Tag Archives: Yorkshire

#BookReview ‘Big Sky’ by Kate Atkinson #crime #Yorkshire

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I hesitate to express some disappointment with Big Sky, the fifth Jackson Brodie instalment by Kate Atkinson, but the feeling grew as I read deeper into the book. I realize this disappointment is based on my incredibly, probably infeasibly high expectations of this author. Kate AtkinsonI have loved Jackson since his first outing in Case Histories. The darkly comic tone is the same in Big Sky but I struggle to pin down what is different this time. The crime is sex trafficking. The action is told through a wide variety of viewpoints. The cast list is very long and the tying up of ends involves characters I had long ceased to remember. Some of the ends were tied up quickly in the last thirty or so pages.
There are still many things to love. The Yorkshire Coast setting – Atkinson was born in York and clearly knows the area well – is at times both realistically beautiful and sordid. And there are so many rough diamond characters to spend time with: Crystal Holroyd; her stepson Harry; the wonderfully named drag queen Bunny Hops, Harry’s co-worker at the Palace Theatre; and the inept Vince Ives. Jackson has moved to the coast and is working as a private detective on a number of small seemingly irrelevant cases; staying with him are his ex-partner’s dog Dido, and their teenage son Nathan. The story is anchored in the historic sex crimes case of Bassani and Carmody. Bassani is dead but Carmody is rumoured to be about to spill some names. Various people are being threatened. Two police detectives are investigating the cold case and how it links to the ‘magic circle’ but they have little luck in finding answers. Two Polish girls arrive in England. Four friends play golf, and one of them feels like an outsider.
Halfway through, the two sides of the story come together as Brodie is employed by Crystal Holroyd to find out who is following her in a silver BMW. After their first meeting, a warning is left for Crystal: a photo of her young daughter. ‘Keep your mouth shut, Christina’. The first hint of a former life for the expensively polished wife of Tommy Holroyd. This is a book in which the present catches up with the past, where past horrors are finally acknowledged.
I finished this book with mixed feelings. Jackson is still a character I want to spend time with, but the plot this time didn’t work for me. Also I put my hand up to say that, as an East Yorkshire girl, I was bamboozled by Atkinson’s mangling of East Coast geography [which she admits in ‘Acknowledgements’ at the end] which took me away from the page but won’t matter a jot if you’ve never been to Brid. That said, Atkinson is one of our best living writers and Jackson Brodie is not a typical fictional detective.

Read my review of another Jackson Brodie book:-
DEATH AT THE SIGN OF THE ROOK #6JACKSONBRODIE

And here are my reviews of other novels by Kate Atkinson:-
A GOD IN RUINS
LIFE AFTER LIFE
SHRINES OF GAIETY
NORMAL RULES DON’T APPLY
TRANSCRIPTION

If you like this, try:-
‘Eeny Meeny’ by MJ Arlidge
‘The Art of the Imperfect’ by Kate Evans
‘The Vanished Bride’ by Bella Ellis

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BIG SKY by Kate Atkinson https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4Hq via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Art of the Imperfect’ by Kate Evans #Yorkshire #crime

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The Art of the Imperfect by Kate Evans starts with a murder but this mystery set in a Yorkshire seaside town is not a thriller, it is not a police procedural, it is not cosy crime; it a story about the psychology of the people concerned and the after-effects of the event. Evans is a counsellor, like her protagonist Hannah Poole, and this allows her to bring an emotional depth and understanding to her characters. This is the first in the Scarborough Mysteries series and was longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger award in 2015. Kate EvansLike Emma Woodhouse, Hannah is a serial not-finisher. She has failed to finish training to be an accountant, a plumber and, twice, to be a counsellor. This is the third time she’s tried the counselling thing, and now she discovers a dead body. Her boss. A large number of characters are introduced in the first few pages, and names are littered around which I found dislocating. But I love the drawing of the Yorkshire setting, the town of Scarborough– my home town, so I am biased – the train journey to York, all done with a light hand. For example, ‘The sea is below them. Its solid air-force blue cracked open only occasionally by a filament of white. It has retreated away from the brown sand and weedy rocks and is quiet, with only a whisper coming in on its frosty exhale.’
Dr Themis Greene, a romanticised version of her ordinary-sounding real name, is psychology lecturer at the Centre for Therapy Excellence. Hannah, back in Scarborough and lodging with her parents, is studying at the Centre but longs for the action of the city. She misses London, her lodgings with landlord Lawrence, and her friends. As part of her qualification Hannah must see a counsellor herself and this is where her deeply-hidden fears emerge, the trauma of finding the body, other things she has tried to forget.
The post-murder story is told by three people – Hannah, Detective Sergeant Theo Akande and lawyer Aurora, new mother and Hannah’s neighbour. In passages of intense description, Evans describes the post-natal depression suffered by Aurora as her dreams turn to delusion. She alternates between suspecting her husband Max of violence, to fearing Mad and their son have been abducted and replaced by wolf man and wolf baby. Some of these passages are a little wild for my taste and I admit to skipping paragraphs.
Therapy is an unusual element of this character-led mystery, unusual also for its portfolio of characters without one key protagonist. Theo and Hannah are not a double-act solving murder in the tradition of crime fiction, but this is not a traditional crime series.

If you like this, try:-
‘Reservoir 13’ by Jon McGregor
‘The Silent Twin’ by Caroline Mitchell
‘The Killing of Polly Carter’ by Robert Thorogood

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ART OF THE IMPERFECT by Kate Evans https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Uz via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘The Unaccompanied’ by Simon Armitage #poetry

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The Unaccompanied is Simon Armitage’s first poetry collection in more than a decade during which he wrote drama, translation, travel articles and prose poetry. This collection doesn’t disappoint. It’s a mixture of familiar Yorkshire moors and sea, urban depression, Nature and human nature, globalisation and social media. His poems are accessible; at times witty and sad, they set the big questions of life against the small familiar details of every day.

Simon Armitage

Simon Armitage [photo: Paul Wolfgang Webster]

My favourite poem from this collection is ‘The Unaccompanied’. A walker at night stops to listen to the sound of singing, songs about mills and mines, myth and the mundane. It is a poem about heritage, about traditions spanning generations, from father to son, of the fathers that went before. It reminded me of traditional fishermen’s choirs, still popular on the East Yorkshire coast.

Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Wandering slowly back after dark one night
above a river, towards a suspension bridge,
a sound concerns him that might be a tune
or might not; noise drifting in, trailing off.’

Amazon

Simon Armitage

 

Read these other excerpts, and perhaps find a new poet to love:-
‘A thousand years, you said’ by Lady Heguri
‘Runaways’ by Daniela Nunnari
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘The Unaccompanied’ by Simon Armitage https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Rb via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘The Unthinkable’

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This poem grabbed me from the first line. It has action, it has colour, it has place. I could see the purple door, I could see the beach. And I wanted to write my own story about it. This is ‘The Unthinkable’ by Simon Armitage [below], included in his latest anthology The Unaccompanied. Simon Armitage

Here is the first stanza of The Unthinkable. Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,
its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.
The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:
the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer
had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,
who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family
over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now
by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.’
Source: Poetry (May 2013)

Simon Armitage

 

‘The Unaccompanied’ by Simon Armitage [UK: Faber]

Read these other excerpts, and perhaps find a new poet to love:-
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney
‘Alone’ by Dea Parkin
‘A thousand years, you said’ by Lady Heguri

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘The Unthinkable’ by Simon Armitage https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3ek via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Cloughton Wyke 1’

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John Wedgwood Clarke writes about the edges of North Yorkshire, the forgotten bits, the ugly bits, the hidden bits. He is a new discovery for me. His latest pamphlet, In Between, was written for the York Curiouser Festival, and is inspired by the snickets and alleys of old York.

[photo: valleypressuk.com]

[photo: valleypressuk.com]

Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Cloughton Wyke 1’
Iron light. Fulmar and kittiwake
laugh in Anglo-Saxon,
ripple quick shadows
over the beach.

It transports me instantly to the North Yorkshire cliffs where I grew up, and the constant presence of seabirds. Cloughton Wyke [below] was one of many destinations for the Danby family explorations on Sundays, sandwiches wrapped in foil, trifle in colour-coded Tupperware bowls, orange squash.

I cannot read this poem enough.

[photo: whitbyseaanglers.co.uk]

[photo: whitbyseaanglers.co.uk]

For John Wedgwood Clarke’s blog, click here.
To find John Wedgwood Clarke’s poems around York as part of the York Curiouser Festival, click here for a map.
To listen to John Wedgwood Clarke read his poem ‘Castle Headland’, click here.
For more poetry published by Valley Press, including In Between, click here.

ghost pot - cover 15-7-14

 

‘Ghost Pot’ by John Wedgwood Clarke [Valley Press]