What qualities make the former police detective so attractive to readers? And would you want to see him appear in another novel after this? This is the fourth Jackson Brodie novel.A reviewer called this a "state of the nation novel - far sharper and more observant and satirically understanding than anything else out there at the moment." Do you agree, and if so, what did the novel reveal for you about Britain today?.Are there any other true crime cases that come to mind that resonate with the stories in this book? Another epigraph quotes Peter Sutcliffe, suggesting that this novel was partly inspired by the 1970s Yorkshire Ripper.
"For want of a nail the shoe was lost / For want of a shoe the horse was lost." How do you think this traditional proverb, quoted by Kate Atkinson before the start of the novel, relates to what happens in Started Early, Took My Dog?.We have already seen this foreshadowed in the phantasmagorical reference to the mermaids, which came out from the basement (the sea’s bed, or the subconscious?) to look at the speaker, suggesting that stage of one’s own sexual maturation when the sexual object is simultaneously other (the mermaids as female symbols of sexuality) and internalised (these mermaids have come to look at the speaker in all her glory). And the poem can be analysed on several levels, the most intriguing of which, perhaps, is that Dickinson is using the sea as a metaphor for the (female) speaker’s sexual awakening. She then retreats to the town.īut this might make for a rather unremarkable poem if it weren’t for the symbolic richness of this oceanic encounter. There follows an account of this morning stroll (‘I started Early’) which the poem’s speaker undertook along the beach, until – having presumably waded some way into the water – the tide rises, engulfing more and more of the speaker’s body, until it’s above her waist. When is the sea not the sea? When it’s a symbol for sex, of course! Is this what we get here with ‘I started Early – Took my Dog’? The poem begins with words which could almost be a banally literal description of the poem itself: ‘I started’.
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