Lies and Deceptions Theme Analysis

Throughout When Will There Be Good News?, characters’ relationships are marked by dishonesty: lies, omissions, and deceptions of various kinds. Often these deceptions are part of the way characters represent—or fail to represent—their own lives to one another. For instance, Reggie doesn’t tell Dr. Hunter about her criminal brother, Billy (“She hadn’t lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life”),  and Dr. Hunter never mentions her troubled past to Reggie (Reggie “imagined herself saying, ‘What’s your story, Dr. H .?’ but it didn’t sound right”). By making lies a key part of the novel’s action, Atkinson argues that people tend to construct reality—including representing their own stories—in the ways they imagine best promote their interests. This comes through notably in Jackson Brodie’s and Louise Monroe’s attitudes toward their respective marriages.

Though Jackson Brodie sees himself as a cynical veteran and ex-cop, he’s actually very naïve and gullible, seeing what he wants to see about the people he loves. Jackson doesn’t actually know his new wife, Tessa. It’s clear from the beginning that his and Tessa’s relationship is on a less than fully truthful footing, as Jackson makes a fateful trip to Yorkshire to see his (alleged) son, Nathan, from a past relationship, but doesn’t tell Tessa about the trip because he’s never mentioned Nathan’s existence to her. “So [there were] quite a lot of sins of omission going on, and in such a new marriage, when there should have been no secrets.” That there are secrets suggests that Jackson is already feeling insecure about his new marriage. Jackson’s gullibility comes through in his attitudes about Tessa herself. Tellingly, he reflects, “He couldn’t have designed a better woman. She was […] much smarter than he was but, unlike the previous women in his life, didn’t find it necessary to remind him of this fact at every turn.” Though Jackson is self-aware about what he desires in a wife, Tessa’s willingness to marry quickly and her lack of transparency fail to raise his suspicions, further underlining his readiness to be deceived. At the end of the book, it’s revealed that Jackson’s marriage was a mirage after all—Tessa had conned Jackson in cooperation with a mutual friend. No one at her alleged workplace, the British Museum, has ever heard of Tessa, and Jackson discovers that Tessa has cleaned out his financial accounts. “It had all been one big setup, right from that initial ‘chance’ encounter on Regent Street. Between them they had designed her to appeal to him—the way she looked, the way she behaved, the things she said—and he had fallen like the biggest fool ever.” Because Jackson otherwise proves himself to be a competent detective, this event suggests that Jackson talked himself into believing lies out of sheer loneliness.

Detective Louise Monroe’s insecurities provide a parallel to Jackson’s, as she tells small lies to conceal the fact that she feels like a “bad wife” posing as a “good wife.” In contrast to the deceived Jackson, Louise is the deceiver in her marriage. Her dishonesty suggests that she toys with the truth in order to confirm her own reading of the world, much as Jackson believes what he wants to see. For example, after lying to her husband, Patrick, that she didn’t have an extensive sexual history before their marriage, she thinks, “Liar, liar, pants on fire. Louise was ever a good deceiver, she often thought that in another life she would have made an excellent con woman […] She should have said, ‘I have no idea how to love another human being unless it’s by tearing them to pieces and eating them.’” In other words, Louise doesn’t believe herself capable of being “a good wife” and tells relatively superficial lies in hopes of concealing her “real” self for as long as possible. Louise’s experience of, in her mind, pretending to be a good wife inclines her to be suspicious of others. When she ponders Joanna Hunter’s case, for example, she suspects that she sees a like-minded liar in Joanna: “She suspected that if push came to shove, Joanna Hunter could dissemble with the best of them […] Had she nurtured revenge in her heart for thirty years and now wanted to execute justice? That was an outlandish idea, people didn’t do that. Louise would have […] but Louise wasn’t like other people. Joanna Hunter wasn’t like other people either, though, was she?” Louise’s perception of being “abnormal” causes her to perceive the same in others, whether that hunch is justified or not. Later, Louise’s suspicions are partly confirmed when Joanna casually reveals that she’d gone to visit her family’s murderer about a month before his release from prison. “She never said, Louise thought. She had gone to see Joanna Hunter in her lovely home and sat in her lovely living room […] and she had told her that Andrew Decker had been released and Joanna Hunter said, ‘I thought it must be anytime now.’ She didn’t lie, she simply didn’t tell the truth. Why?” As in Louise’s case, Joanna’s efforts to conceal the whole truth help to maintain a “lovely” façade where, in fact, there might be uglier facts just under the surface.

After Jackson Brodie rescues Joanna and helps her cover up the evidence that she killed her captors, he realizes his actions have repercussions for his relationships, especially with Louise, a longtime romantic interest: “She was police and he used to be. There was a chasm between them now that could never be bridged because he could never tell her the truth.” Lies and omissions, though they are usually intended to protect relationships, actually destabilize them. Arguably, in fact, Atkinson uses the ubiquity of lies in the story to unsettle the reader as well—by the end of the book, the believability of characters’ stories about themselves (especially Jackson’s, Louise’s, and Joanna’s) is rather in doubt.