This book has a lot of drastic scene changes, is packed with minor characters and is in no hurry to get where it’s going. But somehow Atkinson never seems to be treading water ... There is no stray anything in Big Sky. That’s one big reason Atkinson’s devotees love her. No detail is too small to come home to roost ... it’s worth rereading the beginning once you’ve finished this novel just to see how well the author has manipulated you. Atkinson is also adept at weaving the mundane details of her characters’ lives (or perhaps her own) into the Brodie books as a way of humanizing them, despite the stark malevolence that lurks beneath this workaday surface ... Atkinson opens Big Sky with one perfect page. It’s a bit of a red herring, but it couldn’t do a better job of throwing the reader off base and commanding instant interest ... It’s a prime example of how Atkinson tells a great story, toys with expectations, deceives by omission, blows smoke and also writes like she’s your favorite friend. Thank goodness the long Jackson Brodie hiatus is over.
There will, eventually, be blood. But the richness of this novel comes in spending time with the kaleidoscope of characters who spin together in the whirlwind ending ... Atkinson is so skilled at getting inside people’s heads that when she introduces a new character, it’s almost impossible to not feel at least a little sympathy for the person. As terrible as I feel typing this, it even holds true for one of the human traffickers ... Jackson appears to be aging basically in real time ... He’s still the empathetic, flawed, country-music-listening detective we first fell for.
Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky, the fifth in her series of literary detective novels featuring ex-soldier, ex-policeman and private detective Jackson Brodie, is, like the others, wonderfully written, irresistibly suspenseful and offhandedly funny, its wildly eventful plot so chock full of coincidence and convenience that, looked at from arm’s length, it seems delightfully silly—yet so attuned to human foibles that it feels utterly genuine.
... [an] alternately depressing, inspiring and slyly funny tale ... The unfolding plot snags a dozen main characters in a web of duplicity, human misery, betrayal and murder that Atkinson skillfully relates from multiple points of view ... As always in a Kate Atkinson book , whether it’s the Brodie series or her mainstream novels, the pleasures derive from her mastery as a storyteller, her skillful character development and the beauty of her quirky and poetic prose.
Many writers practise literary trickery, or investigate the truism that things aren’t always what they seem, but a big part of Atkinson’s appeal comes from her unbridled delight in sleight of hand. Plot reversals, shifts in point of view, leaps in space and time; echoing and doubling, twists and fakeouts, MacGuffins and red herrings: all are deployed with gleeful energy ... It’s tempting to think of Atkinson as a writer of maximalist, conventionally satisfying, carefully plotted fiction that is innovative only in stretching the usual elements of psychological realism to their technical limits. But one of the most exciting things about her books is the way they renege on their own promises. Atkinson’s illusions are performed out in the open: you think you’ve mastered their complexities, but then the chaos of human relations takes over, and people defy their own natures, or the rules of their own stories ... Atkinson is good at presenting ordinariness as nothing more than the state that obtains before disaster occurs; every quotidian observation in Big Sky generates suspense ... The fact that at any given moment hardly anyone actually knows what’s going on is part of the pleasure of this rangy, loping thriller ... Atkinson tells you everything and still takes you by surprise.
[Atkinson] has never been a straightforward crime writer, and in Big Sky, as in the four previous Brodie novels, she gives the impression of winking at the reader, making us complicit in the recognition of cliches and expectations ... Big Sky is laced with Atkinson’s sharp, dry humor, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny, even when the themes are as dark as child abuse and sex trafficking ... If Atkinson relies heavily on coincidence, that too is entirely deliberate; 'a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen,' is a favorite adage of Brodie’s. These have always been novels about character, and there are enough moments of tenderness between parents and children to balance out the cruelty inflicted on the young. Anyone familiar with Atkinson’s work will know not to look for easy resolutions or happy endings.
Big Sky's large, colorful cast have lots of explaining to do: not just about homicide, it develops, but about other crimes, including child abuse and sex-trafficking. Such grimness is leavened by a text brimming with wit, unpredictable events and vivid characters. From the shocking to the comic to the poignant, Ms. Atkinson does it all with breathtaking panache.
Does Jackson Brodie know he’s in a detective novel? He at least half suspects it, and as in Transcription Atkinson can’t resist a little salt-sprinkle of postmodernism ... There’s considerable vamping about with tone in Big Sky. The novel enjoys the absurdities of its genre – winks at them, even – yet manages at the same time to do a lot of work with the melancholy and absurdity of ordinary life. This, in a way, is a book of aftermaths ... It’s a credit to Atkinson’s dexterity that despite...clashes of tone and register the novel manages to hang together, even though the subject matter...and the essentially comic mechanisms of the plot, its coincidences and confrontations, seem to be at odds. How seriously are we to take it all? Atkinson artfully avoids supplying or implying an answer.
There is...something unremittingly dark at the heart of Big Sky. It bubbles under the surface as Atkinson — once again — gleefully upends crime-fiction convention and spends the first chunk of her book introducing her wide range of characters, old and new. You start to wonder where the crime is ... Atkinson’s nimble and endearing skill across all her fiction...is to take the determinedly domestic, find the wry, sometimes waspish humour in it, and yet reveal something profoundly humane. She set up Brodie in Case Histories, his first appearance, as a man who, despite a horribly bruised past, held on to the belief 'that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad'. It’s this moral bedrock that underlies all his misadventures, including Big Sky, in which his enduring preoccupation with lost girls flows into the ghastly case of abuse and sex trafficking that slowly emerges. Yet Atkinson doesn’t forget that crime fans enjoy the 'cheerfully unrealistic' too. Her beloved coincidences abound ... And deft misdirection, cheeky literary references and Brodie’s flailing attempts to offer sympathy by quoting country-and-western lyrics are constantly entertaining. You finish Big Sky feeling battered — but thoroughly cheered up.
Big Sky is a curious mixture: a detective novel about the sorry state of the UK, an exasperated celebration of blended family life and a meditation on loss, adversity, damage and repair ... Atkinson is interesting in this novel on the futility of crime: none of the criminals know where to put their loot, let alone how to garner enjoyment from it ... For this reader (and writer), more interested in texture and character than plot, the mounting tension in the novel is less appealing than the well-made characters and their histories, diversions and asides. Crystal’s stepson, with his love of all things theatrical, has a gallant, wounded nature at odds with his father’s coarse air ... In Big Sky you sometimes get the sort of moments great theatre brings where you aren’t just witnessing skilled acting, you feel something empirically true is taking place before you ... Despite the novel’s melancholy, Atkinson is adept at showing us sharp moments of pleasure ... [Atkinson] is a writer with the world in her hands.
... the kind of book that invites readers to kick off their shoes, put up their feet, and settle into their comfiest reading chair with snacks and beverages close at hand in order to minimize the number of interruptions required to get up for refills. It's that good. Really ... Especially for readers who like the kind of mystery that starts out with seemingly unrelated storylines that gradually, cleverly, ever so slowly and surprisingly begin to intersect ... Reviewers have shied away from giving away much of the plot as it is an extremely complex one involving sinister elements. The focus has been on, as it is here, the stellar writing, the story development, the delicious dialogue, and the characters who walk off the page to sit across from you or on the edge of your bed as you read, nodding approvingly with every turn of the page ... the plot at first might seem to be all over the place, but don't be fooled. The author knows what she's doing, and if you can ignore the annoying overabundance of parenthetical asides, you will find this to be a satisfying, indulgent binge book guaranteed to release a flood of pleasurable endorphins.
... coincidences act as slow-burning fuses throughout the novel ... Atkinson’s layered narrative proceeds elegantly and relentlessly, its intersecting viewpoints gliding over one another in a plot as elaborately sinuous as it is geometrically precise. You could, indeed, draw a map of all the intersections; but you won’t, because this story holds you too close ... Atkinson’s deadpan wit is sharp as ever here, as is her depiction of England, from its seaside esplanades to its human cesspits. Most remarkable of all, however, is her enduring ability to place us inside the consciousness of each character as she conducts us through their overlapping lives. Readers new to Atkinson, always to be envied, will be lured back by Big Sky to her earlier novels.
In the book’s first hundred pages or so, Atkinson develops her characters at a leisurely pace, making them so interesting we almost forget this is supposed to be a mystery. Then a body turns up in a garden, head bashed in, and it’s off to the races, the plot careening at such a breakneck pace it’s hard to turn the pages fast enough ... Atkinson is not only skillful but playful with the elements of mystery writing. She ends one chapter with a literal cliff-hanger ... As in all the Brodie books, Atkinson marries crime fiction with the comic novel genre, wedding the grim and the humane, all powered by her witty and exuberant prose. Brodie might not want to seem too Chandleresque, but Raymond Chandler once wrote that the best mysteries are those you’d read even if the last chapter were torn out — because the writing and the characters are so compelling. Big Sky is one of those.
As always, Ms. Atkinson skillfully weaves together...multiple narratives, among others, in a complex tapestry of a murder mystery that will test what each character thinks they believe about themselves and everything they hold true. Fans will enjoy the callbacks to prior books in the series, but can be read as a standalone novel—even though, personally, I think everyone should at least read When Will There Be Good News?, the novel that first introduced Reggie to the world. It’s a treat to see how Reggie has grown up and how Jackson is dealing with aging as well as with parenting two children separated by a decade in age. All the moral dilemmas are treated with sensitivity and aplomb, and the plotlines wrap up with a naturalness that hearkens back to the best of Ms. Atkinson’s oeuvre. The nine years were well worth the wait; hopefully, it won’t be another nine until we see more of Jackson and my beloved Reggie in print again.
... both an entertaining caper fueled by coincidence and a sordid story of human trafficking ... After the main characters are all up and running, their personalities in high gear, events become gratifyingly sinister: Abduction, murder, enslavement, and the reverberation of past iniquities mark the plot, one which is spun out from the viewpoints of half a dozen characters. Their minds are constantly abuzz with unspoken, sardonic or self-deprecating commentary, a feature that, along with Atkinson’s quiet whimsy and mischievous liberality with coincidence, gives this writer’s work its unique comic flair and lightens the dark unraveling of monstrous crimes ... The plot of Big Sky is something of a ramshackle affair, but it hardly matters. Kate Atkinson is a wayward writer, her books are, in the end, uncategorizable. Her Jackson Brodie novels are both more than crime novels — and less. They are sui generis and they, like this one, are enormously enjoyable.
Policeman–turned–PI Jackson Brodie has been reduced to chasing cheating husbands and shuttling his teenage son and elderly dog around town ... This long-anticipated reappearance of fan-favorite Brodie (following 2011’s Started Early, Took My Dog) is ultimately disappointing ... The minimal action occurs toward the end, and the denouement feels contrived. Brodie has seen better days.
Ms Atkinson has been on the trail of lost children (particularly girls) since her very first novel ... In the depiction of this despicable business, as in all Ms Atkinson’s fiction, she supplies gruesome discoveries and a strong helping of violence, all nevertheless relayed with a deft and witty touch ... Big Sky has all the sizzle of a British fry-up; Ms Atkinson’s evocation of the beauty and desolation of faded seaside resorts is unerring. As in the other Brodie novels, several stories are woven into a seamless plot, with the help of credible-seeming twists of fate. And there is just enough unfinished business to leave readers impatient for his next outing.
Using her signature narrative style, Atkinson not only tells the story from multiple points of view, but also moves back and forth in time, letting us see new sides of an incident from several characters’ perspectives. This technique feeds a rich kind of dramatic irony, as we know marginally more than the people in any one scene do, but never quite enough. As the lives of several Yorkshire couples slowly swirl out of control, with the ripples of dysfunction, buried abuse, and tightly held secrets gradually drawing Jackson into their red tide, we marvel at Atkinson’s rare ability to create in a relatively few but stunningly deft brushstrokes at least a half-dozen characters with the depth and complexity to own their own novel. Another dazzler from a writer whose talents know no bounds.
The crimes at the centre of Big Sky are of a particularly nasty, and rather topical, variety: a historical investigation into a paedophile ring of elite, establishment figures is reopened, while an active company traffic young women into the UK. Yet while Big Sky never makes light of such depravity, it also makes for an exuberant, entertaining read ... Atkinson’s work is always playful, and there’s a brisk, jaunty tone to Big Sky and much dry observational comedy. Her characters have their own, distinctly British gallows humour, and there are blackly comic asides in even the most heinous of situations ... There’s a lot going on in Big Sky, and it can get bogged down in allusions to previous stories, especially from Brodie’s past ... These half unpotted case histories feel unnecessary for existing fans, cumbersome for new readers. Atkinson is on surer territory with new characters – she has an almost cruel ability to capture a person in a line or two ... But you also come to really know and love (or loathe) many of them. While this focus on character means Big Sky can lack the relentless propulsion associated with crime writing, getting to know a plethora of her tenacious, memorable characters seems like a fair trade, especially as they gently offer hope that, in the end, good will out.
A small cast of characters collides and careens in a manner that straddles Greek tragedy and screwball comedy. The humor is sly rather than slapstick, and Atkinson is keenly interested in inner lives and motivations. There are villains, certainly—human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children figure prominently here—but even the sympathetic characters are complicated and compromised. Jackson has a strong moral code, but his behavior is often less than ethical. The same is true of Vince, Crystal, and Reggie. The deaths and disappearances that Jackson investigates change with every book, but the human heart remains the central mystery. The welcome return of an existential detective.
Atkinson has been better at balancing personal and professional story lines, and the presence of a figure from Jackson’s past, now a cop involved in an inquiry looking at establishment figures, won’t resonate for first-timers. Series fans will best appreciate this outing.
