Case Histories: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child sexual abuse, the death of a child, murder, violence, domestic violence, suicide, and rape.

The quest for justice and closure drives each of the novel’s titular “case histories,” including Jackson’s own history of loss. Though the novel does offer closure for readers, Atkinson comments on genre conventions through Michelle, who thinks that “[n]ovels 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). This offers an early warning against expecting perfectly tidy closure for every case or missing person. For example, Niamh’s killer is never discovered. Jackson begrudgingly accepts this, thinking that the north holds only “bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway” (74). He is similarly pessimistic about solving the Land sisters’ mystery: “He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them that” (166). Contrary to Jackson’s expectations, he is able to uncover the truth of what happened to Olivia and to return her body to the family. He provides them with a sense of closure, though this does not result in a criminal charge or trial.

Though Jackson succeeds in solving some of the cases, the question of justice still remains. For Jackson, it seems that justice is not always found through the police and courts. In both the Land case and the Wyre case, he leaves the pursuit of justice in the hands of family members rather than the police. When he receives Sylvia’s confession, he recognizes that she committed a crime as a disturbed and abused child, and that Victor, the adult, is already dead. He tells Amelia, “I’m going to tell you what happened […] and then you have to decide what you want to do about it” (416). Ultimately, Amelia decides to tell no one else and allow Olivia to rest in peace in the rose garden she makes. Jackson also leaves the pursuit of Laura’s killer up to Theo, mailing him the name and address and letting him decide what to do about it. At the novel’s end, Theo has not pursued the lead, preferring to devote his time to living his life and helping Lily-Rose. With these characters’ decisions, Atkinson leaves the question of whether or not justice has been done open. The novel cautions readers early on that novels offer neat endings while real life doesn’t, and this serves as a reminder that the real world often contains messier conclusions and a lack of closure or justice. Case Histories departs from traditional detective novels by highlighting how closure and justice are often elusive in real life.

Nearly every character in Case Histories grapples with trauma and its lingering effects. For example, it has been 10 years since Laura’s death, but Theo has still not been able to move on with his life. He experiences Laura’s death as a kind of eternal present: “Every moment Laura would be standing by the photocopier, […] waiting for the stranger and his knife, waiting for the world to go white” (54). Theo, too, feels frozen in that moment and devotes his days to investigating the murder, transforming Laura’s room into an incident room filled with files, photos, and theories. Looking at him, Jackson thinks of Theo as “the poor guy, the size of a blimp, wheezing and puffing on his inhaler, nothing left but a memory—the shape of a space where a twenty-eight-year-old woman should have been” (166). For Theo, trauma means that his life is now shaped around Laura’s absence.

The Land sisters are also shaped by the trauma they experienced as children through their father’s abuse, their mother’s neglect, and Olivia’s death. Though the novel doesn’t reveal that Victor abused them until a third of the way through the narrative, the early scenes at his deathbed reveal his daughters’ feelings about him. Amelia thinks that she feels “giddy” when she remembers that he is dead, “as if someone had lifted a great stone off her body and now she might be about to rise up, like a kite, like a balloon” (110). Even the stoic and usually emotionless Sylvia reacts with joy when she hears the news of her father’s death: “And just for once her saintly composure slipped and she burst out laughing” (111). Their trauma is also evident in the way they still obey Victor, attending him on his deathbed and cleaning out his home. Though they realize he is abusive, they still react to him as children—calling him “Daddy,” and obeying his wishes. Though the Land sisters are adults, their early trauma still grips them with fear, infantilizing them.

Finally, Jackson himself is also experiencing trauma and has never fully recovered from the death of his mother, brother, and sister. Atkinson does not explain Jackson’s loss until Chapter 20, but she sprinkles moments of foreshadowing throughout the earlier chapters, allowing readers to sense that his past was not a happy one. Early on, Jackson thinks, “All the years before he was twelve shone with an unblemished and immaculate light. After twelve it was dark” (96). Though Jackson is, in many ways, more functional than the Land sisters or Theo, he is still deeply affected by his losses. His profession offers him a way of trying “to help people be good rather than punishing them for being bad” (81-82), which is why he likes it. He copes with his trauma by attempting to help others.