48 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AtkinsonCase Histories: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Case History No. 1 1970: Family Plot”
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child sexual abuse, the death of a child, murder, violence, domestic violence, suicide, and rape.
This chapter recounts a day in the life of the Land family during the summer of 1970. Rosemary and Victor Land are unhappily married and have four daughters. Victor ignores Rosemary while spending most of his time working on his mathematics research and his job as a professor at Newnham College. Rosemary feels overwhelmed by their lively daughters Sylvia, Amelia, and Julia, but dotes on the youngest, Olivia. She has recently discovered she is pregnant again and dreads adding another child to the bunch.
The girls spend most of their time playing outside and avoiding their parents during the summer. They run wild and are prone to injuries, and many of their exploits are instigated by Sylvia, the eldest and the ringleader. They all adore Olivia and spoil her. Rosemary is exhausted by the heat and her pregnancy, and she makes the girls go to bed early. She tells Amelia that she can sleep in a tent in the yard with Olivia. The girls have been begging to do this all summer, and Amelia is elated to be chosen. She wakes up early to find Olivia and her beloved toy, Blue Mouse, gone. Amelia wakes up her parents, who also panic when they discover that Olivia is missing.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Case History No. 2 1994: Just A Normal Day”
Theo Wyre is an attorney and a widowed father of two girls—Jenny, who is at college, and Laura, who lives at home during her gap year. Laura is his favorite—he is very devoted to her, and she to him. He worries about her constantly, much to her dismay, and he is pleased that she has agreed to work at his office during her gap year. His physician has recently told him that he needs to lose weight, and he begrudgingly allows Laura to force him to exercise by walking to the office.
Theo is late to work because of a train accident and plans on eating lunch with Laura when he arrives. However, the office is in chaos. An unknown man in a yellow golf sweater entered, asking for Mr. Wyre, and then stabbed Laura to death. Theo holds her as she dies and knows that his world is ruined forever.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Case History No. 3 1979: Everything From Duty, Nothing From Love”
Michelle is an 18-year-old who has reluctantly become a wife and mother. She lives with her husband Keith and her infant daughter Tanya, whom she calls “the bug,” in a remote cottage outside of Cambridge. Michelle feels overwhelmed by motherhood and regrets choosing to keep the baby rather than finishing school. She rises early every morning to clean the house, cook, garden, and study. She hopes to eventually be able to attend university.
One Saturday, she is finally getting some studying done because the baby has fallen asleep. Keith comes home early and drops logs on the floor, waking the baby and causing her to scream. Michelle begins to scream as well, and Keith slaps her on the face. She runs outside to get the ax.
In the next scene, Michelle is sitting in the cold room alone, with Keith dead from being struck with an ax. It is implied that Michelle killed him. However, the novel will later reveal that Michelle’s younger sister, Shirley, killed Keith, and Michelle has agreed to take the blame. In return, Shirley promised to love Tanya and make sure she is raised well.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Jackson”
Jackson Brodie is working a surveillance job for his private eye business. He has been hired by the husband of a woman named Nicola Spencer and is watching her to see if she has a secret lover. The surveillance is tedious, and he uses the time to think about his failed marriage to Josie and his love for his eight-year-old daughter, Marlee. Though he has never felt at home in Cambridge, even when he was on the police force, he stays to be near Marlee. He is not happy in his life after divorce and fantasizes about buying a house in the south of France. Currently, he is spending most of his income on birthday gifts for Marlee and on visits to his dentist.
While waiting, he ignores a call from an elderly woman named Binky Rain. She is a lonely and crotchety woman who lives alone with her cats in a crumbling estate. She constantly calls Jackson and tries to hire him to find cats that she believes have been stolen. He sees his visits to her as a form of charity since she is lonely and never pays him.
Jackson’s secretary, Deborah, calls to tell him that he’s been hired by the Land sisters who have “found something” in their house. When he arrives, he is taken aback by the strange sisters, Julia and Amelia, and their father’s decaying house, which happens to be next door to Binky’s. The sisters explain that their father has recently died, and they discovered their missing sister’s toy, Blue Mouse, in a locked desk drawer. They don’t know how their father had it, since it went missing when Olivia did. Jackson agrees that it is strange and says he will take the case.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Amelia”
Amelia and her sister Julia came to stay with their father as he was dying due to complications from a stroke. Julia is an actress who seldom has work and must do odd jobs as a secret shopper to make ends meet. Amelia teaches communication at a trade school to disinterested students. Neither of them has a steady partner and both are generally unhappy. Though they come back to Cambridge out of duty, neither of them feels much warmth toward their father and they hate being in their childhood home. The novel later reveals that this is because Victor Land sexually abused Sylvia and tried to abuse Julia. When he dies, they experience a sense of giddy relief.
After speaking with Jackson about Olivia, Amelia and Julia eat dinner and discuss whether he is handsome. Amelia suddenly feels ill and goes to vomit. Afterward, she has an epiphany—she believes Olivia is coming back to them, though whether alive or as a ghost, she can’t say.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Theo”
Every year, on the anniversary of Laura’s death, Theo walks to his old office building and visits the place where she died. This year, the building has become a spa, and he lies to the receptionist about buying a gift for his wife so he can get inside. After seeing where Laura died, he flees guiltily. He has no one to talk to about his grief since his other daughter, Jenny, lives abroad and prefers not to speak about Laura. It has been 10 years since her death, and he decides it is time to pursue some closure.
In Jackson’s office, Theo waits for a long time with Deborah before Jackson arrives. Jackson apologizes for being late and explains that he was at the dentist’s office.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Caroline”
Caroline is a wealthy woman walking in rural England with her dogs when she takes shelter in a church. Though this is not revealed to the reader just yet, she is actually Michelle—she is now out of prison and has remarried and taken a new name. She meets the new vicar, John Burton, and is immediately attracted to him.
She thinks back over the circumstances that led her here. She worked as a teacher at failing inner-city schools and saw herself as doing penance, a kind of secular nun. Though her crime is not named explicitly, she feels she is making up for neglecting Tanya and for Keith’s death. A friend from work, Gillian, brought her to her home village on vacation. There, she met Jonathan Weaver, a wealthy local landowner. They were immediately attracted to one another and ended up having sex. Soon after, they got married, and Caroline finds herself saddled with a malevolent mother-in-law, Rowena, and two resentful stepchildren. Though she loves her job at the village school, she is otherwise unhappy in her life.
In the present, she bids the vicar farewell and thinks that she has fallen in love with him.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
Atkinson opens Case Histories with three seemingly unrelated chapters, each detailing a different case history, complete with date and number. The titles of these chapters indicate that they are actual histories from long-buried case files. The novel’s opening immediately builds suspense by piling up the mysteries of what happened to Olivia Land, who killed Laura Wyre, and what becomes of Michelle.
The opening also establishes that this will not be a routine detective novel in the sense that it is not solely plot driven. Instead, these case histories are character studies that focus on the psyche of the characters. These cases are also all cold cases, so the detective solving them is not racing against the clock as he might be in a thriller. Instead, this narrative technique introduces readers to Atkinson’s ideas about how fiction differs from reality. As Michelle says: “Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on” (66). While Case Histories is a novel with a satisfying ending, this early warning points to the limitations of fiction in reflecting lived experiences and the ways that reality might not follow a perfectly linear plot. By grounding her early chapters in realistic detail, Atkinson seeks to let art imitate life.
Though Atkinson pays attention to verisimilitude, she also uses many hallmarks of the detective genre in Case Histories. For example, the “case histories” themselves contain omissions and misdirection. Michelle is set up as a red herring so readers might assume she is the murderer, though this is only implied and not directly stated. Jackson also embodies many tropes associated with the detective as a protagonist. He is a former police officer turned private eye, and his chain-smoking surveillance feels like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel. However, Jackson differs from traditional, serious detective protagonists in his sense of humor and his tenderness, especially toward his daughter. He also has unusual quirks, like listening constantly to female country singers.
The early chapters also establish the theme of The Lingering Effects of Trauma. Each of the viewpoint characters (Theo, Amelia, Michelle/Caroline, and Jackson) have experienced significant trauma in their lives. All of them are shaped by that trauma, though they react to it in different ways. Caroline seeks to atone for her past and “to bury herself in a town somewhere and do good works, like an eighteenth-century Quaker or some Victorian gentlewoman driven by philanthropy” (140). Theo devotes his daily life to memorializing Laura, to the point that he cannot move forward at all. Amelia and Julia try to pretend that the past hasn’t happened, but their glee over their father’s death reveals that something is very wrong in their family history.
These chapters also reveal that Theo and the Land sisters are on The Quest for Justice and Closure. Theo’s life has become consumed by his daughter’s death, and he is unable to move past it. Finally, on the 10th anniversary of her death, Theo decides that in order to move on, he must have answers. This is why he hires Jackson to look into the case. Similarly, Amelia and Julia, too, want answers about Olivia, their little sister who went missing and never came back. They hold deep grudges against their recently deceased father, who was abusive, and are upset after finding their Olivia’s favorite toy among his personal effects. They feel the need to solve this mystery in order to move on and make sense of their own pasts. These characters highlight the destructive nature of unresolved grief and the human need for justice as a means of restoring balance and order.
Throughout the novel, Olivia’s toy mouse—Blue Mouse—functions as a symbol of Olivia herself, both of her innocence and her unavenged death. This mouse makes its first appearance in Olivia’s arms. It is “a limp and lanky animal made from toweling” that Olivia “consulted […] at all times on all subjects” (25). Due to this close association with Olivia, Amelia reacts to finding Blue Mouse the way she might to finding a body: “For a moment Amelia was puzzled and then suddenly she was stepping into space, as if she’d walked through a door that opened onto nothing” (118). Significantly, Blue Mouse is called Olivia’s “oracle” since it seems to have an almost supernatural purpose. Its reappearance causes the sisters to reopen the case and hire Jackson. It also causes the facade of their happy childhood to unravel at the seams, making Amelia and Julia confront their father’s evil and their mother’s neglect once and for all. Even Jackson, who has no emotional connection to the toy, correctly understands that it is something important. He thinks that “[i]t had ‘clue’ written all over it” (92). Later in the novel, Jackson will also come to see Blue Mouse as a powerful tool in solving the crime and forcing Sylvia’s confession from her.
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