When Will There Be Good News? Themes

When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson’s 2008 mystery novel, is very much a survival story. Multiple characters—detectives Jackson Brodie and Louise Monroe, and especially crime survivor Joanna Hunter and orphan Reggie Chase—carry memories from traumatic events and are coming to terms with how their pasts impact their relationships with others in the present. By focusing on the struggles of Joanna and Reggie to deal with their respective pasts, Atkinson argues…

In When Will There Be Good News?, many characters feel like misfits in their surroundings, cross socio-cultural boundaries, and forge unlikely personal ties in an effort to find meaning in their lives. Sometimes characters embody unusual contrasts, such as Reggie’s bookishness amidst poverty, and Joanna Hunter’s underworld ties amidst middle-class gentility. These improbable boundary-crossings often signal an unresolved tension in a character’s life.  Through such contrasts—both relatively innocent ones like Reggie and darker ones…

All of the book’s major characters have suffered through major dysfunction in their home lives—often involving the traumatic deaths of loved ones. Reggie, Jackson, and Joanna all long to piece back together the families that were taken from them when they were young, and they each do this through the means most readily available to them—whether through jobs, childbearing, or even detective work. Through the characters’ various attempts to reconstruct their broken families…