[.ca] Tomorrow (ISBN 030735590X)

"The future right now is simply tomorrow":
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.