For all the drawn out frisson about the momentous revelation coming on the morrow, there's something deflating once it's known. It's well written as usual; the accidental history of our lives remains as one of Swift's abiding themes. But it's not the best from this excellent writer.

*pout* I’m not having much luck with my fiction reading at the moment.

I am spoiled for choice with non-fiction: I have started Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity but then Tony Kevin’s new book Return to Moscow came into the library – and I just took a little peek at it when the traffic lights were red and kept going when I got home. I’ve got an intriguing new bio called Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait and a beautiful National Library of Australia bio called Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Bush Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet.

But my bedtime fiction reading has been no good at all. After the debacle of Sarah Dunant’s Transgressions (see my disappointed review) I tried Australian poet Libby Angel’s The Trapeze Act, expecting to like it after hearing about it on Radio National’s Books and Arts program, but no, I gave it 50 pages but just couldn’t muster the interest to keep going. Then I took up Ouyang Yu’s new novella Billy Sing – and I do like it, but relaxing bedtime reading it’s not. I need my wits about me to read Ouyang Yu. I really need something easy-to-read-but-interesting while I’m having trouble with my eyes, so I looked on the TBR for a tried and trusted author… and there was Graham Swift, author of books I loved: the Booker-winning Last Orders, (1996), Waterland, (1983) The Light of Day (2003), and more recently Mothering Sunday (2016) (see my review). What could go wrong?

I should have remembered my experience with Wish You Were Here (2011). That was a dud (see my review) but it failed to alert me to the possibility that worse might be in store. Words fail me when I try to explain how much I disliked Graham Swift’s Tomorrow: it is possibly the most exasperating book I’ve ever read.

It’s narrated by a mother lying awake at night, thinking about the secret about to be revealed to her twin children the following day. It is narrated in the incredibly annoying second person, as she addresses these hapless children, who have just turned sixteen. (This is how I know I bought this book sight unseen on the strength of Swift’s name (probably from a Readings’ catalogue, but I don’t blame them). If I had set eyes on these introductory words, I would never have spent my hard-earned money on it:

You’re asleep, my angels, I assume. So, to my amazement and relief, is your father, like a man finding it in him to sleep on the eve of his execution. He’ll need all he can muster tomorrow. I’m the only one awake on this night before the day that will change all our lives. Though it’s already that day: the little luminous hands on my alarm clock (which I haven’t set) show just gone one in the morning. And the nights are short. It’s almost midsummer, 1995. It’s a week past your sixteenth birthday. By a fluke that’s become something of an embarrassment and some people will say wasn’t a fluke at all, you were born in Gemini. I’m not an especially superstitious woman. I married a scientist. But one little thing I’ll do tomorrow – today, I mean, but for a little while still I can keep up an illusion – is cross my fingers. (p.1)

Are your teeth on edge already? Mine were, and (merely from typing it) still are, and now I don’t understand why I kept on going. A vague interest in what the earth-shattering secret might be, I suppose, (plus I was too warm and comfortable to get out of bed and choose another book). But before long I knew that this secret wasn’t something interesting, like their father having been a Soviet spy or that she was really the offspring of an escaped Romanov and that there was a fortune awaiting them in de-Sovietised Russia. No, clearly it was some commonplace domestic secret. Either the parents were splitting up, or that their parentage was not what they thought it was. Or both. Either way, she was overdramatising it.

To read the rest of my review, please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/01/tomorrow-by-graham-swift ( )

The Goodreads reviews seem to be "loved it or hated it" with a lot of readers viewing it as an actual letter by a mother to her children, rather than as the reflections of a woman during a sleepless night. She reviews her life, her marriage, her children, her parents, her in-laws, a cat, all her relationships. Once again I am amazed at how much Graham Swift can pack into a short space (in this case 255 pages). At the end, we are left to ponder about what happens "tomorrow" when she and her husband reveal what she considers a major family secret to their son and daughter (sixteen year old twins).

Whether or not one loves or hates this book may depend a great deal on the reader's perspective. I liked (not loved) this book, but not as much as the other two I've read by this author (Mothering Sunday and England and Other Stories). I'll read more by Swift, Waterland is on my chair-side stack. Library book. ( )

I thought this book had a promising premise; however, it soon became repetitive and tedious. Paula Hook, the narrator, spends one entire night, with her husband asleep beside her, recounting the family past leading up to the "big reveal" to their teen-aged children that will occur in the morning. There are so many ways this novel went wrong - it is well written, but lacks the necessary ingredients to make it even marginally interesting. I can't imagine how yucky it would be to learn the extensive details of their parents' sex life and how ultimately boring to recount their genealogy over and over again. The secret to be revealed is almost a ho-hum after the anticipation of what will be learned by the twins. ( )

OK, who did know that Graham Swift is a woman? I didn't. By the look of his picture he sure looks a man. But he must be a woman. Must.
How can one explain otherwise the book Tomorrow? This book is one long stream of consciousness by a woman on the night before a crucial day in the life of her family: her life, but surely the life or her man and her children.
How is it possible that these typical female thoughts (at least, they look typical female to me, but then again, i'm also a man) can be written down in this way by a man?
But it is a great book. Of course one could easily imagine another end. One could easily imagine another situation, but the description, the way the story unfolds, the small things.... It's Graham Swift and yes, it is a masterpiece.
Only one character but references to many others, like Otis the cat, and yet it tells about all major themes and questions of life: childhood, parenthood, trust, lies, responsibility, care, biology, nature and nurture.
A brilliant point of view taken by Swift here and even more brilliant in the complete setup.
Read this book. Surely if you are a woman, and then tell me if you agree.
Thanks. ( )