When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson’s 2008 mystery novel, is very much a survival story. Multiple characters—detectives Jackson Brodie and Louise Monroe, and especially crime survivor Joanna Hunter and orphan Reggie Chase—carry memories from traumatic events and are coming to terms with how their pasts impact their relationships with others in the present. By focusing on the struggles of Joanna and Reggie to deal with their respective pasts, Atkinson argues that trauma can shape people in ways both dangerous and heroic, and that sometimes there isn’t a clear line between danger and heroism in people’s resulting actions.
Joanna Hunter, who at six years old was the lone survivor of the knife attack that killed the rest of her family, spends her adulthood trying to outrun her traumatic past. Ultimately, her survival instinct—especially her desire to protect her son—makes her dangerous in her own right. When Joanna was little, the only reason she survived the attack was because she “obeyed her mother when she screamed at her. “Run, Joanna, run,” she said, and Joanna ran into the field and was lost in the wheat.” In effect, Joanna never stops running from the trauma of this incident. Out of survivor’s guilt, Joanna tries to recreate some of her lost childhood family through her baby son (Gabriel Joseph, named for her dead mother and brother) and her dog, Sadie. Joanna even admits this attempted compensation to herself: “her whole life [was] an act of bereavement, longing for something that she could no longer remember […] [I]n 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 […] A contingency plan for when you were cornered, for when you couldn’t run.” Joanna senses that, on some level, she can’t make up for what she’s lost, and there might come a point when she can no longer run and is forced to confront her past directly.
Even as she’s aware that she can’t truly recreate her lost family, Joanna discovers real love for her son and transfers her survival instinct to protecting the baby: “She had spent the thirty years since the murders creating a life. It wasn’t a real life […] 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.” In a way, the fierceness of this newfound love makes Joanna more vulnerable—and, as she soon discovers, more dangerous. When Joanna and her son are kidnapped, presumably by her husband Neil Hunter’s shady business associates, she ultimately escapes by attacking and killing the men holding them hostage. She persuades detective Jackson Brodie to burn down the house in which the attacks occur, so that the ordeal won’t continue to haunt them. “She said she killed the two guys who were holding her in the house because they were intending to kill her and the baby […]For the rest of her life she would have been the woman who killed her kidnappers, and the baby would have been the son of that woman. […] She’d spent thirty years running from one nightmare only to crash headlong into another.” While Joanna seems to have acted in self-defense, the grisly nature of the killing implies that she was reacting as much to her childhood trauma as to the situation at hand, grim as it was. This conclusion confirms that, in the end, Joanna can’t outrun her past. It also shows that, haunted by her childhood vulnerability, she’ll do anything—even commit crimes—in order to shield her son from the same trauma.
Sixteen-year-old Reggie Chase, who works as a mother’s helper for Joanna, fell through the cracks after her mother’s death and has no one to look out for her, so she copes by making sure others don’t fall through the cracks, too. The narration notes that “[N]obody really took any notice of Reggie at all [...] It was very easy to slip between the cracks, especially if you were small.” Though Reggie’s care for vulnerable people seems at times like a potential weakness, her love (motivated by her own loneliness) ultimately saves the day. Reggie is drawn to other vulnerable people. She has no experience with children but gets a job as a nanny for Joanna Hunter on the basis of her empathy: “[Babies] were small, they were helpless, they were confused, and Reggie could easily identify with all of that.” She also provides company to dying, eccentric Ms. MacDonald, her former classics teacher, and even takes responsibility for Ms. MacDonald’s remains following her death. Though she’s no expert on babies and isn’t fond of Ms. MacDonald’s religious quirks, her attraction to the lonely and helpless governs her actions. After her mother’s drowning death, Reggie learns first aid from Dr. Hunter so that she can rescue anyone else who’s in a critical situation. When a catastrophic train wreck occurs nearby, she goes to help without a second thought, even rescuing detective Jackson Brodie’s life. Reggie’s empathetic, and self-sacrificial attitude suggests that, having been left abandoned and lonely after her mother’s death, Reggie is coping with her trauma by preventing that same fate from befalling others.
Because she seems to attract the vulnerable, and so many she has cared about have died, Reggie wonders whether she’s truly capable of helping people or whether she’s an “angel of death”: “It was like being cursed. […] [Perhaps] instead of saving [Jackson Brodie] she had killed him, simply by being near him. Not the breath of life but the kiss of death.” Like Joanna Hunter, Reggie is haunted by past trauma, and it seems possible that said trauma compromises her ability to relate to others in a healthy way. Others wonder, too—when Reggie first reports Dr. Hunter’s supposed disappearance, cynical police detective Louise Monroe supposes that Reggie “was a romantic, quite possibly a fantasist. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. […] 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.” However, the truth is that Reggie is the only person who is observant enough to realize that Joanna Hunter is in trouble (she notices Joanna’s car is still parked at her house; she recognizes the baby’s missing blanket) and persistent enough to demand help. Reggie’s love and loyalty leads Jackson Brodie to the Hunters and ultimately saves them.
Atkinson ends the novel on an ambiguous note, not drawing a definitive moral from Joanna’s and Reggie’s respective outcomes. It is unclear whether Joanna and her son will be unscathed by Joanna’s defensive killings, or whether Joanna’s actions have compounded the trauma they’ll both carry throughout their lives. Will Reggie’s loyal affections keep her innocent, or will she, too, experience darker fallout (perhaps through her devotion to Joanna herself)? These questions are left to speculation, but in the world of the novel, even loving intentions, when shaped by one’s past trauma, can lead to unforeseen results.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past ThemeTracker
Trauma, Survival, and Reckoning with the Past 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!
This was the third dead body Reggie had seen in her life. Ms. MacDonald, Mum, and the soldier last night. Four if you counted Banjo. It seemed a lot for a person of so few years.
She’d identified a dead body, had her flat vandalized, and been threatened by violent idiots, and it wasn’t even lunchtime. Reggie hoped the rest of the day would be more uneventful.
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.
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 had been found once, she would be found again. She wasn’t Joanna Hunter anymore. She wasn’t a GP or a wife, she wasn’t Reggie’s employer (“and friend”), she wasn’t the woman that Louise was concerned about. She was a little girl out in the dark, dirty and stained with her mother’s blood. She was a little girl who was fast asleep in the middle of a field of wheat as men and dogs streamed unknowingly towards her, lighting their way with torches and moonlight.
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.
“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.
