Ian McEwan Gets a Head Start on the 2015 Awards Season

The Children Act - Ian McEwan

There’s a hoary joke about a married couple who divorced when both are 54 after the husband had an affair with an 18-year-old. Once the wife had found a boy-toy of her own, she gleefully informed her ex-husband that she got the better end of the deal, mathematically speaking: after all, 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Ba-dump-bump.

McEwan ca. 2008 (source: wikipedia)

Such might well be the story of Fiona and Jack, childless and almost 60, when he decides he “needs his space” to take up with a coworker born well after his and Fiona’s wedding day. Their thirty-some-year marriage sundered in one acrimonious moment, Jack departs for his would-be lover’s flat and Fiona returns to her work. The scenario may be regrettably commonplace, but the actors are not: Lady Justice Fiona Maye is a judge in family court. Each day the slim, elegant juror presides over the dissolution of marital unions, the tawdry tales before her bench really not unlike her own.

Jackson Brodie Meets the Coincidence Fairy

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson

Central Leeds

Perhaps the most irritating failing of crime writers is over-dependence on coincidence. It seems to me to be a form of laziness, lack of imagination, or both. One writer who’s made a career out of over-dependence on the muse I call the Coincidence Fairy is Robert K. Tanenbaurm in his Karp family series (at least once he’d lost ghost writer Michael Gruber); another popular author who’s sometimes suspect is Sue Grafton with her Kinsey Millhone series. And now I may have a third coincidence criminal: Kate Atkinson, at least from the plot of Started Early, Took My Dog.

Jackson Brodie, retired London cop turned reluctant PI, is backtracking an adoption thirty-five years ago in Leeds when he accidentally acquires a dog. At more or less the same time, retired Leeds cop Tracy Waterhouse (now head of security for a shopping mall) accidentally acquires a daughter. Well, actually, she buys four-year-old Courtney from a local hooker for £3000…