When Will There Be Good News?
Kate Atkinson, 2008
Little, Brown & Co.
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316154857
Summary
Thirty years ago, six-year-old Joanna witnessed the brutal murders of her mother, brother and sister, before escaping into a field, and running for her life. Now, the man convicted of the crime is being released from prison, meaning Dr. Joanna Hunter has one more reason to dwell on the pain of that day, especially with her own infant son to protect.
Sixteen-year-old Reggie, recently orphaned and wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for Joanna Hunter, but has no idea of the woman’s horrific past. All Reggie knows is that Dr. Hunter cares more about her baby than life itself, and that the two of them make up just the sort of family Reggie wished she had: that unbreakable bond, that safe port in the storm. When Dr. Hunter goes missing, Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried, despite the decidedly shifty business interests of Joanna’s husband, Neil, and the unknown whereabouts of the newly freed murderer, Andrew Decker.
Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is looking for a missing person of her own, murderer David Needler, whose family lives in terror that he will return to finish the job he started. So it’s not surprising that she listens to Reggie’s outrageous thoughts on Dr. Hunter’s disappearance with only mild attention. But when ex-police officer and Private Investigator, Jackson Brodie arrives on the scene, with connections to Reggie and Joanna Hunter of his own, the details begin tosnap into place. And, as Louise knows, once Jackson is involved there’s no telling how many criminal threads he will be able to pull together — or how many could potentially end up wrapped around his own neck.
In an extraordinary virtuoso display, Kate Atkinson has produced one of the most engrossing, masterful, and piercingly insightful novels of this or any year. It is also as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as Atkinson weaves in and out of the lives of her eccentric, grief-plagued, and often all-too-human cast. Yet out of the excesses of her characters and extreme events that shake their worlds comes a relatively simple message, about being good, loyal, and true. When Will There Be Good News? shows us what it means to survive the past and the present, and to have the strength to just keep on keeping on. (From the publisher.)
This is the third in the Jackson Brodie series, following Case Histories and One Good Turn.
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.
After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.
Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.
Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.
Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.
Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."
A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.
Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A deliciously underhanded, echo-filled novel…Although When Will There Be Good News? has been expertly rendered by Ms. Atkinson, it is a reminder that she is too versatile a writer to stick with any one incarnation. It is very much to be hoped that she keeps this gratifying series going. But she has already shown herself capable of creating a varied body of work, starting with her debut novel, the Whitbread prizewinner Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Good as it is, this latest Brodie book nearly bursts at the seams. It shows off an imagination so active that When Will There Be Good News? can barely contain it.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Thank God, in these hard times, for a cheerful, ghoulish, gory book like this....This is a grand mystery, with plenty of misdeeds and overwrought coincidences, as well as quotes from Scots ballads, old nursery rhymes and the classics, so you can feel edified while being creeped out—as you wait for that happy ending we all long for, and think we deserve.
Carolyn See - Washington Post
(Starred review.) In Atkinson's stellar third novel to feature ex-cop turned PI Jackson Brodie (after Case Histories and One Good Turn), unrelated characters and plot lines collide with momentous results. On a country road, six-year-old Joanna Mason is the only survivor of a knife attack that leaves her mother and two siblings dead. Thirty years later, after boarding the wrong train in Yorkshire, Brodie is almost killed when the train crashes. He's saved by 16-year-old Regina Reggie Chase, the nanny of Dr. Joanna Hunter, nee Mason. In the chaos following the crash, Brodie ends up with the wallet of Andrew Decker, the recently released man convicted of murdering the Mason family. Enter DCI Louise Monroe, Brodie's former love interest, who's tracking Decker because of a recent case involving a similar family and crime. When Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie is convinced she's been kidnapped and enlists the reluctant Brodie to track her down. A lesser author would buckle under so many story lines, but Atkinson juggles them brilliantly, simultaneously tying up loose ends from Turn and opening new doors for further Brodie misadventures.
Publishers Weekly
Evocative, smart, literary, and funny, Atkinson's third novel featuring one-time police detective Jackson Brodie (after Case Histories and One Good Turn) is both complicated and a page-turner. Set mostly around Edinburgh, Scotland, the tale begins with a six-year-old girl escaping an attacker who kills her mother, eight-year-old sister, and baby brother. Atkinson then weaves a plot that connects Brodie to the girl, now an adult, through coincidence and more tragedy, this time a train wreck. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Morse, who has a thing for Brodie, returns to his life, and a new character appears: Reggie, an orphaned 16-year-old girl with a criminal for a brother and a desire to study for her A-levels even though she has dropped out of school. The characters quote literature (sometimes in Latin), and fabulous turns of phrase abound, but the narrative remains buoyant; it is sprinkled liberally with humorous observations (particularly from Reggie), making each wild turn of events seem like just another bump in the road. A book that will easily stand up to more than one reading; highly recommended for all fiction collections.
Nancy Fontaine - Library Journal
A third appearance for former police investigator and private detective Jackson Brodie in this psychologically astute thriller from Atkinson (Case Histories and One Good Turn). In the emotional opening, six-year-old Joanna witnesses the brutal killing of her mother and siblings by a knife-wielding madman in the British countryside. Thirty years later, Joanna, now a doctor in Edinburgh, has become a mother herself. Her baby's nanny is 16-year-old Reggie. To Reggie, whose own mother recently died in a freak accident, Joanna and her baby represent an ideal family (Joanna's husband, a struggling businessman, seems only a vaguely irritating irrelevance to fatherless Reggie). When prickly, self-loathing policewoman Louise Monroe comes to call on lovely, warm-hearted Joanna, watchful Reggie (think Ellen Page from Juno with a Scottish brogue) is struck by the similarities between the two well-dressed professional women. Actually Louise has come to warn Joanna that her family's murderer is being released from prison. Louise chooses not to mention her other reason for visiting, a suspicion that Joanna's husband torched one of his failing businesses for the insurance. Jackson's connection to the others is revealed gradually: Jackson and Louise were once almost lovers although they since married others; as a youth Jackson joined the search party that found Joanna hiding in a field following the murders. Rattled after visiting a child he suspects he fathered despite the mother's denials, Jackson mistakenly takes the train to Edinburgh instead of London. When the train crashes near the house where Reggie happens to be watching TV, she gives him CPR. Soon afterward, Joanna's husband tells Reggie that Joanna has gone away unexpectedly. Suspecting foul play, Reggie involves Louise and Jackson in individual searches for the missing woman and baby. While Louise and Jackson face truths about themselves and their relationships, Joanna's survival instincts are once more put to the ultimate test. Like the most riveting BBC mystery, in which understated, deadpan intelligence illuminates characters' inner lives within a convoluted plot.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Kate Atkinson is an author formerly known as a prize-winning literary writer, but with the three Jackson Brodie novels, she has introduced elements of the traditional crime novel. What do you think turns a novel into a "crime" novel? Don’t all good novels that catch the public imagination have elements of the crime novel: a sense of suspense, a mystery, a violent death or two? What crime novel conventions can you discern in this book?
2. Kate Atkinson always creates very strong female characters. What do you think about the women in this novel – Dr Hunter, Reggie, Louise? And what about the men: are they generally weaker than the women, and does this make it a feminist novel?
3. The initial tragedy that opens the books is reminiscent of familiar high-profile news stories. What is it about those cases of random violence that make them so very haunting? Does it have something to do with the fact that when mothers are attacked they can’t run, because they feel the need to stay and protect their children?
4. Similarly, it would appear that Kate Atkinson used the Selby train crash as the inspiration for the train crash in the novel. Discuss the impact of these tragedies on the nation’s morale. Do you think Kate speaks for us all when she asks When Will There Be Good News?
5. Jackson Brodie believes that "there are no rules. There isn’t a template we’re supposed to follow. We make it up as we go along." Do you feel this statement also applies to Kate Atkinson’s writing – and to real life itself?
6. "How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he’d felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him." Do you think Kate Atkinson should ever allow Jackson Brodie to have a successful romantic relationship? Why do you think he is such an appealing character?
7. Jackson Brodie believes that "a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen." Discuss the coincidences in the novel. Do they make the story seem more or less real? If Kate Atkinson had written a conventional crime novel, would it be as appropriate to use coincidence to move the plot forward?
8. There are "good" characters and "evil" characters in the novel, but Kate Atkinson is rarely black and white in her portrayal of either. Louise, Reggie and Jackson Brodie are essentially good, but will break the law to achieve the right result. What is the moral code at work in the novel?
9. "As in the best crime fiction, dramatic events and unexpected twists abound, but Atkinson subverts the genre by refusing to neatly tie up every thread." (From the UK's Independent). Did you notice any loose threads in the plot?
10. The British pride themselves on their dry wit in the face of adversity. Despite the bleakness of the subject matter and the streak of sadness running through the novel, Kate Atkinson’s writing is often very funny. What did you find humorous about the book, and do you think that it’s a particularly British sort of humour?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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