When Will There Be Good News?

I'm somewhat biased, I suppose when it comes to Kate Atkinson's work. I've read and deeply enjoyed both her two previous Jackson Brodie mysteries, as well as her novel, Human Croquet. I came to her newest book, When Will There Be Good News?, with the highest of expectations, especially since I received the book itself as a much-anticipated, though easily predicted, birthday present. And, to a large extent, Atkinson's third mystery does not disappoint. The characterizations are as full and poignant as her previous works, the mystery as involved and intense as that of Case Histories. The return of Louise Munro is, while expected, nonetheless satisfying. In fact, Good News stands out from its predecessors in its sheer humor and in the narrative power of the sixteen year old protagonist which it introduces. Reggie's voice, particularly in the first half of the novel, creates, within the prose, moments of both surprising dignity and almost overwhelming tragedy.

However, my one critique of Atkinson's novel, comes in fact from the sheer accumulation of that tragedy. Death, of course, seems not out of place in a mystery novel. It has been a significant figure in each of the Atkinson novels I have read, both the context and the catalyst for the plot. However, in Good News, Death is not just a frequent visitor, it is an omnipresent shroud encasing not only the characters whom the reader meets, but also those shadowy figures, the unnamed populace who inhabit Atkinson's fictional Britain. Without giving anything away, I think it is safe to say that people die. Lots and lots of people die. In fact, Death is so ubiquitous throughout the novel, one rather wants to applaud the survivors; the everyday, non-protagonist characters whom, in an act of seeming authorial mercy, Atkinson does not kill off.

Such an onslaught of fatality inevitably has a calculated effect on the reader. We too feel as if we are adrift in the world of Louise, Reggie, Jackson, Joanna, etc., in which Death is an element of both unpredictability and an unfortunate statistical probability. There is no order to this world, no guarantees or safeguards, anything can happen to anyone; the shock of that reality permeates the novel. The reader finds herself echoing the title, begging the author for any happiness or crumbs of joy capable of existing, even fleetingly, within such an environment. We connect to this world, or at least I did, for the majority of the book, caught in a fictional nightmare from which we at least have the ability to awaken, grab some food or conversation, and then willingly re-immerse ourselves. The characters do not have the same option to raise their heads from the horrifying world around them.

However, there was a moment near the end of the book in which this engrossing, oppressive formula failed for me. An elderly parent loses an adult child in a horribly unfair way and then commits suicide. Perhaps it is only in context with the rest of the novel, but this moment felt horribly gratuitous to me. In Case Histories, something very similar happens to a father and a teenage child, but in that case, the parent goes on living, is forced to struggle through life for another thirty years or more. That fight, that imposition of continued life upon a character stripped of his human raison d'etre, was for me the most powerful part of Case Histories. Here Atkinson attempts to invoke pathos with the parent's suicide, but, to me, at least, this moment just felt gratuitous and an easy choice for the novelist.

After all, the greater emotional opportunity for the author to explore seems to be in characters living after tragedy, something frequently evoked within the mystery novels of P.D. James and Elizabeth George. James and George never seem to be writing so much about Death, but rather about what happens to the living after loss. Atkinson is as concerned as either with demonstrating the effects which death have on the survivors, but the load she piles on both her characters and readers seems eventually so overwhelming that the novel itself ultimately seems to lose a little of its grasp on reality. In Kate Atkinson's authorial attempts to play God and pass judgment on so very many mortal lives, she seems to miss some of the opportunities to explore the genuine persevering strength of humanity.

Fictional Fertility

I recently finished reading James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder and Dave Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, and I was struck by the many parallels between the stories. Both are narratives containing a woman at their heart, Jennet Stearne and Ann Eliza Young respectively. Each of these female characters in turn devote their lives to the elimination of an “evil” borne of an overly religious society, an immoral reality conjured up as the inevitable double of the human striving for holiness. Finally, each woman ultimately depends on a system of legal justice to defend their own bodily integrity and identification, as well as to further their all-consuming missions. In a more modern context, I was fascinated by the implications which these two women’s disparate, yet uncannily linked, crusades have for our own society's conceptions and understandings of women, both in fiction and society.


It is perplexing that both authors chose a woman as their heroine and moral warrior. David Ebershoff, of course, was dealing with a true historical figure, one whose gender was established by God and biology rather than authorial intent. And yet, the role seems a uniquely feminine one. Perhaps this is merely a result of the coloring of our modern minds by echoes of Harriet Beecher Stowe (herself in later life an outspoken opponent of the same plural marriage which Ann Eliza Young combated), Margaret Sanger, or any of a number of Suffragettes from the early part of the twentieth century. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to label this a Joan of Arc complex in our brains: the young woman standing against the oppressing forces of a far more powerful enemy. Having a woman as hero enhances the David and Goliath effect of the combat; after all, the only thing more fragile to our minds than a child is a young woman.
And so, we are given Jennet and Ann Eliza as heroines, each willing and destined to give their lives’ purpose to an external cause. This is particularly effective for the reader since it marks a level of sacrifice which in a man, lacking both the biological investment and the social impetus to reproduce, would, however unjustly, be modified. Women’s lives are seen as rampant with maternal potential, a potential which both Ann Eliza and Jennet only imperfectly achieve, discarding their children for the higher good, with regret but also firm decision. To the reader, here is true sacrifice, the loss of fecundity, or as in the case of Joan of Arc, the tragic inability to realize reproductive capacity.



For these women, public good becomes their offspring, literally in both cases culminating with a book. Women produce literature instead of children; they succeed in their crusades by transforming their minds into substitute ovaries. There is a sterility embedded in the idea of in a determined, single-minded woman, from which only a birth, no matter if of flesh or paper, can preserve her a gendered integrity. Thus book-pregnant women are the ultimate heroines for authors, they allow a continuation of the birthing process of ideas into a tangible form. Our modern writers see demonstrable progress in human rights through history and they wish to detail the conception of individual triumphs for “morality” within human minds. It only makes sense to transplant that process into a female womb, so often considered to be synonymous with a female mind; it is through women that we can most directly see the process of humanity from generation to generation. No wonder, that in fiction, we look to women as well for the conception and reproduction of our basic ideals.