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, Atkinson argues that, beyond any biological impulse, the desire for family is fundamentally a longing to secure what has been most lacking in one’s life.
For Reggie, family means an affectionate, consistent shared life. Reggie’s mother, Jackie Chase, had gone through a series of unhealthy relationships and then abruptly died, so for Reggie, Dr. Hunter and her baby represent a stable, loving home. Until now, she has patched together family relationships wherever she’s been able to find them—spending Christmas day with the family of Mr. Hussain, her boss at the corner store, sharing a weekly meal and tutoring session with her old teacher, Ms. MacDonald—but in the Hunter home, she finds what has been lacking throughout her own formative years. Reggie’s poignant longing for inclusion in the Hunters’ life is evident throughout the novel. Reggie daydreams “that one day soon Dr. Hunter might say, ‘Why go home, Reggie? Why not move in here?’ and then they would be a proper family — Dr. Hunter, Reggie, and the baby and the dog. ([Mr. Hunter] didn’t really figure in Reggie’s daydream of family life.)” This daydream suggests that Reggie isn’t so much looking for a traditional household configuration; she just longs for an environment in which she can find constancy and affection.
Short of being able to join the Hunter household, Reggie immerses herself in the pattern of the family’s life as their nanny, learning the baby’s habits and Dr. Hunter’s comings and goings. This caretaking instinct—interpreted cynically as an “overexcited imagination” and “training to be heroine” by Louise Monroe—eventually leads to the Hunters’ disappearance being investigated, and their lives being saved. In a way, then, Reggie’s care for the Hunters is an attempt to prevent the disintegration she felt powerless to stop in her biological family. For Jackson Brodie, despite multiple long-term relationships and children, the nearest thing to family is the collection of those he’s protected and defended over the years as a cop and detective. Jackson grew up in a dysfunctional household (it had “a whole vocabulary of violence. It was the nearest they could get to expressing love for one another”) and then his beloved sister was murdered at 18. He describes his attitude toward family as a kind of herding instinct: “Jackson was a shepherd, he couldn’t rest until the flock was accounted for, all gathered safely in. It was his calling and his curse. Protect and serve.” Like both Reggie and Joanna, he feels compelled to save the vulnerable.
As Jackson makes up his mind to search for the missing Joanna, he reveals the fatherly instinct that undergirds his detective work: “She had been found once, she would be found again. She wasn’t Joanna Hunter anymore. She wasn’t a GP or a wife […] She was a little girl out in the dark, dirty and stained with her mother’s blood.” At the end of the novel, it’s revealed that Jackson, as a young soldier, was among the search party who found the orphaned Joanna after her family was killed, not long after his own sister had died. So, in a way, his entire career has been framed by this impulse to gather and care for the vulnerable. Jackson’s personal experiences with loss are reflected in the fierce emotions he experiences when he meets his young son, Nathan: “Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. […] Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.” It seems that his “shepherding” instinct informs his fatherhood rather than vice versa, especially since his ex-girlfriend, Julia, denies his paternity, making it impossible for Jackson to gather the boy into his “flock.” His sense of helplessness in this matter only deepens his desperation to find and help others.
Joanna Hunter shares Jackson’s perception of love as “ferocious” and “dirty,” especially when new motherhood reconnects her to the sense of family she lost at such an early age. Joanna’s family of origin had been obliterated in an unthinkable act of violence when Joanna was only six years old. All her life, therefore, she has been “longing for something that she could no longer remember.” Having been so abruptly deprived of a tangible family, she struggles to piece together an approximation of one as an adult. With her husband, Neil, “[i]t wasn’t a real life, it was the simulacrum of one, but it worked. […] And then she had the baby and her love for him breathed life into the simulacrum and it became genuine.” This suggests that, for Joanna, family love is something more than simply creating a household; becoming a mother awakens a visceral survival instinct and allows her to somehow reconfigure in the present what she lost as a child. This comes across most clearly when Joanna kills her captors at the end of the novel, doing for her son what she couldn’t do for her mother and sisters as a helpless child.
The novel’s picture of family love is best summed up when, in a domestic scene near the beginning of the book, Dr. Hunter and Reggie are bathing baby Gabriel Joseph. Dr. Hunter suddenly tells Reggie, “There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. […] What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love. Do you understand?” Reggie doesn’t understand what has prompted Dr. Hunter’s words, but as she proves through the rest of the novel, she instinctively understands a family life founded on shared bonds of affection, commitment, and fierce loyalty. All the book’s major characters yearn for this, in fact, though none of them find it without disillusionment and heartache.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family ThemeTracker
Family 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.
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?”
The mechanics of fatherhood turned out to be infinitely more primitive. He fingered the plastic bag in his pocket. A different pregnancy, a different child. His. He remembered the surge of emotion he had felt earlier in the day when he had touched Nathan’s small head. Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.
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!
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.)
Joanna didn’t believe in God, how could she, but she believed in the existence of the soul, believed indeed in the transference of the soul, and although she wouldn’t have stood up at a scientific conference and declared it, she also believed that she carried the souls of her dead family inside her and one day the baby would do the same for her. Just because you were a rational and skeptical atheist didn’t mean that you didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.
The best days of her life had been when she was pregnant and the baby was still safe inside her. Once you were out in the world, then the rain fell on your face and the wind lifted your hair and the sun beat down on you and the path stretched ahead of you and evil walked on it.
She couldn’t really remember any of them, but that didn’t stop them from still possessing a reality that was stronger than anything alive, apart from the baby, of course. They were the touchstone to which everything else must look and the exemplar compared to which everything else failed. Except for the baby.
She was bereft, her whole life an act of bereavement, longing for something that she could no longer remember. Sometimes in the night, in dreams, she heard their old dog barking and it brought back a memory of grief so raw that it led her to wonder about killing the baby, and then herself, both of them slipping away on something as peaceful as poppies so that nothing hideous could ever happen to him. A contingency plan for when you were cornered, for when you couldn’t run.
He had no idea how sexually incontinent Louise had been in her life and she wasn’t about to enlighten him […] “A handful of guys — if that— pretty long-term relationships, really. Lost my virginity at eighteen to a boy I’d been going out with for a couple of years.”
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. Who knows, maybe even in this life, it wasn’t over yet, after all.
She should have told the truth. She should have told the truth about everything. 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.”
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?
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving, sumer is i-cumin in, loude sing cuckoo, there was an old lady who swallowed a fly, Adam lay ybounden bounden in a bond and miles to go before I sleep, five little bluebirds hopping by the door. Run, run Joanna run. But she couldn’t run because she was tethered by the rope, like an animal. She thought of animals gnawing off a leg to escape from a trap and she had tried tearing at the rope with her teeth, but it was made from polypropylene and she couldn’t make any inroad on it.
She knew that this was the dark place she had always been destined to find again. Just because a terrible thing happened to you once didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.
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.
