Novelist Kate Atkinson: ‘I do feel a need to prove myself’

Kate Atkinson has an idea for a fun side-hustle: at some point in the future, when she’s done with the second world war, and with her jaded private eye, Jackson Brodie, she’ll bring to life the creative projects that have hitherto existed only as facets of her characters’ lives. She’ll take the fortune teller Madame Astarti from her third novel, Emotionally Weird, and put her at the centre of her own series of mysteries; she’ll conjure up a script for Green Acres, the rural soap opera that features in her two short-story collections, 2002’s Not the End of the World and last year’s Normal Rules Don’t Apply; she’ll craft episodes of the TV police procedural Collier, in which Brodie’s one-time girlfriend Julia played a pathologist. And finally, she’ll flesh out the breathtakingly hammy murder mystery that a cast of clapped-out actors perform at Burton Makepeace, the stately home that is the setting for her new Jackson Brodie novel, Death at the Sign of the Rook.

Writing these scenes – teeming with aristocrats, actors, Russian countesses, clergymen and a “fastidious little Swiss detective” – were Atkinson’s treat, she tells me, as she constructed the novel during lockdown. “I would have done so much more of that,” she explains, as we sit sipping coffee in a studiedly antiquated hotel near her home in Edinburgh. “But I thought, I can see that I would just annoy people. I had to keep going back to Jackson.”

And so she did, forging a characteristically complex story of deception and delusion, in which Brodie and his reluctant sidekick, the ambitious policewoman Reggie Chase, find themselves on the hunt for a stolen artwork and a home help with an apparent talent for disguise. Also making memorable appearances are a reverend suffering from a sudden loss of voice, a former army major who lost a leg in Afghanistan, and the redoubtable and eccentric Lady Milton, making do and mending in her crumbling Yorkshire mansion. She is Atkinson’s favourite character, and first came into her mind 25 years ago: “I didn’t know what to do with her. And then when I was writing this, I thought, yeah.”

It’s been almost as long since Brodie himself occurred to her. His first outing, in Case Histories, appeared 20 years ago, and this is his sixth; in the intervening years, he has been brought to life on the BBC by Jason Isaacs, his lugubrious inner monologues and knack for attracting danger winning Atkinson a legion of dedicated readers. It is for these – “I hesitate to use the word fans” – that the author will turn up at the small bookshop events she prefers to the grander fixtures on the live circuit: “If you go to out-of-the-way places, they might not have a huge room, but they’ll have a great turnout. And they’ll be really happy to see you. I’ve had people
wading through snow in wellingtons, and they make you cakes, they’re happy.” She considers. “I really like going to Oswestry. I think it’s Oswestry that has a funicular railway.”

Death at the Sign of the Rook may be a homage to the golden age of detective fiction – as a teenager, Atkinson made her way through Agatha Christie, and still rereads her – but like all of the Jackson Brodie books, it casts a sharp eye on the contours and particularities of contemporary society and its discontents. When Reggie encounters CCTV in a funeral home mortuary, she thinks grimly of Jimmy Savile, whose spirit hovered uneasily over the last Brodie book, Big Sky, and Brodie ponders the practicalities of exfiltrating a victim of domestic violence from her shiny, ordered home. Like all of her novels, they are deft entertainments with a serious core.

This has been her modus operandi since her debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995, which told the story of Ruby Lennox, a working-class girl born in York in 1951, the same year as Atkinson. It won the Whitbread book of the year, having been up against Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and a biography of Gladstone written by Roy Jenkins. The story of an unknown quantity triumphing over these marquee-name writers was perfect headline fodder, and she grimaces humorously at the “Chambermaid beats Rushdie” reaction (she had once worked in a hotel). Some journalists, she recalls, and especially women, were “snobby and sniffy, just unsupportive … I shan’t name them, they’d be dead now anyway”. “Woman’s Hour was great. Jenni Murray said, ‘Did you know that Richard Hoggart said, ‘Miss Atkinson has written a postmodern novel, but she may not know what postmodernism is?’ And I said, ‘I did a doctorate on postmodernism, I think I know what it is.’”

My father was a reader, but my mother never got it. When I got my MBE, she said: Why you?

She recalls being taken aback by the assumption that Ruby’s story was her own, especially its class aspect, and remembers thinking, “I didn’t know we were a working-class family. Although, obviously, my grandparents were, but my parents were shopkeepers. That’s a different class of people, completely different.”

Her father, who had been living with dementia, died the day before she won the Whitbread. How does she think he would have reacted? “He would have been hugely proud. He was a reader, and he would have been very proud because he did come from a really poor background.” He sent his daughter to a private primary school, although she describes it as more of a crammer for the 11-plus, her mind flashing back to having to walk through the kitchen where a cook was making “the awful food” to
get to the concrete yard where the loo was. But her father “knew that education was the key to getting out. I got the education he never did.”

Her mother, however, “never got it. When I got my MBE, she said, ‘Why you?’” She would have been happy for Atkinson to have opted for a more conventional life, rather than trying to get a PhD and taking on a fairly random series of jobs until she first published a novel in her 40s. “She was very aware what people thought. She’d had a bad marriage that she’d gotten out of and tried to forget. I mean, she was not divorced when she had me; I was illegitimate.” Atkinson only found out when she was 36: “I thought, ‘I’ve done a lot of detective work, looking at certificates – divorce certificates, marriage certificates, birth certificates – and I have to say something to her. And I said – I was very casual – ‘You never told me I was illegitimate.’ And she had the best answer, ever, by anyone. She said, ‘I was going to tell you [once] but then you left the room.’”

Behind the Scenes at the Museum opens out from Ruby’s life – “I exist!” she cries, Tristram Shandy-style, at its opening – to a spiral of vignettes of her immediate family and her ancestors. One features the fate of a bomber crew, an early indication of Atkinson’s preoccupation with the second world war. This came to magnificent fruition in the sequence of books that began in 2013 with Life After Life, the story of Ursula Todd, a character who repeatedly dies and is reborn. It was followed by A God in Ruins, with both novels winning Costa awards; and then in 2018, came the espionage story Transcription.

She has frequently said that she regards A God in Ruins, which follows the story of Ursula’s brother, Teddy, a wartime airman, as her crowning achievement. It was, she tells me now, “the book I was always moving towards writing. When I finished writing that book I just thought, ‘OK, I’ve written my best book and I’ve written the book I wanted to write.’ I broke that fourth wall, I broke a fifth wall. I brought to life something that was surprisingly important to me.”

Why was it so important?

“Well, the war really, but also the bomber crews. Because it’s so fraught, the bombing campaign: you’re carpet bombing civilians, and the Germans are doing the same. But I didn’t want to start getting into the whole anti-Churchill, anti-Bomber Harris argument, because I thought, once you’ve visited a war cemetery and you’ve seen the
graves, you know the dead are buried as a crew. There’s the navigator, there’s the gunner, there’s the captain, and they’re 20 and 19. They’re 21. I have a 21-year-old grandson.” She laughs as she tells me how blithely her grandson relates his mountain bike adventures: “That’s the mentality, not seeing the danger, not understanding the danger. Knowing it, but not feeling it.”

That’s the trick in a way: just keep on writing books until finally people kind of go, ‘Oh, yeah, OK. She’s a writer’

For the Halifax bomber crews, death was a constant reality. Atkinson grew up surrounded by the remnants of wartime aerodromes – “they were where you went to learn to drive, and you could see the weeds growing up through the concrete and all of the armaments shelters, it was still very clear” – and the thought of those airmen, returning from night sorties with entire crews missing, never left her.

She is also deeply absorbed by what happened to Britain after the war. She has set three books in 1951, and thinks that might be evidence of a shared obsession for those who just missed out on living through the war itself. She is currently at work on a novel set during the Festival of Britain, which she sees as an attempt to persuade the
British people that there was a bright future ahead, and that their own abilities and achievements were key to securing it; there was an emphasis not on empire, but on England’s pastoral life, on its craftsmanship, its art and architecture. In the agricultural pavilion, her researches have revealed, people could go to see cows, sheep and shire horses, and “watch a blacksmith at work. It’s quite funny because the blacksmith is complaining bitterly because they’ve taken him away from his normal job, and he’s not earning money. But all of these people were showing the audience aspects of life that they didn’t know. And actually what they were showing them was a whole way of life that was just about to cease.”

There was also the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion, in which the writer Laurie Lee curated “Eccentrics’ Corner”, for which people were encouraged to submit their wildest ideas: “There was a smoke grinding machine, and a collapsible rubber bus. Ridiculous! They’ve all gone in the book.”

Now 72, and having lived in Scotland for many years, she’s clear that this vision of Englishness – still cleaved to by nationalist politicians – is very much a south-of-the-border issue. Her own identity, she insists, lies in neither country: “I’m not English. I’m from Yorkshire. It’s different.” She left after she wrote Behind the Scenes at the Museum, “but when I die, open me up and Yorkshire will be carved on my heart”.

Geography, class, genre: Atkinson is not a writer – or a person – very comfortable with being defined or circumscribed. When she was being patronised in the early years of her career, “I just kept on writing books, and that’s the trick in a way: just keep on writing books until finally people kind of go, ‘Oh, yeah, OK. She’s a writer. She’s not in a class at all.’ I probably never thought about this before, but I think I do have an undercurrent of feeling a need to prove myself.”

Does she think she’s been underestimated? “I’m not the one to say that,” she smiles. If I said it? “I’m probably not the one to agree with that! I think the books have been underestimated in some ways, because I’ve been trying to do quite interesting things with them. And I think that some of that is missed.”

For now, she is happy to send Brodie – as familiar to her as “an old pair of slippers” – back out into the world, and get back to her desk, where she often finds herself “so determined that I’ll make it work that I will get as entangled and as frustrated as is humanly possible in order to break through that barrier”. Like Christie before her, much of her time is spent bringing wildly intricate plots to their climax. “I think that she probably liked getting to the end. Because that’s what we all like, isn’t it? Having made it work.”

And she’ll also be out and about, perhaps even taking the funicular railway. “You can’t just write in isolation. You do write in isolation – it’s a really complex thing. I am my reader, I’m the only reader. But I wouldn’t read in the same way that other people do. I sometimes wonder, would I even like my books?”

• Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply. The author was photographed at Prestonfield House in Edinburgh.