I would love to give this 5 stars, but I'm trying to resist that urge these days. The book is flawed, dated, and occasionally a battering ram of ideas, so I'll stick to 4. But other reviewers here have said everything, and I'm mighty sleepy. So all I will say is the concerns of Barnard and Eldershaw (two classic leftie intellectual writers in an era of heavy right-left combat) remain with us. Questions about capitalism and materialism, about the unwanted influence of the USA on Australia, and also about whether Australia wants too much of an influence from Britain.

Australia doesn't often do dystopias - indeed, the only other literary example I can think of is Alexis Wright's compelling The Swan Book. Like all such attempts, dystopic novels reflect the age in which they're written rather than the future, and we may question Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow after 80 years on these grounds. But I think the combined literary prowess of the two authors with the cyclical nature of history has brought the wheel around again.

I will leave you with a quote from the first chapter (excerpted in the great introduction in the Virago edition) about Australians of the time:
They had been a very strange people, full of contradictions, adaptable and obstinate. With courage and endurance they had pioneered the land, only to ruin it with greed and lack of forethought. They had drawn a hardy independence from the soil and had maintained it with pride and yet they had allowed themselves to be dispossessed by the most fantastic tyranny the world had ever known: money in the hands of the few, an unreal, an imaginary system driving out reality... They loved their country and exalted patriotism as if it were a virtue, and yet they gave a greater love to a little island in the north sea that many of them had never seen... The small people was prodigal of its armies: generation after generation, they swarmed out to fight and die in strange places and for strange causes. Tough, sardonic and humorous, they were romantics the likes of which the world had never seen. ( )

Oh, dear, it feels disloyal to The Sisterhood and the feminist Virago publishing project to say this, but Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a really dreary book. I'm not surprised that the censored (1947) edition wasn't popular with the reading public, and now, having read the uncensored (1983) version, I'm inclined to think that the rejection of this novel had little to do with the censor's scissors. There are two reasons why I persisted with it: I wanted to contribute to Bill's AWW Gen 3 Week at The Australian Legend; and the book is very rare now and hard to get hold of, and it's part of Australia's literary history.

Alas, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has a history more interesting than the story within its pages...

Firstly, it is a work of collaborative writing, by Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw. Both born in 1897 into middle-class professional families, they met at Sydney University but established themselves as independent of their families before turning to writing. Flora Eldershaw became a teacher, and eventually Head of PLC in Sydney. Margery Barnard, who had been offered a place at Oxford after winning the University medal, reluctantly became a librarian because her father would not let her take up the place.

In 1928 The Bulletin offered a prize for an Australian novel, and this was the catalyst for them to begin writing together. Barnard and Eldershaw's A House is Built shared first prize with Coonardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard, and they went on to write five more novels during the turbulent 1930s.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was their last novel, and it suffered from the hands of the zealous Australian censor. (To see just how zealous he could be, see my review of The Censor's Library by Nicole Moore.) However, the censor's cuts weren't made because of prudery as I had first thought, it was because it ruffled political feathers during the emerging Cold War.

To quote from the introduction by Anne Chisholm:

It is a deeply political book and a brave one, considering that it was written at the height of World War Two. At the heart of it is the story of how the aftermath of the First World War—the Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe—impinged on the lives of a group of working-class families in Sydney, in particular on Harry Munster and his family and circle. But Barnard Eldershaw do not stop the story at the outbreak of World War Two. Writing before the war was half over, they postulate a series of events leading to the invasion of Australia by a right-wing international police force, a revolutionary uprising by left wingers and the destruction and abandonment of Sydney.

It is hardly surprising that the book, when it came to the attention of war-time censors, caused them concern. Although they confined their cuts to the fictional ending and the build up to the rising, the whole book is in fact provocative in the extreme. It reveals Barnard Eldershaw's deep hostility to capitalism, materialism and competition, and to the way that Australia, as they saw it, had been exploited and manipulated by Britain and the United States. (p.xii)

Well, you can see the potential for the authors to lose control of their material, and IMO they did. The story of Harry Munster and his circle is Misery 101, piled on with a trowel and with a surprisingly unsympathetic portrayal of his feckless, selfish wife as the source of most of his troubles. At first the representation of Harry as the Everyman had my sympathy: he endured the two world wars, the Depression and the inability to escape from poverty in an unfair economy. But then he ceases to be poor, and any moral authority he has vanishes because a quixotic (and not very credible) bequest of £200 pounds is hoarded, kept secret from his family, and not used to enable the brightest of his children to get an apprenticeship, because she is a girl. The opportunity for Barnard's autobiographical experience of this kind of sexism is wasted because Wanda's point of view about it is never explored. IMO the characterisation of women is surprisingly weak, reverting to easy stereotypes like female jealousy over a man and portraying the lives of working-class women with a loftiness that contrasts unfavourably with Ruth Park's authentic stories of slum life in Sydney.

But what really kills this novel is its unwieldy structure. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is structured as a novel within a novel, and it was the framing novel that really tested my resolve to finish the book.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/21/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-by-m-barn... ( )

Beautifully written language (though at times verging into purple prose). It somehow reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale in its narrative structure – that "look back" from the 24th century into a reconstruction of a dystopian 20th century – but Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow turns out to be as much a critique of the 24th century as of the 20th. Though set in Australia, it seems to have a geographic universality.

This is a book that I started reading for ALL VIRAGO/ALL AUGUST 2013 and which caused me to get "virago-ed out" toward mid-month so that I only finished it a couple weeks into September. It's one of those books that I'm glad to have read (note the present perfect tense) but did at times find a real slog getting through. ( )

“…It was written during the Second World War by two women in collaboration. Marjorie Barnard, who was a librarian, and Flora Eldershaw, who was an historian, and they took a very long view in the book. It is set in Sydney but it goes right back to a mythical past and then it also goes forward into a completely futuristic world, because at that time they imagined that Australia could easily be wiped out because of the war, and then the threat of nuclear war that emerged out of that. They were left-wing people and they believed that a whole new world order might be possible. But this would involve the destruction of the old order. So it is quite a remarkable book because of its sweep and visionary quality.



A lot of the novel is set in the Depression and deals with the very difficult circumstances of people trudging through the city and feeling hopeless. But then the novel has this incredible energy of imagining the whole place burning and people fleeing and this futuristic world at the end.…” (reviewed by Nicholas Jose in FiveBooks.)
The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/nicholas-jose-on-australian-novels


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