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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
Louise is thinking about buying flowers. She also thinks about her new husband, Patrick, an orthopedic surgeon. They met at a horrible car accident two years ago. Now Louise’s 16-year-old son, Archie, wants driving lessons, and Louise wishes she could find a way to interfere with his getting a license—“being police was just the obverse of being criminal, after all.”
Police detective Louise is not accustomed to domestic pursuits like flowers or, for that matter, husbands. As it is for Dr. Hunter, fear is a major aspect of Louise’s approach to motherhood. She is also aware that her position as police gives her power that ordinary people don’t have, if she chose to do something dishonest.
Themes
Patrick is Irish, wise, amiable, and poetic. His previous wife, Samantha, was killed in a car crash 10 years ago. Louise likes his sense of authority and his confidence, as a surgeon, that things can be fixed. Louise is sure that flaws like hers can never be fixed—“sooner or later the crack would show.” In marrying Patrick, she relinquished control for the first time in her life, and now she feels off balance. Louise has a fancy dinner planned for Patrick’s sister and brother-in-law, but she’s exhausted.
Louise’s husband has his own traumatic past. Louise thinks of herself as fundamentally broken and beyond even Patrick’s ability to fix—it’s just that her “crack” has been safely concealed so far. Being married, rather than providing stability and identity in her life, is unsettling for her. She struggles to care about things like dinner arrangements.
Themes
A couple of years ago, when Archie’s behavior was worrying, Louise had gone for therapy and been coached to put her negative thoughts aside—visualizing them being locked inside a chest at the bottom of the sea. Once she’d mastered this, she felt that she had no positive thoughts left over. Not long after, she married Patrick. Archie goes to a fancy prep school now and has happily found a geek crowd. Louise hates the privileged school atmosphere but “the greater good wasn’t an argument she was going to deploy when it came to her own flesh and blood.”
Louise struggles to think positively about anything, so her perceptions of the world, like Reggie’s more hopeful ones, aren’t necessarily to be completely trusted. She brings all her negative baggage into her marriage to Patrick. Louise’s determination to put Archie in a good environment, despite her disdain for its privileges, is reminiscent of Joanna Hunter’s argument that “there are no rules” when it comes to the people one loves.
Themes
Patrick has been reminding her that it’s not too late to have a baby, but the thought terrifies Louise; Archie is already “wrapped around her heart.” She’s perplexed enough to find herself at 40 with an expensive flat, two cars, and a big engagement ring. It feels as though she took a wrong turn at some point.
Louise finds the emotional drains of motherhood too wearying to contemplate having another child. The thought of a conventional family is also alarming to her at this stage in her life; she feels that such a life’s outward trappings—a nice apartment, a fancy ring—contrast with the life she’s known.
Themes
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Louise is on her way back from a meeting and stops by the station. Her cheerful young Detective Constable, Marcus McLellen, has a forensics report for her. She’s taken Marcus under her wing in a maternal way. He tells her that an arcade fire they’ve been investigating was the result of arson. It turns out that the arcade owner is Neil Hunter, Joanna Hunter’s husband. According to Joanna, Neil does “this and that”—which seems to include amusement arcades, seedy health clubs, private-hire vehicles, and dodgy beauty salons.
Despite her discomfort with conventional domesticity, Louise isn’t lacking in maternal feelings; she seems to be more comfortable expressing such feelings in her professional world as a police officer. It turns out that Neil Hunter is under investigation. His seedy business pursuits contrast with his tidy middle-class home life.
Themes
Louise looks at some pictures of Neil Hunter having drinks with Michael Anderson, a suspected drug dealer in Glasgow. Hunter is clean so far, but the fraud officers suspect that Anderson is looking for ways to launder his money in Edinburgh. In her conversation with Joanna yesterday, Joanna explained that she met Neil in the ER after he’d “been set upon by some thugs.” She can’t imagine why Joanna agreed to go out with him.
Neil Hunter has attracted some unsavory people in his life, and there’s more going on with him, and perhaps with the Hunters’ life in general, than meets the eye. Joanna’s casual description of her unlikely meeting with Neil also underlines the sense that Joanna has cobbled together the appearance of a “normal” life, but perhaps not the reality of one.
Themes
Louise and Marcus can’t find a conclusive link between Neil Hunter and the Glasgow drug dealers. Marcus suspects that Hunter is about to go under and is trying to keep himself afloat by going into business with Anderson. Louise offers to go and talk to him. It’s below her pay grade, but she lives nearby. Privately, too, she’s obsessed with Joanna Hunter. (“She’s the other side of me, the woman I never became—the good survivor, the good wife, the good mother”). She tells Marcus to get a warrant for Hunter’s documentation.
Louise has a tendency to become obsessed with her cases, further suggesting that she identifies herself more strongly with her work than with her home life. Her complicated past is further hinted at by her thoughts about Joanna—that Joanna is a kind of mirror image of Louise, who is a “bad survivor,” a “bad wife,” and a “bad mother.”
Themes
Louise’s pregnant coworker, Karen, drops some files on Louise’s desk and, noticing the Hunter files, references the old Mason murders. Young Marcus isn’t familiar with the case, so Louise and Karen fill him in about the random killing of Joanna’s mother and siblings in rural Devon 30 years ago. The convicted man, Andrew Decker, is getting out. That’s why Louise went to the Hunters’ yesterday—to warn Joanna before the news hit the press.
Marcus’s ignorance of Joanna’s history gives Louise a chance to go over the story of what happened to the Masons and it also explains why she showed up at the Hunters’ yesterday—the killer is free, which means that Joanna’s carefully curated sense of normalcy has been suddenly disrupted. Her past is coming back to haunt her.
Themes
Louise finally leaves the station and starts driving home. Her phone rings, and her “police sixth sense” warns her that if she answers, the evening’s plans will be ruined. She can’t resist, though. She picks up.
Louise’s inability to cut herself off completely from her work shows that she’s not completely comfortable with her home life.
Themes
