| | Tomorrow |  | Author: Graham Swift
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
Buy New: £0.45
New (11) from £0.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 961662
Edition: Airside e.
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0330450476
EAN: 9780330450478
ASIN: 0330450476
Publication Date: April 20, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new copies, with fast U.K. delivery. Delivering to Europe in 3-7 workings days. Delivering to U.S.A. in 7-12 working days. delivering rest of the world in 3 to 6 weeks
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Writer's strengths in this case show as weaknesses July 15, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Like several reviewers, I too always appreciate Swift's writing; this time, it is sadly disappointing. The ability to reach inside a character and trace history back (or forwards) through time and circumstance, the ability to create layered and complex characterisation just don't cohere here.
I think the basic structure is flawed and perhaps a more conventional time line would have worked better in this instance. I sussed what the denoument would be within the first few pages (honestly!) ; as soon as the news of revelation, on your 16th birthday, tomorrow, I knew what 'it' was.
The revelation didn't actually matter but the central character never naming it in her head, upfront, began to seem more and more like a writer's trick; too clever by half for its own good. I felt SWIFT was teasing me, and this trick destroyed the narrator's credibility - his device, not hers. The story could have worked equally well if Paula had started with the revelation and her fears about making it, and then back tracked the whole development.
The relationship itself also seemed to not quite work - I don't think I'm being unduly cynical, but the perfection and sweet understanding of an almost fairy-tale relationship just seemed to lack depth. Paula and Mikey were just TOO light, there seemed very little shadow, not even the one incident where Paula makes a suspect decision, leading to a further secret she must keep. In fact, I'd even say her rationale for the act doesn't make a lot of sense, just further writer devices!
I've given it a 2 star rating because it is so far below Swift's usual standards. If this would have been a first-time author, I probably would have gone 3.
 tedious beyond words June 24, 2008
I wish I had read the reviews here before I bought this book. I too am a huge Swift fan and own all his books but this was unbelievably turgid. I had to drag myself from page to page and in the end gave up, totally hating the narrator and wondering what all the fuss was about.
 What kind of a judgment day will tomorrow be? May 10, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Tomorrow takes forever to arrive March 19, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
In Tomorrow, Graham Swift's novel published in 2007, he employs the same technique he used in Light of Day. Light of Day involved a detective mulling, over the course of a single day, over past events and piecing the fragments together to form a cohesive and striking story.
In Tomorrow, the person doing the thinking is Paula Hook, art dealer, ex 60s' chick and mother of sixteen year-old twins. Only it's more like pontification than thinking. Paula is awake through the night and dreading the next day when her husband Mike, a biologist who gave up studying snails to work on and eventually edit a popular science magazine, is going to confess something shocking to the twins; something that will change their lives forever. But a premise like this where the narrator is building up to a shocking revelation is dependent on delaying relating the crucial event for as long as possible. This can lead to a book built on a somewhat flimsy notion where the reader is grinding their teeth with impatience for the narrator to spit it out. And it also requires the confession to be truly awful or mind boggling when it's eventually revealed.
The fact that when Paula does eventually spit it out the event in question is not hugely rare or shocking leads to a feeling of anti-climax after so much build up . There is also something dislikable about Paula. If she is indeed pondering in the way she would talk to her children, she is obviously a self-indulgent and selfish person, burdening the story with cringeably intimate details that would only embarrass a child and serve no purpose whatsoever. For instance, is it essential to this confession to keep referring to the fact that her and her husband were always at it like rabbits on Viagra? It smacks of thoughtless egotism and, far from being crucial to the story, would only add to the twins' trauma. Noone likes to think of their parents making the beast with two backs - why shove this onto the twins' a;ready full plates? There is also something of Anne Enright's narrator in her Booker-winning The Gathering about Paula - the world centres around her.
But perhaps Paula is not articulating her thoughts in the way that she hopes Mike will the next day; perhaps her thoughts are the uncensored, unashamedly egocentric version. In which case the premise of the book is shaken - we are sold the story as a mother's shivery anticipation of the true story her children will be told the next day, and the narration is consistently done in a way that addresses Paula's children.
The idea might have made a gripping short story or perhaps even novelette, but it's way too paper thin to form the backbone of a novel. Paula's irritating style of narration is exacerbated by her constant side tracking to irrelevant details; she refers to the rain pounding down many times and even jumps from a key point to refer to the weather on individual days twenty years before. Who cares? Obviously it would add to the atmosphere if this were a straight novel written contemporaneously, but when the reader is told on page one that a life-changing confession is about to be related, they don't have much patience for witterings about the weather decades before.
This is a great shame because Graham Swift is a writer of many talents. His prose is usually precise and incisive. Last Orders, Waterland and Light of Day were novels with the power to sweep the reader up and transport them, even though Waterland did take a chance with its many diversions to geographical facts about the Fens, and even though Light of Day relied on the memories of one character in a single day.
Here though, in the hands of a middle-aged non literary mother, Swift softens his style so that puns abound and the subject constantly jumps from one time and place to another. The fact that Paula weakly apologizes for her puns and darting about from inconsequential detail to blush-inducing TMI didn't stop me silently grinding my teeth and willing her to get on with it. It's not a bad book by any means - a talented writer like Swift will always have the ability to include mesmerising fragments, even when a concept is flawed. There are still chunks of this book that are gripping and lucidly written, but Paula's overbearing presence is like a shadow over the pages.
Not his best. ***00 1/2
"The future right now is simply tomorrow" October 28, 2007
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
A middle-aged woman narrates this deeply reflective novel as she lies in bed by her husband one rainy and stormy night, restlessly writing a eulogy to her two teenage children about her life and her marriage. It's almost midsummer 1995 and it's a week past Kate and Nick's sixteenth birthday. There's a secret about her family that Paula Hook is propelled to address and in the next morning her husband, Mike will also reveal to Nick and Kate his own version of the dramatic denouement that provides the climax to their lives so far.
Paula's story begins in 1966 when she is only twenty and where she meets Michael while studying at Sussex University near Brighton. On the cusp of the sexual revolution, college life has become rife with possibilities, the birth control pill has just become available to young women and Brighton is considered to be the best and perhaps the coolest place to be.
The choices that are available to a girl like Paula would have been incomprehensible to her parents and the excitement of the new, "the liberated as we sometimes called it," especially attracts Mike. Paula delicately reveals that Mike slept around, sleeping with two her friends in possibly quick succession, and then eventually hooking up with her. In fact, he got into bed with her one night in Brighton nearly thirty years ago and though the place, the room, and even the bed have changed from time to time, Mike has managed to stay with Paula ever since.
Paula was overwhelmed by the fact that Mike's father sent his son twelve bottles of champagne to celebrate their love. A sudden bounty, the champagne comes to symbolize, in a decidedly impetuous and breathless way, the couple's eventual betrothal, even though they didn't actually get married for another four years. Of course, being children of the freewheeling 60's, both Mike and Paula were obliged to scoff at the very idea of marriage.
As the narrative unfolds, Paula begins to reveal ever more about her life with Mike as she thinks back to those early days in the 1970's where Mike began his research on snails, a supposed stepping stone to his brilliant future in science, and where she began a career as a trainee art dealer at Christie's auction house. Without doubt, theirs is one of a positive and upwardly mobile life, that of a steadily married couple in their thirties living in their terraced house in the picaresque London suburb of Herne Hill
Bounded at night by her recollections in this bedroom, in the dark, with the rain smattering away outside, this world for Paula feels like some sort of temporary refuge. She tells her children of life and how short it is, that they should "seize it, treasure it and cradle it," and also of Mike's father who was forced to fly off to his highly possible death in the 2nd World War, even as Paula's own father had a very different war, cracking codes in the cozy depths of the English countryside, surrounded by lots of female clerks, one of which was Paula's mother.
When Paula and Mike discover they are cat people when they obtain a neighborhood cat called Otis. Paula, however, is quick to note that Otis came before, and was never intended to be a replacement for Kate and Nick, even when Otis ended up turning their lives upside down. Then along come the announcements and the reckonings, and the understandings about death, especially that of Grandma Pete when Paula cries her heart out at his funeral at Invercullen, and also of dear Uncle Edie who died when his was only fifty-seven and who gifted Mike a beautiful, leather-bound Victorian book on mollusks.
Thematically the novel is a plea to live one's life to the fullest, no matter how quick and rushing life it sometimes seem, even when can also seem to be slow and sweet and everlasting. Paula's message to her children is of the power of love, and perhaps even a strong measure of forgiveness. Obviously, Paula and Mike have learnt in the past few years, especially how hard it can be to tell what's true and what's false, what's real and what's pretend, and also the critical question of how they both came to make this profound decision which ended up altering their lives.
In languid and measured prose, author Graham Swift characterizes a loving and deeply intuitive marriage over the course of thirty years, the author ultimately infusing his tale with a type of worldly melancholy, but one that is also permeated with immense beauty, as well as the possibilities of great happiness. Paula's revelation comes about three quarters into the story, which causes the rest of the novel to become a bit tedious, save for Swift's leisurely and competent style and his astute observations about life which keep the action moving along at a nice enough pace. Mike Leonard October 07.
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