Lizzie's Reviews > One Good Turn

I am tempted to write this review as "nah," and leave it at that, but I want to do better by it.

I am rating this really low! Surprisingly low. I don't hate this author. This isn't terrible writing. (Possibly, it is rather better writing than the Tana French book I just finished; at least nobody is described as having "hidden levels" in their "X-box game he calls a brain." Left that bit out of my last review, didn't I. Ah.)

"Multiple points of view" does not communicate enough about what this book puts you through. It is a loose bucket of noodles and that bucket is your plot. Enjoy the jumble of noodles. Sometimes bits touch, but all the chapters are so spaced apart, you'll never remember why it matters. You'll think, "I think I'm supposed to be surprised that these two people know each other, but I don't even remember who this second person was the first time." There are at least foooour major povs? A total of SIX, but I guess mainly the four. It's way too many, and they are almost all awful. Martin is just awful. Gloria is pretty awful. Louise is not awful! I liked Louise! Too bad the company she is in. It would have been a good book if we actually learned anything about her.

Because Jackson, our hero. He's awful! And, okay. Partly, I suppose, that is okay. He's a screwed-up anti-hero quasi-detective guy, right? Angst town. This is supposedly appealing. But nothing is given to us for our pains with him here. Talk of his (unseen) daughter and a rehash of his family pain -- exactly the same information we knew from reading his first book -- is all that makes him sympathetic, and that isn't okay. If we have to hear him having all these stupid thoughts about women, watch him making all these really stupid decisions with no explanation, if we have to wait it out while he bores us out of our skulls, we need to know why this man is ours. He is our protagonist, somehow, despite not appearing particularly more than the other third-person perspectives. But what the hell is he here for.

Because every, each one of the chapters is so strangely pointless. How is this possible? These people, they are supposed to be getting us deeper in this twisty interconnected plot noodle thing, but actually they don't! Hardly at all. It is weak weak sauce. The author essentially sets each chapter to wander through the thoughts of all of these people she's created, stream of consciousness less like the good literary kind that reveals existentialist dread and more like someone's really boring diary entry about frozen dinners. Setting up characters, giving them voices, and showing us the everyday of their worlds: this is, I suppose, how you would describe the job of a novelist. Kate Atkinson is doing that job. And then she is going home at 5:00 whether she finished her work for the day or not. Did she write this book on vacation? I don't get it.

This book, though technically a mystery, does not put two clues on one page (thus making us care about making any plot connections whatsoever) until page 290. 290! A dead body (page 100) does not a mystery make. Even a second dead body doesn't make it so. You're supposed to make SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS HAPPEN. And at the end, you cannot just have characters from different threads showing up in the same place and saying stuff. You're supposed to make A STORY TIE UP. I mean, good mysteries are hard, sure; I definitely wouldn't be able to do it. I am also not publishing bestsellers. So duh.

I need to share an example so I do not sound so crazy. There are so many run-on sentences in this book, and I truly don't know how this happened. Just add some semicolons and you've got literature, I swear. The paragraphs will also just wander off in a completely unnecessary direction, and then you are spending your time reading something you would never in a million years wonder or care about:

"E. M. Heller (what kind of a name was that?) was just plain odd, she was either a badly put-together woman or she was a man in drag. Transvestism was a mystery to Jackson, he had never in his life worn a single item of female clothing, apart from once borrowing a cashmere scarf from Julia when they were going for a walk and being troubled all afternoon..."

ETC. ETC. OMG ETC. Who cares. Also what did Ms. Heller ever do to you? She seemed perfectly nice in the last chapter aside from being constantly described as ugly, which hardly seems fair. Also, Louise's annoying colleague who's constantly described as fat and insinuated to be snacking at all times. It's a narrative device! Making people we're not supposed to like reported as unattractive. Too bad that is the same sophisticated device that makes Barbie dolls a thing.

Basically, this was no fun at all. I will, however, read the third book eventually. I already own it, for one thing, but I also need a tiebreaker. Case Histories was so lovely, to me. It has, perhaps, the same structural weaknesses as this book, but just a little fractured weakness and not an all-out house-falling-to-pieces waste-of-time disaster. Also, actually, it was not a very good mystery. Just a good book. I can't figure you out, Kate Atkinson. But I will try.