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
Marcus buys fish and chips for everyone. Jackson and Reggie are sitting in the back of Louise’s car with Sadie between them. Jackson tells Louise to just drop him somewhere so that he can get home, but Louise refuses, reminding him he’s committed several crimes—driving without a license and driving while unfit. (Although “he’s not a prisoner,” she had told the English officers. “Just an idiot.”) He and Louise snipe at one another while she drives.
The improbable group’s journey back to Edinburgh has a sense of comic relief about it. Jackson’s and Louise’s affection for each other is masked by humorous albeit irritable insults.
Themes
Louise explains to Reggie about the aunt who’s been dead for weeks. Reggie goes through the contents of Joanna’s purse again. She insists that something bad has happened to Joanna, and both Jackson and Louise agree. They can’t figure out if there is any connection between Joanna’s disappearance and Decker. Jackson somehow lost his BlackBerry and keys in the train crash, and it had been replaced with Decker’s driving license. How had their identities gotten swapped? Louise finally fills Reggie in on Joanna’s past. Jackson finally remembers who Decker is—he’d been among the search party looking for Joanna while on army maneuvers in Dartmoor. Now he’s searching for her again.
As Reggie is filled in on the “sick aunt” wild goose chase, as well as the true story of Joanna’s childhood, certain big questions remain unanswered—and another improbable wrinkle in the story emerges, as it’s revealed that Jackson, then a young soldier, was the man who found Joanna the last time she ran, as a little girl. Jackson’s own life was saved because Dr. Hunter, whose life he helped save, taught Reggie lifesaving techniques.
Themes
Later, while Reggie and Marcus are buying snacks in a service station, Louise feels strong desire for Jackson and wishes she could “let her bones melt,” even momentarily, as she never does with Patrick. But she talks about Neil Hunter’s criminal associations instead. She wonders if Hunter’s friends are holding Joanna and the baby hostage. Jackson approves of her theories, but just takes her hand and says that he’s missed her. Before she can respond, Reggie and Marcus return from the shop.
Jackson and Louise still have strong feelings for one another, but they don’t indulge them, as Louise tries desperately to keep their interactions focused on the business at hand, and Reggie’s and Marcus’s presence keep their feelings muffled.
Themes
They arrive back in Scotland after dark. Louise drops Reggie and Jackson in Musselburgh. Jackson promises Louise he won’t go back to London without saying goodbye. Louise daydreams about taking Jackson home and introducing him as the man she should’ve married, or at least run away with—“marriage was for fools.” She drops Marcus off, even though he’s miles out of her way, and contemplates where else she could go—“how far could she get before anyone noticed she was gone?”
Louise is convinced that she’s made a big mistake in marrying Patrick and wishes she could run away with Jackson. Short of that, she wishes she could run away like Joanna, to escape the strain of pretending to be something she isn’t.
Themes
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