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 like Joanna Hunter’s—Atkinson suggests that people are rarely what they seem, and that outer appearances often mask a more complicated, even ominous reality.
Reggie is a vivid example of the contrast between appearance and reality, as her highbrow passions are at odds with her meager existence. Reggie never fit into the social hierarchy of the “horrible posh school” she attended on scholarship, but she maintains her classical studies even after her circumstances change for the worse, forcing her to drop out. Despite being poor and recently orphaned, Reggie finds studying the classics to be a source of continuity, pride, and enjoyment even while struggling to make ends meet—working two bus journeys away for well-off Dr. Hunter while living in a shoebox-sized apartment in a depressed area. Reggie is drawn to others who embody similar contrasts, spending time with retired classics teacher Ms. MacDonald, who’s helping her prepare for college. Despite Ms. MacDonald’s lack of social graces and the apocalyptic religious views she embraces in her dying days, she, somewhat improbably, owns “every single Loeb Classic that had ever been published, red for Latin, green for Greek.” Ms. MacDonald doesn’t seem like someone who would care about classical literature, but she patiently tutors Reggie and even leaves her an inheritance that will allow Reggie to go to college. Though Reggie finds aspects of her teacher’s life crazy and even pathetic, she appreciates and cares for her, instinctively understanding that people can’t be neatly categorized. The invasion of Reggie’s intellectual turf symbolizes the vulnerability of this contrast in her life. Reggie’s brother, Billy, uses the beloved Loeb Classics editions to smuggle drugs. Reggie discovers that “Trojan horses had surprising insides and so did Ms. MacDonald’s Iliad. When Reggie opened the pages, she found it had been the subject of razor-sharp surgery, its heart cut out in a neat square.” Reggie—herself a “Trojan horse” of a sort—finds that even the spaces she’s carved out for herself as safe havens are subject to violation. This proves to be even more true in the person of Joanna Hunter.
Despite her professional middle-class lifestyle, Joanna Hunter has criminal ties at odds with others’ perceptions of her, especially Reggie’s. Reggie can’t put Joanna Hunter in the same mental category as her brother Billy, who “knew a lot of ungrammatical people.” She is wary of Billy even crossing paths with the Hunters and never tells Dr. Hunter about his existence. Yet, at the end of the novel, there’s an implied connection between Joanna Hunter and Billy. Earlier in the book, Reggie mentions that Billy had stolen a Russian handgun, a Makarov, that their father had brought back from the Gulf War. Much later, after Jackson Brodie comes home to his London flat, he discovers the dead body of Andrew Decker, the killer of Joanna’s mother and siblings, next to a gun: “a Russian number—Makarov, Tokarev, he couldn’t remember—there’d been a lot around in the Gulf.” Later, in an offhand remark, Billy reveals that “At least he had the money that Reggie’s precious doctor gave him for the Makarov. He couldn’t imagine what she wanted it for. Funny old world.” Atkinson gives no further clues in the novel as to how this unlikely collision of worlds has occurred. Reggie insists that she has kept her brother and Joanna Hunter apart, but it turns out that, not only did Dr. Hunter know about Billy, she transacted a gun purchase with him—and was implicitly involved somehow in Decker’s death.
Atkinson leaves many unanswered questions. Did Dr. Hunter’s hiring of the inexperienced Reggie have something to do with a previous connection with Billy? What was the nature of her hinted involvement with Decker’s death? Atkinson explains nothing, only suggesting that no one is quite who they seem to be, and that sometimes the appearances people maintain mask complicated realities. The most shocking such contrast in the novel occurs when Joanna Hunter kills her captors. Just before she is rescued by Reggie and Jackson, Joanna obeys her captors by carefully writing an appeal for rescue. “She crossed the i’s and dotted the t and underlined the Please, and when John came back for the note, she jammed the pen into his eyeball as hard as she could. It surprised her how far it went in.” Hardly missing a beat, she then sings a soothing nursery rhyme to the baby as he wakes up. Far from being a helpless victim, Joanna is, contrary to her impeccably bourgeois and maternal appearance, prepared to manipulate others and commit violence to save herself and her son. Later, as Detective Louise Monroe talks with Joanna about Andrew Decker’s death in London, Joanna mentions an apparently inconsequential visit she’d made to her family’s killer before his release from prison. Louise thinks afterward, “Good explanation […] Worthy of a doctor. But who was to say what else she had murmured to him across the visitors’ table. […] She’d certainly rather fight with [Joanna] than against her.” Louise’s thoughts suggest, in other words, that Joanna’s darker side contrasts starkly with her trustworthy, professional exterior.
While pondering how Andrew Decker could have committed heinous murders, Louise Monroe reflects, “Men like Decker were inadequates, they were loners, maybe they just couldn’t stand to see people enjoying the lives they never had.” But most of the novel’s characters appear to be misfits in one way or another—the difference lies in how they leverage that status. Some, like Reggie, carve out a niche for themselves, defying the assumptions or intrusions of others. Others, like Dr. Hunter, rely on an appearance of normalcy to mask improbably dark ties. As Reggie remarks, “Trojan horses [have] surprising insides,” and in her characters, Atkinson allows the tension between inside and outside to go unresolved.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Appearances vs. Reality ThemeTracker
Appearances vs. Reality Quotes in When Will There Be Good News?
Of course, she should have taken Joseph with her, she should have snatched him from the buggy, or run with the buggy (Jessica would have). It didn’t matter that Joanna was only six years old, that she would never have managed running with the buggy and that the man would have caught her in seconds, that wasn’t the point. It would have been better to have tried to save the baby and been killed than not trying and living. It would have been better to have died with Jessica and her mother rather than being left behind without them. But she never thought about any of that, she just did as she was told.
“Run, Joanna, run,” her mother commanded. So she did.
It was funny, but now, thirty years later, the thing that drove her to distraction was that she couldn’t remember what the dog was called. And there was no one left to ask.
Reggie had never actually had a close encounter with a one-year-old child before, or indeed any small children, but what was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could easily identify with all of that. And it wasn’t that long since she had been a child herself, although she had an “old soul,” a fortune-teller had told her. Body of a child, mind of an old woman. Old before her time.
On one of these evenings, apropos of nothing (apropos was another new word), when Dr. Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr. Hunter turned to Reggie and said, “You know there are no rules,” and Reggie said, “Really?” because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins […] She said, “No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. There’s no one watching us to see if we’re doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.”
Reggie wasn’t entirely sure that she knew what Dr. Hunter was talking about. The baby was distracting her, squawking and splashing like a mad sea creature.
“What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love. Do you understand?”
Andrew Decker didn’t destroy his own family, he destroyed someone else’s. He destroyed Howard Mason’s. Men like Decker were inadequates, they were loners, maybe they just couldn’t stand to see people enjoying the lives they never had. A mother and her children, wasn’t that the bond at the heart of everything?
Hide or run? Louise hoped she would stand and fight. If you were on your own, you could fight, if you were on your own, you could run. You couldn’t do either when you were with children. You could try. Gabrielle Mason had tried, her hands and arms were covered in defensive wounds where she had tried to stave off Andrew Decker’s knife.
Reggie opened the front door and stuck her head out into the wind and rain. “A train’s crashed,” a man said to her. “Right out back.” Reggie picked up the phone in the hall and dialed 999. Dr. Hunter had told her that in an emergency everyone presumed that someone else would call. Reggie wasn’t going to be that person who presumed.
“Back soon,” she said to Banjo, pulling on her jacket. She picked up the big torch that Ms. MacDonald kept by the fuse box at the front door, put the house keys in her pocket, pulled the door shut behind her, and ran out into the rain. The world wasn’t going to end this night. Not if Reggie had anything to do with it.
What larks, Reggie!
Louise sighed inwardly. The girl was one of those. An overexcited imagination, could get stuck on an idea and be carried away by it. She was a romantic, quite possibly a fantasist. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Reggie Chase was a girl who would find something of interest wherever she went. Training to be a heroine, that was what Catherine Morland had spent her first sixteen years doing, and she wouldn’t be surprised if Reggie Chase had done the same.
Andrew Decker was fifty years old and he was free. Joseph would have been thirty-one, Jessica would have been thirty-eight, their mother sixty-four. […]
Sometimes she felt like a spy, a sleeper who had been left in a foreign country and forgotten about. Had forgotten about herself. […]
The baby woke with a squawk and she held him tightly to her chest and shushed him, cradling the back of his head with her hand. There were no limits to what you would do to protect your child. But what if you couldn’t protect him, no matter how much you tried?
He was free. Something ticked over, a click in time, like a secret signal, a cue, implanted in her mind long ago. The bad men were all out, roaming the streets. […]
Run, Joanna, run.
In the dream he had opened his heart and let Louise in. The dream had unsettled him. Tessa hadn’t existed in the dream world, as if she had never entered his life. The train crash had caused a rift in his world, an earthquake crack that seemed to have put an impossible distance between him and the life he shared with Tessa. New wife, new life. He had proposed to her the day after Louise texted him to tell him she was getting married, it had never struck him at the time that the two things might have been related. But then he’d never been much good at figuring out the anatomy of his behavior. (Women, on the other hand, seemed to find him transparent.)
She picked it up. Same neat hole cut into its center. She ran a finger around the sides of the little paper coffin. Was someone hiding secrets inside Ms. MacDonald’s Loeb Classics? All of them? Or only the ones that she needed for her A level? The cutout hole was the work of someone who was good with his hands. Someone who might have had a future as a joiner but instead became a street dealer hanging around on corners, pale and shifty. He was higher up the pyramid now, but Billy was someone with no sense of loyalty. Someone who would take from the hand that fed him, and hide what he took in secret little boxes.
Reggie didn’t mean to cry, but she was so tired and so small and her face hurt where the book had hit it and the world was so full of big men telling people they were dead. “Sweet little wife, pretty little baby.”
Where did a person go when they had no one to turn to and nowhere left to run?
Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night — they all made sense, they were part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn’t know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman.
She suspected that if push came to shove, Joanna Hunter could dissemble with the best of them.
She had run and hidden once, now she was doing it again. She must have been upset by Decker’s release. She was the same age as her mother when she was murdered, her baby was the same age as her brother. Might she do something stupid? To herself? To Decker? 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 done […] but Louise wasn’t like other people. Joanna Hunter wasn’t like other people either, though, was she?
“So your whole identity, basically. What if Decker’s using it? You get the driving license of a Category A prisoner with a warrant out against him, and he gets you — upstanding citizen (so-called) —credit cards, money, keys, a phone. The last person who phoned Joanna Hunter on Wednesday called on your phone, your BlackBerry, so perhaps it was Decker. He phones Joanna Hunter and then she disappears. Neil Hunter says she left at seven but we only have his word for it. Maybe she left later, after the phone call. And if she did drive away— somehow or other, not in her car, not in a rental — and she wasn’t driving down to see the aunt, then where was she going? To meet someone else? Decker? Did he catch the train to Edinburgh because they had arranged a meeting? He gets derailed, literally, he phones her afterwards, and she goes off to meet him.”
She became a doctor because she wanted to help people. It was a terrible cliché but it was true […] If she couldn’t heal herself then she could at least heal someone else. That was why she had been attracted to Neil— he hadn’t needed healing, he was whole in himself, he didn’t suffer the pain and sadness of the world, he just got on with his life. She was a bowl, holding everything inside, he was Mars throwing his spear into the world. She didn’t have to tend to him, didn’t have to worry about him. Necessarily, that meant there were drawbacks to living with him, but who was perfect? Only the baby.
She had spent the thirty years since the murders creating a life. It wasn’t a real life, it was the simulacrum of one, but it worked. Her real life had been left behind in that other, golden field. And then she had the baby and her love for him breathed life into the simulacrum and it became genuine. Her love for the baby was immense, bigger than the entire universe. Fierce.
“You know how to shoot a gun,” Louise said, holding the stepladder steady.
“I do. But I didn’t pull the trigger.” And Louise thought, No, but somehow or other you persuaded him to do it.
“I went to see him because I wanted him to understand what he had done,” Joanna Hunter said as she reached to fix the angel on the top of the tree. “To know that he had robbed people of their lives for no reason. Maybe seeing me, grown up, and with the baby, brought it home to him, made him think how Jessica and Joseph would have been.” Good explanation, Louise thought. Very rational. Worthy of a doctor. But who was to say what else she had murmured to him across the visitors’ table.
