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Summary
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
The novel begins with a picture of a relatively intact family—setting a tone that will be quickly disturbed. Jessica’s and Joanna’s personalities create the impression (also soon to be overturned) that Jessica will play a more prominent role than her younger sister. Dogs, from the first, will play a big role in the story, as well.
Themes
The family has just gotten off a bus after shopping in town. They don’t have a car. The father, a writer named Howard Mason, has driven away in it. It was his idea to move to rural Devon, because he needed “space to write.” Joanna misses her old home and school and dislikes the long trek to town (a long walk and two bus rides).
Howard Mason’s abandonment shows that this is actually a broken household. The family is isolated in an unfamiliar, remote place, and they have to make strenuous trips to get basic necessities. Their country life isn’t idyllic, no matter what their lovely surroundings suggest.
Themes
The family’s country life has not been successful. A fox ate their hens, and the bees in their beehive froze. Their father just says he’ll put it all in his novel. Their mother, Gabrielle, a painter, no longer paints in the country. She is clever, funny, and quite unlike their friends’ mothers. She and Howard fight sometimes. During the fights, Jessica gathers her siblings in their bed, and they all fall asleep. After their first winter in the country, Howard moves back to London and lives with Martina, his “other woman,” a poet. Gabrielle still doesn’t paint.
Howard seems not to care what his family endures for the sake of his dream, both materially and emotionally. Again, their seemingly idyllic life is a false front. Howard can leave it behind; his family is left to struggle in his absence. The fact that Gabrielle no longer paints suggests that she is persistently unhappy.
Themes
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As they walk along the country road, laden with shopping, Gabrielle promises the children that they will move back into town in time for school. Joanna admires her mother’s strength as she pushes the baby’s buggy uphill. Jessica is “fierce” like their mother, but Joanna thinks she has only inherited their mother’s allergies. Most of Joanna’s things are hand-me-downs from Jessica. “Joanna filled the spaces Jessica left behind as she moved on.”
Joanna perceives herself as a follower in the shadow of her determined older sister and her strong mother. Her early years don’t give the impression that she will develop into a strong character, once again setting up a reversal of expectations.
Themes
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They walk along a huge wheat field. Joanna got lost in it once, and the dog found her. They stop for a snack in the shade. In London, they used to have “proper picnics” using their grandmother’s picnic basket. They don’t have any of their wealthy grandmother’s money because, Gabrielle explains, Gabrielle and Howard eloped.
Joanna’s memory of being lost in the wheat field foreshadows what’s to come. Dogs are already established as a symbol of faithful companionship in the story. Although Gabrielle and Howard seem to have been in love, their romance quickly led to estrangement within the family, suggesting the fragility of family relationships that will be a major theme in the story.
Themes
As they continue making their way toward home, a man suddenly appears, seemingly out of nowhere. Their dog growls. The man is walking quickly toward them, huffing and puffing. Gabrielle starts walking faster and urges the girls to hurry, leaving the dropped groceries behind. The man is now walking in the same direction they are. Their dog tries to block his path. The man kicks the dog, hard, into the wheat. It makes a “terrible squealing noise.” Jessica screams at the man and runs after the dog.
Although there have been hints that the family’s life is not idyllic, it’s now disrupted in a shockingly unexpected way, by a sudden, unprovoked attack from outside. The dog, the family’s protector, is cruelly dispatched, hinting at worse to come.
Themes
Joanna realizes that her mother is fighting the man. He has a knife he keeps raising in the air. Soon Gabrielle is covered with blood. Joanna realizes that her mother is screaming at her to run. Her mother is finally cut down where she stood, stabbed through the heart. Jessica, too, is stabbed and dies curled up with the dead dog. The baby dies in the buggy. Joanna, meanwhile, obeys her mother’s scream—“Run, Joanna, run.” She runs into the wheat and gets lost.
Joanna turns out to be the only survivor of this horrifying event. After the family members have been introduced and their backstory established, the sudden deaths of nearly all of them is all the more shocking. Joanna, who “didn’t like to think for herself,” survives because of her inclination to be obedient.
Themes
Later, after dark, Joanna is found by other dogs. A stranger picks her up, saying, “Not a scratch on her.” Even then, Joanna thinks that she should have rescued the baby—Jessica would have. But she just did as she was told. Thirty years later, “the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.”
The stranger’s remark—that Joanna is outwardly unharmed—belies the fact that she’ll prove to have been irreparably scarred by this tragedy. She even blames herself for not saving her helpless baby brother. While the dog’s name is not a critical detail, the point is that no one is left to help Joanna come to terms with her past. She’s completely alone.
Themes
