Unlike most writers of the genre, Atkinson, a veteran now of six novels and a collection of short stories, sets out to present more than just a thriller: She seeks to be literary. She reveals this early in One Good Turn, taking constant diversions into her characters' histories and emotional intelligences, making references to literature's giants and their canonical works, and then stating so through the thought of one of her characters, an "inane and banal" mystery novelist:
To write something with strength and character, a text in which every page was a creative dialect between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry.
Problem is, she fails. And in a repugnant way that made it an absolute chore for me to finish the book.
For, while her prose is clean and fluid and poses little problem for anyone who can read newspapers, Atkinson doesn't manage the simple (which is not to say easy) elements of a good read, irrespective of genre: Her characters are not relatable, her story is not engaging and her work at no point moves me to laugh, to cry or to even to want to flip to the next page.
She presents a cast of banal characters-a frustrated housewife, a one-dimensional thug, a writer, of course (for one thing I do know about modern writers is that they love to write about writers)-and they all, unlike the memorable characters of any good book, seem to have been produced out of nowhere by Atkinson's whims. They would never be mistaken for real-life people.
She square dances amongst them to tell the multilayered tale through various perspectives, but through no character's voice does she reserve herself, instead interjecting without restraint proverbs, bad jokes and a feminist agenda that derive from Atkinson the writer and not the individuals who comprise her story. So all her characters turn out to be inconsistent, ball-less, of constipated wit, able to cite poetry, cognizant of the "smell of lilacs in the valley" and champions of empowering women.
A resident of Edinburgh, Atkinson plops the story there and makes intermittent allusions to its landmarks and vernacular. Yet she manifests so little of Edinburgh that an American in Nevada like me can't gather a thing about Scotland's capital city in the 418 pages of her book, and so I'm positive it strikes no regional nerves with the folks who actually live there.
Although Atkinson drizzles contemporary references throughout the book, expounding beyond doubt that her plot takes place in the 21st century, her words hit no universal bones nor any regional nerves, and therefore it's impossible to become attached to the story.
The first chapter opens with an act of violence-a surefire way to lasso a reader's horns-but Atkinson stirs neither tension nor intrigue until the 47th chapter, when one of the central characters finds himself stuck in a shoddy hotel room with the dead body of a prostitute. Until then, and after then, I found no reason for the reader to invest himself in what happens next.
Absent from the prose is that authority with which the good writer commands the reader's attention and convinces him that what he is reading, fact or fiction, is true and worth his time. Rather, Atkinson writes in a style reminiscent of so much contemporary women's fiction-uncharged, predictable, blunted by vague superfluities-and though I'm sure many women will embrace the novel (as indicated by gushing reviews by women, from The New York Times to Amazon.com), it's just not very engaging.
Nor moving. Unlike the potent authors Atkinson cites throughout her book, she seems to just be making stuff up as she goes along. It's a story in which mysterious thugs jump out from alleyways, Russian women doubling as housecleaners and circus performers pull men into alleyways to save them and other characters pop up simply because Atkinson rubbed her genie lamp three times. There is contrived dialogue, impotent jokes and nothing to stimulate the senses.
In the end it's neither a thriller nor a solid piece of literature, and though I'm not saying it's the worst book ever printed-for I'm sure it is not-I can say without a quiver in my voice that it's the worst that I've ever read. For my typical practice is to put down a book for good if I can determine within the first half that those three fundamental elements of a good read are missing. But I'd had high hopes for this book, and so I stuck it out until the unfulfilling end.