessness, the novels are not autobiographical. In fact, that's part of the problem, for the greatest mystery about Martin is the whereabouts of his identity. His publicity materials falsely describe him as a former monk. Even his pseudonym, Alex Blake, has been concocted by his editor (54). In this novel, fiction turns out to be stranger than fiction: once Martin intervenes in the road rage attack, he finds himself inserted into increasingly bizarre "plots," all of which provide him with new and decidedly uncongenial public faces. Indeed, the "real" detectives invent a life for him that is far more exciting than his own: "'Or, let me run this by you,' Inspector Sutherland suggested amiably, 'you were involved in a gay lovers' threesome that went horribly wrong'" (257). There's something bathetic even about the Russian "incident," which, once revealed, doesn't supply Martin with the criminal identity we expect. At the end of the novel, one can only chuckle when redemption, of a sort, comes courtesy of Nina Riley's "suicide"; to find himself through truly adventurous storytelling, Martin must lose his fictional crutch. Even so, Nina dies by pulling a stunt straight out of the Perils of Pauline. Apparently, even in extremities, Martin fantasizes in cliches; it's no wonder that the last we hear of him, a traumatized Martin is trying to find "himself" by becoming a real monk.
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