When Will There Be Good News?

Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? is the third novel to feature private detective Jackson Brodie, who finds himself accidentally enmeshed in a train accident, a released murderer's mysterious disappearance, and a woman's kidnapping.  The kidnapped woman is one Joanna Hunter, formerly Joanna Mason, whose mother and siblings were murdered by Andrew Decker--the released murderer in question.  Decker, who wound up in the derailed train along with Jackson, is walking around with Jackson's i.d., and vice-versa.  Luckily (or, from his point of view, perhaps unluckily) for Jackson, he is revived at the crash site by sixteen-year-old Reggie, who is also Dr. Hunter's babysitter and whose teacher accidentally causes the crash in the first place.  Did I mention that the police officer on call just happens to be an old flame of Jackson's?

When Will There Be Good News?, like Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, adapts the detective novel's conventions in service of other literary goals.  While Atkinson's novel is nowhere near as ambitious (and/or experimental) as these three, it uses its mystery plot to explore the narrative function of coincidences. As you can already guess from my potted plot summary, the novel positively revels in unlikely happenings, accidental crossings, and bizarre personal connections.  At one point, Jackson muses that "Reggie seemed to have an overheated imagination" (303), but in fact, as detective Louise Monroe has to admit, Reggie's suspicions about Dr. Hunter's fate prove entirely correct.  The novel's plot, with its near-farcical identity switches and improbable situations--Reggie, like Jessica Fletcher, seems to stumble over death wherever she goes--deliberately defies probability.   Similarly, even traumatic or supposedly life-changing events rarely carry much in the way of meaning: Andrew Decker murders Joanna Hunter's family for no particular reason; Jackson marries a woman he doesn't really know; the train crash leaves Jackson with mild PTSD, but his faith that "[h]e would look at everything differently from now on" (248) doesn't pan out.  Neither actions nor their psychological effects turn out to be predictable.  The same is true of the novel's metafictional cliches, some of which fail (like Jackson's life-changing experience) and some of which prove eerily prescient (like Louise telling a young officer that "[y]ou're too young to die yet" [292]).  The reader will no doubt yell "Oh, you're joking!" when Atkinson reveals the final link between Jackson and Joanna...but that reaction is, in fact, the point.     When Will There Be Good News? randomizes the detective plot, parodying the often esoteric connections between suspects that allow the cops to arrive at the right conclusion, arrest the crook(s), and make everything all right at the end of the day.  Here, the connections sometimes cause as many problems as they solve, while the detectives are anything but omniscient interpreters of the available evidence.  Not surprisingly, the novel refuses to console the reader with a tidy resolution to its main plots.

The novel acknowledges this desire for a neat resolution, however, in its treatment of families.  All of the novel's families are shattered or, at the very least, unsatisfactory.  Jackson's sister and brother are long dead, one murdered and one a suicide; he's in love with Louise, but spontaneously married Tessa.  Louise never knew her father, isn't particularly happy in her marriage to a wealthy doctor, and seems unconscious (or wilfully ignorant) of her pregnancy.  Joanna Hunter, besides losing her mother and siblings, also had to contend with a neglectful, adulterous father who drove at least one of his girlfriends to suicide.  Reggie, meanwhile, is an orphan saddled with a criminal brother.  In the novel's final pages, we find Reggie, Dr. Hunter, and Dr. Hunter's baby, all celebrating Christmas together in a makeshift family (now excluding Dr. Hunter's husband):

She said that if Mr. Hunter had been in her place, she would have done anything to get him back, "And I mean anything," she said with such a fierce look on her face that Reggie knew that Dr. Hunter would walk to the ends of the earth for someone she loved and that she, Little Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, savior of Jackson Brodie, help of Dr. Hunter, daughter of Jackie, came within that warm circle.  And now, for better or worse, the world was all before her.  Vivat Regina!

But this celebratory moment, with its odd jumble of Paradise Lost (surely, not a good sign) and marriage vows, exists only because "Little Reggie Chase" either doesn't know or actively represses what we, the reader, have learned about Dr. Hunter and that "anything."  This Dickensian Christmas moment rests on a kind of poetic justice, to be sure, but it requires the otherwise acute Reggie to abandon her sensitivity to the evidence; much like Jackson and Louise, whose detective skills implode when it comes to their own private lives, Reggie's investigative abilities falter when they threaten her cordoned-off comfort zone.  The cheery ending, with all three laughing and singing, clashes with the narrative instead of resolves it--not least because of yet another connection revealed during a brief vignette, one which casts Dr. Hunter's relationship to Reggie in a slightly more ominous (or, at least, less innocent) light.