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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When Will There Be Good News?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past
Appearances vs. Reality
Lies and Deceptions
Family
Summary
Analysis
Jackson Brodie is trying to navigate his way through the bleak Yorkshire Dales back to the train station. His GPS stopped working outside of the village, and he has no phone reception or radio signal. There are no other cars or houses in sight, only sheep. He thinks about his 12-year-old daughter Marlee, whom he had with his ex-wife, Josie. His ex-girlfriend, Julia, claims that Nathan isn’t his son, but Julia “was born to lie.” Jackson longs for a son. He felt a “surge of emotion” when he touched Nathan earlier—a feeling “that made a strong man weak for life.”
Jackson Brodie’s bleak surroundings suggest a similar sense of dislocation and misdirection in his personal life. He’s cut off from access to the boy he believes is his son, and he’s had a string of unsuccessful relationships. His struggle to find his way back to civilization suggests that he’s struggling to navigate his personal crises, as well.
Themes
Jackson comes upon a raggedy sheep blocking his path. He waits the sheep out for a while, then gets out of the car and tries to pull the sheep off the road. It resists, even knocking him over. Finally he gets back in the car and naps until his passage is free of sheep. As he drives on, he thinks about shepherding. Jackson himself “was a shepherd, he couldn’t rest until the flock was […] all gathered safely in. It was his calling and his curse.”
This comical scene between Jackson and a stubborn sheep makes a serious point about his personality—Jackson is compulsively driven to look after people and ensure their safety, much as a sheepdog instinctively herds wandering, helpless sheep. This compulsion, rooted in his history, defines Jackson and also adds pain and complication to his life.
Themes
The bleak landscape reminds Jackson of a poem he’d had to memorize for school as a child, the “Lyke Wake Dirge.” He remembers his sister, Niamh, coaching him, slapping him with a ruler when he made mistakes. In retrospect, he’s shocked by his family’s “vocabulary of violence […] the nearest they could get to expressing love for one another.”
The “Lyke Wake Dirge” is a traditional English folk song that recounts a soul’s hazardous journey from earth to purgatory. Its bleak themes and imagery both reflect Jackson’s surroundings and anticipate his own journey in the novel. Jackson, too, grew up in a fraught home environment in which love wasn’t easily expressed.
Themes
Suddenly Jackson sees someone ahead, walking on foot. It’s a strolling woman in a cardigan and scarf, around forty, with a librarian’s air. Jackson offers a lift. She laughs pleasantly and declines, telling Jackson, “You’re going the wrong way,” with a Yorkshire accent. Then she saunters on. Jackson watches as she disappears in the distance, never looking back.
The identity of the strolling woman is never identified in the novel. Her improbable appearance and prophetic statement make her seem rather like a ghost. Her memory, and her message, haunts Jackson in the days ahead.
Themes
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As darkness falls, Jackson wonders if there was some hidden message in the woman’s words—“the wrong way for what?” Just as he begins to worry that he’s on a road to nowhere, he sees the lights of the A1, “a great gray artery of logic,” down below.
Jackson’s uncanny journey through the rural countryside has shaken his sense of normalcy. His sight of the highway allows him to suppose that he’s on his way back to the comfortingly familiar, though this expectation is soon to be overturned.
Themes
