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 arrives at Ms. MacDonald’s “bleak bungalow” in Musselburgh. Ms. McDonald looks unwell, and Reggie wonders “if it wasn’t better just to dive down into the blue and check out early.” Ms. MacDonald always makes dinner for them before going to her Wednesday night prayer meeting, then Reggie does homework and keeps an eye on the little dog, Banjo, while she’s gone. Ms. MacDonald is in her fifties, but even when she was a younger teacher, she’d looked starchy and relentlessly rational to Reggie. Now she’s “embraced a crazy religion” and lives in a squalid house while preparing for the end of the world.
Reggie’s remark “dive down into the blue” is a hint as to the circumstances of her own mother’s death. The contrast between Ms. MacDonald’s “rational” past and her “crazy” apocalyptically obsessed present is another example of there being more to a person than meets the eye.
Themes
Ms. MacDonald happily talks about the Rapture while Reggie eats the unappetizing spaghetti dinner. Ms. MacDonald always attributes worldly disasters to “God’s work” and seems indifferent to human suffering; only Banjo seems to draw “soppy, maternal love” out of Ms. MacDonald. Ms. MacDonald fears that Banjo will die alone, so Reggie keeps an eye on him in exchange for a hot meal, access to books, and the prayers of Ms. MacDonald’s church. “The awful thing was that Ms. MacDonald was the nearest thing that Reggie had to a family.”
Ms. MacDonald’s apparent indifference to human suffering contrasts with her affection for Banjo. Although there is much about Ms. MacDonald’s life that Reggie doesn’t like, she’s attentive to Ms. MacDonald’s needs—aware that her former teacher doesn’t have anyone else in her life, showing Reggie’s deep empathy—and she includes Ms. MacDonald in her attempt to patch together a sense of family for herself.
Themes
Reggie cleans up Ms. MacDonald’s kitchen and thinks about her own family. It had been her and her mother for a long time, until Mum had gotten involved with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary (“a total arse”) and then Gary (“the real deal”). Gary was fine, just lazy and cheap. Finally Gary took Mum on a two-week trip to Spain; Reggie received a postcard.
Piecemeal bits of Reggie’s past continue to be revealed as she reflects on her present. Reggie’s mother has had a history of unstable relationships, but appears to have been on the verge of a more stable one.
Themes
Reggie is currently working on a translation for Ms. MacDonald, from Book Six of the Iliad. She decides to check her translation against Ms. MacDonald’s Loeb edition, but it’s missing from its proper place on the shelf. Reggie thinks about all the dying in Homer, and her thoughts return to her mother in Spain. Her mother had drowned in the hotel pool. She’d gotten up early and gone to the pool before anyone else was there. The police speculated that she’d lost her locket in the water, dove down to retrieve it, and got her hair caught in a drain. A waiter had tried to revive her, but it was too late. Gary slept through everything. Later, Reggie received her mother’s postcard at about the same time her mother would have been dying.
The missing Loeb edition is significant, since the Loebs are one of the only things in Ms. MacDonald’s life that are normally in good order. However, thoughts of the tragic scenes in the Iliad draw Reggie’s memories to her mother’s tragic drowning death. Reggie’s loss of her mother has been all the more difficult because it occurred so far away, and the last tangible link Reggie had was a postcard from her mother. While a hotel pool drowning is a far cry from the kinds of deaths that occur in Homer, its importance is just as epic in Reggie’s life.
Themes
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Ms. MacDonald lives almost right against the East Coast railroad line and hardly notices the way each passing train shakes the house. Reggie is startled every time, though. Banjo shows no interest in taking a walk in the cold, gusty night, so they stay in front of the gas fire. The banging of the door knocker in the wind sounds like “an unseen visitor desperate to get in.”
Reggie’s awareness of the rattling trains foreshadows what’s to come. The ghostly knocking at the door gives the evening an air of ominous anticipation.
Themes
