Kate Atkinson is unapologetically tricky. She is still aggrieved that the
papers tried to unearth her two former husbands after she won the Whitbread
Prize in 1996 for the novel she is still best known for, Behind the Scenes
at the Museum. She doesn't understand why I want to write about her, decries
the media, then admits to being a curious, gossipy person herself - and one
with a subscription to Heat. And so we sit in a posh hotel eating frankly
disgusting cakes, Atkinson determined not to reveal “my deepest, darkest
secrets” and me, on a delirious sugar high, trying to get her to do
precisely that.
One should probably tread carefully. Of the tabloid attention she got after
winning the Whitbread, she says: “It made me want to kill. In fact several
people are now dead. I have a huge amount of hatred, which is a very healthy
thing to feel.”
Her prickliness - accessorised by warm laughter and conversational scattiness
- may spring from first being dismissed by literary snobs as a parvenu.
After Museum came bestsellers including Human Croquet, Emotionally Weird and
Case Histories. Her latest, When Will There Be Good News?, is a
crime-scented yarn featuring her gruff, taciturn and damaged detective,
Jackson Brodie. It begins with an horrific murder in a field and combines
the everyday and the grotesque, bloody murders and trips to the supermarket.
Brodie's name just occurred to her, “although a friend's daughter is called
Brodie”. This is much in line with the way she works - not much
pre-plotting, sit down, envelop yourself in plot and characters and write.
She is an engaging stylist, equally adept at oiling the joints of the plot
and creating spiky character portraits.
Poor Jackson: Atkinson has “gone off him a bit”. So he's being rested until
she plonks him in Paris for more mystery solving. “People think I don't like
men but I like men as much as I like women. I'd always avoided fully rounded
male characters because I didn't know a fully rounded male psyche, but then
I decided that didn't matter.”
Atkinson, who is in her mid-50s, claims not to write detective fiction,
although that's the general direction her novels are moving in: the next one
will feature two familiar female characters, Gloria and Louise, at a murder
mystery weekend. “I do like secrets in books,” she says, digging into an
oversweet pistachio thing. “There have always been mysteries in my books. I
don't give that much thought to my books actually. I'd rather talk about
cake, or shoes or Posh” - by which she means, presumably, Victoria Beckham.
All right, let's talk about cakes; she and I rhapsodise about Betty's tea room
in Harrogate and York. At a literary festival a woman complimented her on
the shoes she was wearing, and the usual Q&A about plots and character
degenerated into a fashion free-for-all. Today she is wearing a lovely
scoop-necked green cardigan and surprises me when, without warning, she
produces from the cleft of her bosom a cloakroom ticket. She has a
wonderful, wicked laugh and manner - quite unsuited for someone determined
to be discreet and withholding.
“I was an only child and read a lot,” she says of growing up in York. “I read
Just William, E. Nesbit - the greatest children's writer.” She was “never” a
happy child. “You can be a happy adult - I am - not a happy child, or a
happy child and not a happy adult. I think I was probably just too solitary.”
Her parents ran a surgical supplies shop. “Even as a small child, I thought
that was weird. The other shops sold fairly normal things like bread and
clothes. We sold rubber sheeting.”
Atkinson lives in Edinburgh, near her 84-year-old mother, two daughters and
grandchildren. “I like my own company,” she says. “I might have been a more
sociable child had I had siblings. My father was very sociable, my mother
less so.”
She went to universty in Dundee, where she married and almost became an
academic, but her doctorate - on the American short story - was refused at
its viva. Does she like living alone? “I don't want to live with anyone. I'm
having my garden done at the moment and the builders are trailing through
the house, which is full of dust, as are my lungs. My whole being at the
moment is crying, ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone'.”
Her new book, in its bloody opening pages, seems to directly reference cases
such as the attack on Lin and Megan Russell that Josie Russell famously
survived. Yes, she says, but the actual source was more the case of an
attempted attack on a woman in a local park, and wondering how having a
child with you makes you vulnerable; the attacker wanting to ruin this
vision of bliss and togetherness that he doesn't have.
Nothing violent has ever happened to her. But a friend's sister was murdered
in “ordinary” circumstances. In her fiction she interrogates the randomness
of these horrendous intrusions into people's lives. Is she a fearful person?
“I didn't used to think about walking home alone in the dark, but having
children makes you cautious.” Does she fear death? “No, I fear annihilation.
It isn't a fear. It's probably narcissism. I simply cannot believe I won't
exist.”
At 40 she was assailed by a year-long bout of agoraphobia. “I fought my way
out of it,” she says. “No one can help you. I crawled to the library. I was
determined not to have it. I don't think it came from anywhere - it was very
mysterious. There is obviously something deep, dark in my psyche that I have
never accessed. I don't care why it happened. But I did spend a long time
thinking, ‘I've lost or forgotten something'. I'd wake up almost grasping
it, then it would slip away. What could I have lost that was so powerful?
Maybe the agoraphobia was triggered by that thing. The feeling of missing
something no longer plagues me.”
Would she ever have therapy? “I did go to a psychiatrist but he was leaving
the following week and then this ginger, rather squat Gestalt practitioner
asked me what I'd like him to do, and I thought, ‘I don't know!'” She
laughs, then says very precisely: “Yes, I'd love to have three sessions a
week of intensive psychotherapy where they delve deep. But I'd want [Donald]
Winnicott himself, someone who's cleverer and funnier than me who I thought
was wonderful and would get to the heart of me. Therapy would go into
corners of myself I hadn't explored and expand my writing.” Maybe it would
wash you too clean? I suggest. “Or I find there's nothing there,” she says.
Atkinson is utterly down on the idea of ever marrying or falling in love
again. “I've gone beyond that. I am not one of those women trying to hold on
to her youth with Botox. My life is so full, the idea of someone who expects
something of me fills me with sheer horror.”
Atkinson says she doesn't regret leaving academia. “If I had got my doctorate
I wouldn't have become a writer. Had I continued I would probably be
studying something like passivity and activity in the language of Jane
Austen. In fact, in my next book (What Would Jane Do?) that's what the
heroine will be studying - I am living vicariously through her. If you have
something in you that's creative and you're not creating and not aware what
you should do to create, then that's my deep dark secret.” Well we got there
in the end. “It was one of the major things in my early life - not getting
outside what was inside.”
Writing structures “the chaos” of Atkinson's mind. After Jane Austen might
come a long-planned book on the Antarctic. Our last two minutes are spent, a
little farcically, with me asking the name of her daughter who has children,
her refusing to answer and relenting only after making me feel as if I've
gone through her bins. Good luck to whoever Atkinson's therapist turns out
to be: the sessions will be tiring, but a riot.
When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, £17.99 Buy
the book here
Kate Atkinson: four to read
Behind the scenes at the Museum: In a narrative riddled with tragedy and dark
secrets, Ruby reveals her family's story, from the romantic affair of her
great-grandmother, to her own conception above a pet shop in York-Minster
and the fates of her siblings. This debut novel was the 1995 Whitbread Book
of the Year.
Human Croquet: A family history narrated by Isobel Fairfax, scion of the
ruined Fairfax dynasty. The family's fortunes seem inextricably linked with
that of the Forest of Lythe, which once bordered Fairfax Manor, and into
which the first Lady Fairfax mysteriously disappeared.
Not the End of the World: This collection of short stories explores the world
we inhabit as well as another world shaped by the beliefs we banish from our
conscious minds. The cast of characters includes list-makers Charlene and
Trudi and Meredith Zane, who may have found the secret of eternal life.
Case Histories: In this, Jackson Brodie's first appearance, the private
detective unravels three very different cases to discover surprising links.
Atkinson also introduces readers to the Cambridge-based investigator's
personal history, his failed marriage and the tragedy that haunts him.
