Started Early, Took My Dog

Detective novels have a complicated relationship to nostalgia.  Do they turn rosy-tinted visions of an innocent past into grim investigations of history's uglier underbellies, or do they contrast a lost Eden to the present-day decline-and-fall of Civilization as We Know It? The characters in Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, the fourth in the series of novels about supposedly-retired detective Jackson Brodie, repeatedly dwell on the collapse of all things England--"[t]he world was going to hell in a handcart" (24)--but the narrative suggest that this cultural corruption has always been present, just carefully hidden (and usually by the Old Boys' network).  Jackson, now rapidly aging, has turned to tourism in order to revive his fantasies of "the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart," yet even as he traipses around monastic ruins, he admits that the "Arcadian past was no more than a dream" (48).  But both ways of looking at England are, at base, about history and national identity.  As it turns out, questions of history and identity are very much the core of the novel's intersecting plots.

Started Early, Took My Dog interweaves multiple POV characters and two historical moments.  The novel opens on the 9th of April, 1975, with two police officers making a gruesome discovery: a child alone with a corpse.   The genesis, discovery, and botched investigation of this crime punctuates the present-day plot elements, sometimes moving back in time to 1974, usually moving slowly ahead to the then non-conclusion.  In the present, one of these cops, Tracy Waterhouse--now retired, lonely, and working in mall security--spontaneously buys a small, possibly abused child from a prostitute, Kelly Cross.  There's only one problem: as the reader immediately figures out, it's not clear that the child is actually Kelly's to sell.  About the same time, Jackson Brodie spontaneously rescues a small, definitely abused dog from a nasty man named Colin (it's also not clear if Colin  actually owns the dog).  Meanwhile, speaking of children, Jackson has been retained by an adopted woman, Hope McMaster--the first name sums up her attitude--to find her birth parents, and it's here that the 1970s murder investigation dovetails with Jackson's own snooping.  (Jackson is feeling rather alienated from his now-adolescent daughter, is still working out what to do about his newly-discovered son, and continues to be haunted by memories of his murdered sister.)  Jackson's questions open up a proverbial can of worms that turns out to contain several high-ranking detectives and a social worker; one of those detectives, Tracy's old colleague Barry Crawford, is being eaten alive with anguish over his own daughter, left in a vegetative state after an automobile accident.  There is one more main POV character, Tilly, an elderly actress on a detective series who suffers from senile dementia; although Tilly seems incidental to the plot, she too has lost a child and a lover, and she is instrumental in the novel's denouement.

At one point, Tracy Waterhouse bluntly tells Barry that the "good old days" were not "good" at all, but "rubbish" (91), and the characters' back-and-forthing between nostalgia and a much grimmer attitude to history recurs in the novel's treatment of childhood.  The novel's children repeatedly become history's objects instead of its subjects, their pasts deliberately erased or rewritten, and their bodies sometimes turned into profitable commodities.  And our protagonists sometimes collaborate with these practices--most notably Tracy, whose new "daughter" Courtney is clearly someone else's kidnapped child.  Nostalgia conceals the brutality of the "lost" Britain, especially its treatment of minorities and women; the latter, in particular, turns out to be what enabled Hope's origins to remain hidden for so long.  Its corollary in the present, though, turns out to be a kind of utopian fantasy about do-gooding.   (The present, in fact, is not so wonderful either, as the much-abused Tilly--whose past and present are dissolving into each other--discovers.) The apparently idyllic promise of Tracy's and Courtney's ending, somewhat undercut by Tracy's ironic choice of "Imogen" as her new moniker, cannot conceal the fact that this makeshift family (however plucky) is, in fact, built on the destruction of another.  Like the Gothic, the detective novel insists that the past always return to wreak vengeance on the present--albeit as trace evidence instead of as ghosts; Tracy's makeover does nothing to obviate the possibility that Courtney's past, too, will rise up again. 

Speaking of detective fiction, the Jackson Brodie novels all explore the limits of genre conventions.  The Hope McMaster story unleashes some noirish elements upon the plot, particularly insofar as it reveals the police force's deep-seated corruption. But one of the novel's primary targets, it seems to me, is one of the pleasures normally ascribed to the detective genre: the pleasure of closure.  At one level, the villains suffer from a veritable pile-up of bad endings, all thanks to poetic justice (or, rather, the author): unpleasant deaths, suicides, Carkeresque deaths, accusations, and so forth.  And yet.  The problem of Hope's origins has been solved...but will that actually lead to a happy ending? Tracy and Courtney escape...but, no matter how "nicely," doesn't that just replicate Hope's tale? The deliberately unsolved murder is solved...sort of.  Even Jackson ends the novel poised between two simple decisions, each of them potentially lifechanging, both of them frightening.   What's left, as the postscript by Emily Dickinson suggests, is an open-ended projection into the future--the "'Hope'" that "perches in the soul" (350).