An essay in the LRB about the Pelicot rape trial unexpectedly sent me back to the second book (of six) in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.

I’ve written twice before about Kate Atkinson’s series of novels featuring Jackson Brodie. The first time was in September 2021, in Talk about books’s first year, when I tried to write a single post about four of the five novels (a sixth has since appeared). Then, in February of last year, I revisited the series to write about the first book, Case Histories my copy of which wasn’t nearby while I was writing the earlier post. I thought then that I’d finished with Jackson Brodie as a topic for Talk about books, but it seems I was wrong.

In a remarkable recent essay in the London Review of Books, Sophie Smith writes in depth about the trial of the men who raped Gisèle Pelicot. I strongly recommend the article and urge people to read it but I intend to comment here only on a small part of it, because this is a newsletter/blog about books.

It so happens that Sophie Smith had been reading the Jackson Brodie novels when the Pelicot trial opened. She was astonished, and I think perturbed, to find in the second book, One Good Turn (2006), that the protagonist has raped Julia, the woman he became involved with at the end of the first book, while she was asleep:

He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterwards because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, “Without me? How could you?” Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. (pp. 396–7)

(Smith quotes a longer passage, in which this is included.) When I read this in her essay, I was shocked and perturbed too. Was it possible that I’d missed this on previous readings? At first I wondered if I might not have been reading an edition that omitted this passage. But no, once my memory had been jogged, I remembered being pulled up sharp by Jackson’s reflection that the incident had “technically” been rape. Somehow, I’d just skipped over the passage when writing about the novel, as not fitting my overall perception of its protagonist.

The passage is written in free indirect style: we’re being given Jackson’s point of view. He’s the one who thinks that he has “made love” to the sleeping Julia, who “couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out” and who concludes that it was only “technically” a rape. The fact that he doesn’t tell Julia about it indicates that he’s far from confident in these perceptions. He can’t imagine that she’d be put out, but the fact is that he doesn’t (can’t?) imagine anything about her possible reaction. Earlier, when they arrived at the Edinburgh flat where they’d be staying for the run of Julia’s play in the Festival, he’s puzzled:

It wasn’t like Julia not to want sex, Julia always wanted sex. (p. 55)

That’s how he had seen her, up to this point. In failing to imagine “her being particularly put out”, he’s rationalizing something that he probably regrets, and certainly ought to regret, and he apparently isn’t willing to think too deeply or too long about it, hence the brevity of the passage.

In my original post, I had presented Jackson Brodie as a protector of vulnerable women and children, as essentially a “good guy”. I wrote:

Seen from one angle, Brodie’s protective paternalism is ridiculous and outdated. It’s funny-sad, even pathetic. But, in a society that still harbours the successors to Peter Sutcliffe and Jimmy Savile, it’s arguably better than the alternatives …

Atkinson captures this tension perfectly, striking a difficult balance in Brodie between toughness and reassurance.

That’s not wrong, as far as it goes, but it’s an oversimplification. I was aware that, in attempting to cover in a single post four substantial novels (they run to about 500 pages each) with complicated plots, I was necessarily leaving out a great deal. I didn’t see that I was leaving out something as significant as a rape.

Jackson Brodie is the son of a Yorkshire miner. His mother died young. He joined the army as soon as he was old enough. He became a military policeman and later joined the Cambridge police force. When DI Louise Monroe asks him if he’s seen a dead body before, he recites a list of the many kinds of dead body he’s run into (p. 178). He’s unmistakeably masculine. He’s not someone you’d expect to be familiar with feminist theory. He may never have heard of Susan Brownmiller. So maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised to find him dismissing a particular rape (one which, however wrongly, he apparently believes did not harm the victim) as a technicality.

So his protective attitude, his compulsion to search for lost girls and women and return them to their homes, is not driven by feminism. That much has always been clear. Rather, it has its origins in his experiences: the rape and murder of his sister Niamh when she was 17, the subsequent suicide of his brother, who felt guilty at not having picked her up from the bus stop, the frenzied attack on a family which only the 6-year-old Joanna survived, the terrible events that affected Julia’s family (and may have led Jackson to believe that Julia is tougher than she really is, simply because she survived), the birth of his own daughter Marlee (of whose vulnerability he is acutely and constantly aware), his near-death experience in a train crash.

It may be best, then, to think of Jackson Brodie as not so much a “good guy” as a driven one.

Jackson’s sexual offence against Julia is implicitly compared with something that Martin Canning, the author of the “jolly murder mysteries” featuring Nina Riley, has done in St Petersburg. In my original post, I said I was reluctant to spoil Martin’s guilty secret, but I’ve overcome my reluctance. A young, beautiful and impoverished Russian woman, Irina, has vigorous but not very erotic sex with Martin in his hotel room. Martin hasn’t been expecting this to happen and hasn’t provided himself with cash to give her “little gift for good time” (p. 477). She is happy to accept his £10,000 Rolex in lieu but Martin suddenly becomes uncharacteristically assertive and is unwilling to give up the watch. They tussle and Irina falls, fatally hitting her head. Martin throws her body out of his seventh-floor window, trying unsuccessfully to avoid a skip. Almost immediately, the skip is collected by a lorry and taken away.

He had thrown a human being away like rubbish. (p. 482)

The subsequent history of the Rolex is painfully ironic.

I’m not going to attempt a full comparison of Jackson’s behaviour towards Julia with Martin’s treatment of Irina. I’d need to think about that a lot longer than I have. But it’s interesting to note that Jackson and Martin are starkly contrasting characters. I don’t think I’d like to emulate either of them. Jackson, as I’ve already noted, is an unequivocally masculine character, while Martin is decidedly not. Some of the characters, including himself, tend to think of him as an “old woman”. He’s not usually very assertive — for example in dealing with his agent, or in making it understood that he was never a monk, just an unbelieving religious studies teacher. Yet, he’s wealthy and (by certain lights, if not his own) successful as a novelist. And he proves effective, not once but twice, at putting a stop to the rampages of “Honda Man”, the second time permanently.

And with that, I’m going to cut this post much shorter than usual — it’s been an exhausting week. There’ll be a full-length post in two weeks, probably about Wendy Erskine’s first collection of stories, Sweet Home.

Edition: Black Swan paperback, 2007.