Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16695 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

New Books
'Beautifully written . . . Reading groups will find plenty to discuss.'

Guardian
'...wondrously malleable prose perfectly evokes the stream of semi-consciousness that gushes through one's head at three in the morning.'

Irish Times
'Graham Swift is a master of ordinary voices and Paula's is tender and almost embarrassingly honest...'

Customer Reviews

Writer's strengths in this case show as weaknesses
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
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?
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.