Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe he is dedicated to the best of chivalric ideals, although he is a somewhat hapless hero. In this brutal world Jackson is the self-appointed ‘‘sheriff’’, as he describes himself to Crystal. Also: kidnapped, abused, bought and sold. Women in need of a path to escape are everywhere here, trapped in badly judged engagements, bad marriages, addiction, deep historical trauma. There are women who adopt masks to survive, such as surgically enhanced Crystal, who hides her sharp mind behind false eyelashes, treated like a doll (‘‘and not in a good way’’, she observes), or sly Tatiana who pretends to be whatever men want her to be. Nothing is what it looks like in this story of false appearances and dangerous misapprehensions, crowded with the suffering girls and warrior women beloved by Atkinson. ‘‘It’s not what it looks like,’’ says the man, to an older couple who offer congratulations. The novel opens with a bride being driven away from a wedding - ‘‘a quick getaway’’, she says - by someone we assume is her husband until they stop to admire the sunset. ‘‘One more battle in the war against women.’’ ‘‘The room did bear a resemblance to a war zone,’’ he observes. Towards the end, Jackson tends to the wounds of a group of brutalised women in a human-trafficking operation of terrifying scale. A different but no less consequential war occupies her here. World War II occupied Atkinson’s past three novels, including the acclaimed Life After Life (2013) and A God In Ruins (2015).
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