In Spain, the high degree of popular boiling of his novels has not yet been reached, as is already the case in many other countries. But the quality of the British author Kate atkinson It is endorsed by his recognition as a member of the Order of the British Empire. Which, for a writer, can only indicate that narrative value that she has already been developing for more than 20 years, if not with commercial profusion, yes at least with overwhelming success on each new occasion.
The literary wardrobe always in dark ranges, Atkinson is not limited only to genre noir. As soon as he has devoted himself to a strictly criminal literature, as he delves into the purest detective with classic detective overtones (with the series of Inspector Jackson Brodie at the head) or probes the paths of that unclassifiable that is espionage between warfare and thriller.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Kate Atkinson
Typist
There is something very different between telling a story contemporaneously with the events narrated and doing it some time after they occur. The first spy novels of Le Carré, Forsyth or Graham Greene that accompanied the days of the Cold War were read with a certain tension regarding the plausibility of what was narrated.
In the case of this novel, which oscillates between the psychological thriller and espionage between 40 and 50 but published in 2018, a more complete staging is available that comes from the natural knowledge of the final events: the fall of the wall, the dissolution of the USSR ..., and then a novel like this is balanced between historical fiction and the darkness of a plot that always points to uchrony, to the horrors that could have been in that time of icy and tense international relations.
With all these antecedents we come to the life of Juliet Armstrong led into espionage for her special qualities in the middle of World War II and trying to forget those days a decade later, when the world still trembles from the effects of a conflict whose embers seem not to be never go out.
In that anxiety, Juliet once again finds herself immersed in a similar dark world in which the Blitz bombs no longer sound, but in whose echoes of buried interests many seem willing to do anything so that she is the one who pays the price for those days of espionage. .
And again
Lorenz's butterfly effect has always been extrapolated to any literary or cinematographic fantasy that addresses the relativity of time.
The curious thing is how this effect splashed up this historical novel for the final service of a branched plot in sum of shots around the beginning of the XNUMXth century. All these changes and twists take place on the epicenter of a protagonist, Ursula Todd, who always serves to have the basis of a solid character on which the changing circumstances are posing us the different and transcendental changes that can be produced by that simple flutter of the butterfly of coincidences.
Ultimately it is a kind of reincarnation. The ending materializes for Ursula in different ways, but there is always a return to the frigid February 11, 1910. Lives with a circular effect at the end, complementary, a diverse and conscious existence that serves to narrate an entire changing society of the XNUMXth century.
Waiting for news
I recover the third novel of the Jackson Brodie Saga with certain doubts. Because although the reading of any of the novels can be done independently, there is a strong burden on the inspector's personality and on the author's scenography that is worth considering from the first work.
But, given the uniqueness of "Waiting for News," I could not help but consider it the best of the saga, so here it is. Jackson Brodie no longer works as an investigator, but he retains his instincts and that magnetism that usually brings old sleuths closer to lost causes.
Even more so when the past returns with unusual virulence, splashing those who suffered it and implicating those who look at it as the strange well from which echoes of death, pain and a vague hope emerge. A fast-paced novel in which the ends lead to unexpected turns and in which the destinies of missing persons and investigators end up clinging inescapably.
