Mild-mannered Martin Canning writes soft-boiled mysteries, starring a genteel 1940's heroine, under an assumed name. Haunted by mysterious events in Russia several years earlier, he's never done anything bold in his life, until he hurls his laptop at the maniac attacking a stranger in the street, a stranger he now feels a duty to accompany to Casualty, even at the cost of losing a copy of his latest novel.
Fleeing a well-witnessed scene of road rage, PI and former cop Jackson Brodie, in Edinburgh for his actress girlfriend's fringe performance, stumbles over the body of a girl floating in the ocean. Despite his best efforts, he can't drag her on land before the tide whisks her away, leaving the police dubious about whether she ever existed.
Detective Inspector Louise Monroe is attracted to the Englishman who, despite the lack of any evidence, insists he found a dead body. And wherever she turns thereafter, there he is. And that's not the only coincidence - a missing property manager and his company (who built the crumbling house she and her young petty thief son live in), a cleaning company, and a mysterious man with a dog and a baseball bat, keep turning up too.
The theme of Russian matryoshka dolls (that fit inside one another) echoes through the novel, both in the Russian elements and the intersecting plots, though sometimes with a too heavy hand, and the interweaving of initially disparate lives was quite effective. I did find some elements grating, including the recounting of characters pasts and internal landscapes - while this add a layer of depth to the novel it slowed the action down considerably, and was not always necessary. For example:
She was distracted by the sight of a smear of chocolate on her white blouse. She supposed it was from the chocolate digestives she had breakfasted on. She imagined the little factory of cells that was her body taking in the chocolate and fat and flour (and probably carcinogenic additives) and sending them off on conveyor belts to different processing rooms. This industry, dedicated to the greater good that was Gloria, was run on co-operative, profit-sharing lines. In this model Gloria factory, the cells were a cheerful, happy workforce who sang along to Workers' Playtime from a tannoy radio. They were unionized and benefited from subsidized housing and healthcare and never became entangled in machinery and mangled to death like her brother Jonathan.A vivid internal landscape, to be sure, but (especially as we already know about brother Jonathan and his fate) not exactly plot moving.
The mysterious something that happened to Martin in Russia some years earlier, involving a beautiful woman, is doled out through the novel and culminates in something less than a climax. This is not unlike the surprise "twist" at the end, that lands with a gentle thud rather than a frisson of surprise.
One of the elements of One Good Turn I particularly disliked was the periodic tendency of Atkinson not to articulate her characters' thoughts, while having other characters respond as though they had spoken. I have only a poor example, but it at least gives a sense of what I mean:
There was a woman being some kind of statue of Marie-Antoinette. Was that really a suitable job for a woman? For anyone, come to that? How would he feel if Marlee grew up and announced she wanted to do that for a living?It does make it a little difficult to tell what characters in company are having unexpressed thoughts, and it happens relatively regularly through the book.
"Oh, I don't know," Louise Munroe said, "doing absolutely nothing all day, I could do with some of that."
All this makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy Atkinson's work, and that's not the case. One Good Thing gave me a sense of how good, and how intricate, her writing is when she's writing at her full potential. It's just that this isn't it. But when I get home I'll see if the library have got anything else by her, and have another punt. - Alex
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