|
Literary Review
FICTION
Tomorrow never comes
ANTARA DAS
|
A long and tedious wait for the end.
|
Tomorrow; Graham Swift, Picador, £16.99.
In the hours between midnight and dawn, a woman lies awake in bed, recollecting events and emotions whose consequences might change her family forever.
Her confession, a dramatic rehearsal of a consciously designated turning point, is what Graham Swift’s ninth novel Tomorrow is all about.
Candid responses
Tomorrow (or past midnight should it be today), as art dealer Paula Hook realises, is that point in the future when candid responses would have to be provided to uncomfortable questions about the past.
Her husband Mike (who runs a popular science magazine), asleep beside her throughout the novel, might be a like a man “on the eve of his execution”, but she knows that the day will be remembered as one that marked the rupture of a carefully constructed, yet essentially fragile, pretence that she had set up for her twins, Nick and Kate.
The build-up to that disclosure being the sum and substance of the book, its pace suffers as we wade our way through a welter of excruciating and ordinary details about courtships, marriage and funerals, whose only plausible purpose might be as an exposition of family life or more importantly, blood bonding within the family.
While early on in her soliloquy, Paula promises that she would be providing her children with facts — “a story is what you’ve had so far” — the only brush with that truth happens to be in the form of subtle hints as she progresses through her narrative.
One shudders to think what Nick and Kate, who according to Paula provide the family with “a strange equilibrium: this binary of two couples”, would make of this elaborately played out revelation scene, fed with details of the wine (Clos du Rois ’55, to be precise) served when their father, in the role of a tense yet precocious boyfriend, first met Paula’s father.
No suspense
Or whether they would be convinced by their parents’ decision to provide “…a charming little gloss on those facts of life that were bound to get raised sooner or later” since it is potentially unnerving for them.
In any case, the revelation that comes riding the crest of this prolonged suspense, the equivalent of “Doomsday” or “Bombshell Day” for the Hooks, would be somewhat tepid to the expectant reader.
Conviction is perhaps the one quality that Paula lacks; by her own estimate, she can sometimes be quite a vixen.
Her monologue is a long series of justification for marrying the man she did, of postponing child-bearing till well into her marriage, of her need to indulge in the one-night-stand with the vet whom she was purportedly visiting for treating her cat.
All these details, including the pet cat’s sudden disappearance, happen to have a bearing on the plot, though the points of convergence are not revealed till the end.
It may serve Paula’s purpose, who wants to feel from her children “…that deep, long, almost stationary slowness of time”.
But it only serves to disengage the reader, who after passively suffering all along, waits for the narrative to end.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
