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.