by Kate Atkinson
2008 Little, Brown and Company
$22.95
Reviewed by Paula Harris
A mother and her three children walk from the nearest bus stop to their isolated country home. It’s a beautiful, warm day in late summer. The mother struggles down the rough, road with the baby, Joseph, in a stroller, the other two children, Jessica, 8 and Joanna, 6, run along side with the family dog. They stop for a small picnic while the mother nurses the baby before walking on. Before they’ve gone very far, they see a young man approaching, walking very fast. Though they try to flee, the young man catches and kills them. All except Joanna, who obeys her mother’s last scream and runs as fast and as far as she can into the ripe wheat.
Skip thirty years to the present. Jackson Brodie, whom Atkinson fans will remember from the author’s previous books, Case Histories and One Good Turn, who cannot believe that the child borne by his ex-girl friend, Julia, is not his child. No matter what Julia says. We find him in a small northern England village, determined to get proof.
Skip to present day Edinburgh and meet Reggie Chase, a brilliant, newly orphaned girl of sixteen, struggling to cope with the death of her mother, a sociopath brother, and to continue her education. Through Reggie, we meet Mrs. MacDonald and Dr. Joanna Hunter and family. Mrs. MacDonald tutors Reggie toward her academic goals and Dr. Hunter employs her as a mother’s helper, which keeps the rent paid.
Skip Back to Jackson Brodie who has somehow lost his way on a moorland road. After some wandering and maundering, he does find his way to the A1 Motor Way and civilization.
Skip to another part of Edinburgh, where we find DCI Louise Monroe, also a character from One Good Turn, now working a domestic violence case that seems to have nothing to do with any of the foregoing.
At this point, though I’m a fairly patient reader, I begin to wonder where on earth Kate is going with all this? But I love Kate Atkinson’s work, I truly do. My faith in her as a writer keeps me plowing on instead of taking the book back to the library.
Trust pays off. It doesn’t take much more reading for Ms. Atkinson to bring it all together in a believable, interesting and unpredictable way so that the last half of the novel is fairly intense. Taken all together, When Will There Be Good News? is a most enjoyable read. And the ending leaves the reader knowing that there’s much more to be heard from several of the main characters.
Maybe in the next book; hope so. I will be watching when the next offering from Kate Atkinson is due. And I will look forward to that book, too. I just hope that next time, she doesn’t skip around quite so much or take quite so long to let the reader see how the different elements of the story fit together. Or, if she must use this technique that she or an editor will prune out some of the overly long naval gazing by various characters. One page can tell as much as ten about what a character is experiencing and feeling, as Ms Atkinson herself quite capably demonstrates at her best.
Paula Harris had the fabulous good fortune to be born and raised in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and also the luck to have lived in most of the major cities up and down the west coast in years past. She has been happily back home in Oregon for some years now. Happy mom of four sons, adoring grandmother of six, she lives in Milwaukie, Oregon, with her husband, her old cat, and her books, with the detritus of her many other hobbies and projects scattered comfortingly in and around the house.
