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Flesh and Blood
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
Reggie Chase is spoon-feeding home-cooked organic food to a baby, Gabriel Hunter. She has been working as “mother’s help” for Dr. Hunter for six months. Reggie is 16 but looks 12. No one ever takes notice of her; she sometimes wonders if she’s invisible. It’s easy for someone so small to slip through the cracks. Reggie thinks it’s stupid that she has to constantly persuade people that she’s 16—she feels 100 inside.
From the start, it’s obvious that Gabriel Hunter is a doted-on child. There are some connections between Reggie Chase’s self-perception and the young Joanna’s, too—she thinks of herself as unnoticed and hidden in the background, much as little Joanna did. Like Joanna, too, Reggie seems to have experienced more than most her age.
Themes
Reggie’s brother, Billy, made her an ID so she can get into pubs, but Reggie doesn’t see the point of alcohol or drugs. She thinks of her mother and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary getting drunk and having loud sex. At least Gary, unlike his predecessor, wasn’t married and didn’t leer at Reggie all the time. Reggie avoids most of Billy’s offers. Billy, after all, used to steal sweets from Mr. Hussain’s shop, and now he’s “pretty much a career criminal.”
Reggie hasn’t grown up in the most stable or pleasant home environment—her mother’s serial relationships have been unsettling for Reggie, and her older brother hasn’t been a positive influence, either.
Themes
When Reggie was interviewed for the mother’s help job, she lied about her experience with children. She figures there isn’t much to know about infants, and she was recently a child herself, after all—though she’s told she has an “old soul.”
Reggie figures that her young age and relative helplessness allow her to identify with a needy infant. Even though she’s young and inconspicuous herself, she feels much older than she looks, because of having to fend for herself. This is in keeping with the book’s theme of appearances masking underlying realities.
Themes
Dr. Hunter is English, but she studied at the medical school in Edinburgh and never returned to England. Reggie watches the baby while Dr. Hunter works part time as a general practitioner. Reggie’s favorite part of the day is after Dr. Hunter gets home, so she can spend time with her. The Hunters live in an affluent neighborhood of Edinburgh, “quite a distance in every way” from the “third-floor shoe box” in which Reggie lives. She doesn’t mind the two bus journeys back and forth, because she can sit on the top deck and look into people’s houses. She can also get schoolwork done. She’s left school, but she’s still following the curriculum in English literature, ancient history, Latin, and Greek.
Dr. Hunter has become a surrogate mother figure for Reggie. Their intact family and affluent lifestyle contrast strongly with Reggie’s economic and familial insecurities. Even in the midst of her difficult circumstances, Reggie remains an imaginative and observant person who is strongly self-motivated. Her literary study gives her a sense of continuity with her earlier life, as well as something to achieve and goals to strive for. It’s also not what one would expect from a school dropout in a poor neighborhood.
Themes
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Ms. MacDonald, Reggie’s former classics teacher at the “horrible posh school” she’d attended, is helping her prepare for her A-levels. Ms. MacDonald is a fan of “reading round the subject,” which Reggie finds to be a distraction from her prescribed texts, Great Expectations, Mrs. Dalloway, and Twelfth Night. Reggie likes the “plucky abandoned orphans” in Dickens. Ms. MacDonald’s “criminally untidy house” includes every Loeb Classic that has ever been published. In exchange for the tutoring, Reggie runs errands for Ms. MacDonald.
Reggie reads ambitiously and cobbles together a support system, in the absence of family, to help her achieve her goals. Ms. MacDonald will prove to be another character who’s more complicated than her outward appearances suggest—perhaps one reason that Reggie is drawn to her, even though they only have the classics in common. Like the Hunters’ baby, Ms. MacDonald is someone that Reggie is able to help.
Themes
Reggie had won a scholarship to the “horrible posh school” when she was 12, but she never fit in, having never “understood the secret language and hierarchies of the school.” The army pays for part of Reggie’s tuition (her father was killed in the Gulf War before Reggie was born), but she can’t afford the extra accessories and good haircuts that would allow her to fit in.
Reggie has a history of feeling like an outcast and misfit. Even though she belonged at the “horrible posh school” academically, she was a mismatch socially and didn’t have the means to become acceptable in the school’s social world.
Themes
Reggie and her mother always held multiple jobs. Reggie works in Mr. Hussain’s shop on Sunday mornings and had always held paper routes and other jobs even while in school. She budgets meticulously. Reggie eventually forged a letter to her school explaining that the family was moving to Australia and Reggie couldn’t return after summer vacation.
Reggie is enterprising and responsible, in contrast to her brother Billy, and she carries burdens that most kids her age don’t have to face. The circumstances of her dropping out of school are not explained yet; however, Reggie was willing to break the law in order to cut ties with her school, suggesting a desperate situation. She’s willing to deceive in order to survive.
Themes
Ms. MacDonald also left the school, because she has a fast-growing brain tumor. She is a somewhat bitter person, but she is good to Reggie and loves her little dog, Banjo. Reggie thinks Ms. MacDonald is lucky to have time to adjust to her terminal diagnosis. Reggie “didn’t like the idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be and the next moment you simply didn’t exist.”
Ms. MacDonald has been through traumatic hardships herself. Reggie’s thoughts about being here one moment and ceasing to exist the next moment suggest that she’s had to deal with sudden death and bereavement.
Themes
Dr. Hunter would rather not work outside the home, but her husband Neil owns a business that has “hit a sticky patch.” Dr. Hunter calls home all the time to chat with the baby and recite “scraps of poems and nursery rhymes” that sound very English and foreign to Reggie. She also talks to her dog, Sadie, a huge German Shepherd, whom she trusts with her life and the baby’s life. Dr. Hunter always asks people to call her Jo, but people seldom do. Reggie calls her Dr. H.
Dr. Hunter is almost obsessively devoted to her baby and her dog. She clings to them especially fiercely after having lost her family when she was a little girl.
Themes
Dr. Hunter tells Reggie that her father, now dead, had been a fashionable writer in his day, but his books haven’t “stood the test of time.” She keeps his novels in a “junk repository” on the top floor. The rest of the house is Victorian and tasteful; Reggie’s whole flat could fit in its kitchen. Ms. MacDonald, by contrast, has a whole house full of junk. She uses the Second Coming as an excuse, but she’s actually just a messy person. She “got religion” after her cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Hunter never seems to have fully reconciled with her father after her mother’s and siblings’ deaths. Her tidy, affluent life contrasts with Reggie’s poverty, and Ms. MacDonald’s untidiness contrasts with both of them. Ms. MacDonald’s embracing of a fringe Christian sect also defies expectations for a former classics teacher at a “posh” school.
Themes
Yesterday afternoon, a woman rang the doorbell just after Dr. Hunter arrived home. Dr. Hunter and the woman stepped aside to talk privately, with Dr. Hunter uncharacteristically ignoring the baby and Sadie. Reggie hopes the visitor has nothing to do with Billy, whom she’s never mentioned to Dr. Hunter. After the woman leaves, Dr. Hunter has “a funny, tight look on her face” and pins the woman’s card to the kitchen’s notice board. The card says “Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.”
Reggie observes that something uncharacteristically secretive is going on with Dr. Hunter. Her first assumption is that it’s something to do with her troublemaking brother. The intrusion of a police detective into the Hunters’ warm and tidy home environment signals that things aren’t all as they seem.
Themes
The kitchen is cozy on a cold December day. Reggie hopes she might be allowed to spend Christmas with the Hunters, since Dr. Hunter and the baby are her family. Reggie washes the baby’s old-fashioned china dishes. His toys are tasteful wooden ones, and his clothes are new and fashionable. The baby’s most precious possession, his “talisman,” is a square cut from a pale green blanket. The baby just turned one a week ago, and Reggie and Dr. Hunter celebrated with an afternoon tea in Peebles.
Reggie already thinks of the Hunters as a surrogate family for her, and Dr. Hunter’s inclusion of Reggie in family events suggests that she thinks similarly. Dr. Hunter takes meticulous care to provide only the finest things for the baby, in contrast to her own somewhat deprived childhood in the country, and the fact that her baby brother didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy life for very long.
Themes
There’s little evidence of Mr. Hunter’s business troubles, since the Hunters have two cars and only the nicest new things for the baby. Mr. Hunter usually roars away from the house in his big Land Rover, or else he stands outside, smoking and making endless phone calls related to “business.” He’s from Glasgow and does “something in the leisure industry.” He and Dr. Hunter seem to get along okay, but Reggie doesn’t know good relationships with which to compare them. The baby likes Mr. Hunter but adores Dr. Hunter.
Mr. Hunter begins to appear to be a somewhat shady character—at least, it’s unclear what he’s up to. Reggie has never seen a good marriage up close, so she doesn’t have a way to evaluate the Hunters’ marriage or the health of a family. This suggests that Reggie’s perceptions of the Hunters’ family life aren’t entirely trustworthy.
Themes
Dr. Hunter is very mindful of any potential hazards to the baby, even going so far as to cut grapes in half. Reggie gets Dr. Hunter to teach her first aid, including mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and how to stop arterial bleeding. Mr. Hunter is much more easygoing with the baby. He says that Dr. Hunter’s worries make sense “given her history.” Reggie doesn’t know what he means. One day Reggie asks Dr. Hunter how long it takes to drown. Dr. Hunter says it takes five to ten minutes, “not long.” Reggie thinks that’s long enough.
Dr. Hunter is an extreme worrier when it comes to the baby, trying to eliminate anything dangerous from his life. Reggie, too, has her own preoccupation with safety, as suggested by her interest in lifesaving techniques and the technicalities of drowning. Both she and Dr. Hunter clearly have “a history” that shapes their anxieties in the present, though they don’t talk to one another about their pasts.
Themes
Reggie thinks that Dr. Hunter seems too prone to sadness already—“how sad,” she’s forever saying—so Reggie never tells Dr. Hunter about her mother’s death. Reggie makes up a mother instead who works at a supermarket checkout counter, who’s always planning her next diet, who’s 36 (the same age as Dr. Hunter), who had Reggie and was widowed by the time she was 20. “It’s a funny old world,” was her favorite saying. All these things are actually true, except that Jackie Chase isn’t alive.
Reggie doesn’t want Dr. Hunter to know about the tragedy in her past, so she lies about her own mother, Jackie. She gives Dr. Hunter an accurate picture of her mother’s personality, but she leaves out the most important fact that she’s dead. Both Dr. Hunter and Reggie conceal the truth about their backgrounds. It’s also significant that Dr. Hunter is the same age as Reggie’s mother was when she died, reinforcing the sense that Dr. Hunter is a mother substitute for Reggie.
Themes
Reggie has been staying longer and longer at the Hunters’ lately, especially since Mr. Hunter is often out working on his “new venture.” Dr. Hunter doesn’t mind. Reggie hopes that someday Dr. Hunter might suggest that Reggie just move in—then she, Dr. Hunter, the baby, and Sadie could be “a proper family.”
Reggie longs to be fully included in the Hunter family circle. Not only does she miss her mother, but she’s never been part of a fully intact, healthy household before.
Themes
One evening, as Dr. Hunter and Reggie are giving the baby a bath, Dr. Hunter abruptly tells Reggie, “You know there are no rules […] There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow.” She goes on to say, “What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love.” Reggie agrees. But privately she thinks that love doesn’t do you any good in the long run.
Dr. Hunter, despite her outwardly conventional lifestyle and her obsession with protecting the baby from harm, claims there aren’t rules governing life—a surprising claim. On the other hand, given her past, it makes sense that her love for the baby would overpower all other concerns in her life. The “rules” she makes up are all driven toward that end.
Themes
