Tomorrow

The "great" revelation that Paula and Michael will supposedly inflict on their sixteen year old twin children "tomorrow" is not the issue in this novel nor is it meant to be, even though Paula goes on and on about it in her thoughts. The entire novel is the mental reminiscences and ruminations of Paula the evening before the planned revelation. Paula is lying in bed next to her husband Mikey who is asleep and she is ruminating about her life, her past, her children, and the supposedly life-changing news that they will tell the children tomorrow. The news is not terribly exciting despite Paula's declamations about how shattering it will be. Clearly the reader is not expected to be shocked and surprised as virtually none will be. Nevertheless I did find odd many of Paula's thoughts about the revelation toward the end of the novel. They simply made no sense to me. They were oddly exaggerated in a way that seemed out of touch with reality. Otherwise I found Paula's thoughts to be entirely comprehensible and unprovoking. I wonder if she was becoming a bit unhinged. In my view, this novel is not about the revelation. It is really about life and love in the middle and upper-middle classes of South London and Sussex in the 1960s to 1980s. It is kind of a soft tour through the ordinary and banal lives of ordinary folks of that time and place. I was struck by how absolutely vanilla Paula's and Mikey's lives have been. The novel is set in Putney in that Paula and Mike now live in that most vanilla of inner London suburbs. That Paula's reminiscences are taking place in their upper-middle class home in Putney is significant for the novel, for it represents the ethos that Swift is trying to capture--the utterly banal and quotidian lives of these people. Their lives are so uneventful that the rather unexciting revelation that they will give tomorrow to their children is made into, or imagined into a huge upheaval. This highlights the unexciting nature of their lives. (Sorry to be so coy about the revelation but I don't want to be a spoiler even though nothing really is spoiled for the reader by knowing what's coming.) So is this novel of the ordinary and unremarkable worth reading? Yes, I think it is. Swift gives an engaging and charming picture of life in South London and Sussex. At least I found it to be engaging and interesting. I liked these people, or at least I liked Paula and her images of her family. This is England. Not the England of the endless mystery stories with their murders, nor the England of some other novelists with all their sliminess and depression, just the ordinary England of ordinary pretty well-off decent people. And not just England but anywhere that people are living ordinary lives. Since I am, and I imagine most readers are, living ordinary vanilla lives, Paula's thoughts present something of a mirror for us and our rummaging about in our own thoughts and memories. I listened to the audio book and found it

The tone is unmistakeably Graham Swiftian: the monologues - the looking back from a given moment to the past - a secret to be in due course revealed - the odd tangential idea in brackets - lots of questions inside the monologue - musings about biological processes in the human and the animal world - a feeling for landscape. I have loved all those features in Swift's earlier novels, but I have to say, it took longer in this novel than in the previous ones for me to feel involved. The first half of the book, as far as plot and tension are concerned, falls, in my view, a good deal short of his previous work. Paula has twin children, Kate and Nick, now aged sixteen. She loves them dearly, just as she does her husband Michael. She lies awake during the night, tensed up about what would happen tomorrow; for tomorrow Michael would tell the children something they did not know, something Michael and Paula had decided years ago the children would be told once they had reached the age of sixteen, something that might change their lives for ever, though Paula hopes that they will be resilient enough to cope, because, after all, in 1995 the modern young are `cooler' and more mature than their parents were at that age in the early 1960s. And they do have each other, in that special way that twins have. In her long internal monologue that night, Paula does not get to the first revelation until page 152, and I have to say that only a relatively small part of what she says about her life and that of Michael before the children were born is relevant to that revelation. We learn quite a bit about Paula's and Michael's parents and about their careers, which is easy enough reading and has some sociological interest also; but, when reconsidered after I had read the book, it seemed like padding out, something that wasn't going anywhere in particular - a suspicion I had even when I was reading it at the time. Also, quite some time before page 152 I had some idea of what the revelation might be; and when it came, it did not seem all that shattering - although, as we get a picture of the kind of person Paula was (and the way Graham Swift empathizes with her as a woman is one of the strengths of the novel), one can understand that it had haunted her life. But I found the ninety-odd pages of the monologue that followed the first revelation very much more interesting, more subtle, and more relevant to the situation than the part that preceded it - indeed so magnificent (and in one passage so powerful and moving) that, for all the weaker first part, I have to give the book five stars.

We find Paula Hook, fifty year old wife of Mike, lying awake trying to anticipate the scene tomorrow where something from the past, of life-altering significance, must be revealed to her twin sixteen year old teenagers. It is that revelation that is to occur on a particular day in June, 1995, that provides the tension for the book. But why now; why not before or never? The book consists of Paula's wide-ranging examination of her life and Mike's from their time of meeting at Sussex University in Brighton some thirty years ago to their present middle-class existence including interactions with both sets of parents. It is Paula's keen eye for the subtleties and developments of life that makes for an interesting read. However, as her and Mike's journey is revealed, the reader gets a strong sense that neither of them could have been involved in any affair that should invoke the sense of dread that Paula seems to feel. In fact, Paula comes to understnad that perhaps people may have more knowledge of the unspoken than first thought.

Written as a 255-page middle-of-the night, confessional monologue from a middle-aged mother to her sleeping twin sixteen-year-olds, Graham Swift's TOMORROW is certainly not everyone's cup of literary tea. Swift's latest book is not your basic Lipton brew or Earl Gray. Rather, it's more like a renowned Chinese Bilouchun, elongated spears of baby tea leaves parachuting softly down through the clear water to rest, upright, at the bottom of the glass, dancing gently like a ballerina chorus to the soft movements of the water. The narrator and sole voice of TOMORROW is Paula (nee Campbell) Hook. Employed by a "good name" London art gallery, Paulie is celebrating the 25th anniversary of her marriage to biologist and snail researched turned science magazine owner and editor Michael Hook. From the book's opening pages, Paula's unspoken dissertation to her twins Kate (the older by bare minutes) and Nick makes clear that a momentous, life-changing announcement from their parents is coming to the teens in the morning. Swift as writer is more than a little coy about the news, alluding to its significance without being specific enough to reveal its precise nature. The reader is left guessing. Could a parent be dying? Are the twins not really brother and sister? Are they adopted, or do they not have the same father? For the first half to two-thirds of TOMORROW, Swift maintains this cautious dance around the news while retracing the genesis of Paula and Mike's relationship. We learn how they met at Sussex University in southern England (a sort of mannerly ménage a quatre), spent their early adult years together meeting inlaws and leading to marriage, deferring children to establish their respective careers, owning a cat named after Otis Redding, and other bits of mutual background. Interspersed through Paula's monologue are a variety of asides referring to Mike's blissfully sleeping form laying beside his nerve-wracked wife and rhetorical comments and questions addressed mostly to daughter Kate. At times, Paula's retelling of her past with Mike becomes far more explicit than one would expect a mother to relate to her two children, but this is an interior monologue, not a spoken dialogue. Paula is effectively reliving her life with all the explicit details of an adult, including her romantic wanderings. By engaging in a romantic autobiography of which her children will never actually partake, she is free to "speak" adult details and truths that she would never otherwise reveal to her family. Curiously, however, as much as Swift uses time as his measure, his characters exist largely outside of time, insulated and isolated from external events. The Hooks are a family that for sixteen years, from 1979 to 1995, seem to have been entirely unaffected by the era in which they live - politics, movies, technology, music, sports, AIDS, global crises, etc. Graham Swift's literary conceit in TOMORROW is not necessarily unique or original, but he carries it off to good

(3.5 stars) It is 1995, and Paula Campbell Hook is lying awake in bed on the eve of a dramatic announcement which she and her husband Mike will make to their sixteen-year-old twins. They have delayed this life-changing occasion for several years, having decided to wait until after the twins, Nick and Kate, have celebrated their sixteenth birthday, fearful that they might be "wrenching [them] forever from [their] childhood." In the course of the night, Paula reminisces about her past, her thirty-year relationship with Mike, her wedding, the marriages of their parents and their parents' histories, the deaths of family members, the childhoods of the twins, and the concept of love across three generations. Throughout the novel, Paula contrasts her present life and that of the twins with the lives of her parents and Mike's parents, showing how each person's expectations for the future grow out of his/her upbringing, relationships with those who love them, and the historical period in which s/he happens to live. Paula's meditations are conversational and very intimate, sometimes revolving around the sexual freedom she and Mike experienced, separately and together, in the sixties. While her personal confessions may be more than she ever actually plans to discuss with the twins (and it is certainly more than the twins need to know), they do add to the developing themes for the reader, preparing him/her for the announcement which is the crux of the novel. Swift deliberately ignores two of the canons of fiction writing in order to relate Paula's story. First of all, he writes (surprisingly effectively) as a woman--sharing all a woman's intimacies, points of view, and attitudes. Because the entire novel is an interior monologue, however, he ends up telling about the action, instead of recreating it in lively scenes. This almost works, since Paula is a character who reveals every thought, every emotion, and every aspect of her life to the reader, no matter how personal, but this also makes some of her monologue feel unnatural and the "telling about" of the events somewhat tedious. The reader discovers the nature of the dramatic announcement with one hundred pages left in the novel, and while it may be difficult for the family to deal with, it is not a unique situation, nor is it something that will necessarily change life for the family as much as Paula thinks it will. As a result, the remainder of the novel feels anticlimactic, and it ends as it begins, with Paula still the only one awake. Graham Swift takes a lot of chances with structure in this novel, and he almost succeeds. The novel has many fine qualities, but its revelations ultimately seem contrived, instead of inevitable. n Mary Whipple