While you're at it, another Dickinson - 'My life had stood - a loaded Gun' - could also have served as a title here. I do recommend readers look it up, however it says a great deal about Jackson and this novel. The title itself comes from #520 in that volume and Kate Atkinson never quotes the poem in full. Jackson has become a lover of poetry, especially of Emily Dickinson, and what he sees, what happens to him, constantly prompts a quotation from her collected works. They each act decisively and their lives will be forever transformed as a result. The rescues that take place in that most placeless of contemporary places, the shopping centre, are both accompanied by a muttered chorus from passers-by of 'someone ought to do something,' 'it oughtn't to be allowed,' and 'where are the authorities.' But Jackson and Tracy don't merely mutter. Her characters, generally speaking, are 'common' too, ordinary folks whose lives become extraordinary when they act to do good when called upon. Indeed, she tends to drive the staider critics mad because she manages a complex approach to narration often thought to beyond the scope of the mere detective novel, and she does it without apparently breathing hard or suggesting that all of this is too rich for what used to be called the 'common reader.' It should go without saying that Kate Atkinson is a superb technician. And Tilly's increasing dementia means that the boundaries between past and present in her mind are increasingly infirm. Brodie is trying to find out the whereabouts of her birth parents for a client in New Zealand who was evidently born in Leeds. Tracy was a young police constable who witnessed the aftermath of that event.

Atkinson unfolds a story that has roots in a dreadful event that occurred thirty-five years ago in Leeds against the background of the unfolding drama of the Yorkshire Ripper case. It's there all right, but you have to put in a bit of effort to get her to come into focus. Pursuing the narrative arc in STARTED EARLY is a little like trying to reconstruct the naked lady in Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. And finally, Tilly, an actress currently appearing in a TV serial but teetering on the edge of dementia, who is saved from the embarrassment of being charged with shoplifting for inadvertently wandering off with a Leeds A-Z. Then Tracy Waterhouse, retired policewoman, currently employed on the security force in the centre, who also spontaneously engages in her own, far more significant, rescue operation. First, Jackson himself, who rescues a dog from its abusive owner. It is here that the three major characters are launched into actions that will transform their lives. The Merrion Centre shopping mall in Leeds is the staging area for this fourth episode in the adventures of Jackson Brodie, 'semi-retired' private investigator.

Kate atkinson started early