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When will there be good news?

Shelf life: Looking at secular books

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
By Kate Atkinson
Black Swan. 480 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978-0-55277-243-7

I’m afraid I stayed up far too late one night finishing this novel, partly because it was so compelling and partly because I knew that if I put it down unfinished I would be thoroughly distracted the next day thinking about the story until bedtime came around.

Kate Atkinson has created a story which is both a page-turner and deeply satisfying; she has taken the detective fiction form and played with it, adding wit and depth of characterisation.

Six-year-old Joanna is finishing a picnic with her mother, sister and baby brother when her world is destroyed. Andrew Dekker walks towards the group ‘making a funny huffing puffing noise’ and murders all but Joanna, who heeds her mother’s screams and runs. 30 years on, Joanna is a successful GP in Edinburgh, married with a one-year-old son. Andrew Dekker has just been released from prison. Then the story explodes: ABH, arson, kidnapping, accidental deaths, terminal illness and more murders. You might think that this would make a gory mess, but Atkinson’s writing is controlled, with no melodrama and, instead, a fantastic ear for dialogue and the subtleties of relationships. Her characters are quirky and winsome — a 16-year-old orphan who nannies by day and studies classics at night, her born-again retired teacher, her drug-dealing brother (well maybe he’s not winsome, just human) — but the world they live in is very dark indeed.

Justice and good news

Crime writing in its nature is concerned with morality and a search for justice, and this is apparent in When Will There Be Good News? But Atkinson explores far more: she plays with coincidence and fate, searches the powerful, often violent nature of human love, and again and again looks at the impact of a person’s past on their present. In her world, violence and blackness are only limited by human courage and blind fate; characters long for justice and love but rarely find it. Read this for its literary merit and entertainment value; but praise God that we live in his world where there is good news.

Sarah Allen