Title: Tomorrow
When The War Began
Author: John
Marsden
Publisher:
Pan Macmillan Australia
Publish
date: 1993
ISBN: 978-1-74351-994-3
‘Then the day came when we stopped playing.
We’d gone a couple of months without our usual games, but a few days into the
school holidays I got my dolls out and
tried to start up again. And it had all gone. The magic didn’t work any more. I
could barely even remember how we’d done it… now it was like reading a
meaningless book.’
A group of teenagers go on a camping trip,
and on their return, find Australia taken over by a foreign force. Their
Rip-Van-Winkle realisation of the situation and awakening to the new reality
mirrors the coming of age transitions for most of the characters.
It is not completely without merit. In the
latter stages (as long as you get that far) there’s a fair pace of plot – even if
that plot is more like a comic action-adventure episodes strung together with
no particular direction. Fair enough. I struggle to find further good points,
though.
This text (which for some reason is a set
text in high school) is so clunky you want to go in and apply WD40 to all
moving parts. Listing all the examples would be tedious, so here are just a
few, in no particular order.
WHAT is the point of the character of
Chris? I strongly suspect he was brought on a) to fill up the girl-boy numbers
and 2) as an example of absentee rich landlords not giving a fudge about
anything. The poor critter reminds me of those occasional silent characters in
Shakespeare who have been transferred over from the original source but are
never given any lines. He is seriously useless in plot terms.
When the kids are arguing about the rights
and wrongs of the invasion, Robyn’s supposed understanding of slum dwellers
being justified in wanting to ‘take over’ is totally at odds with not one of
them having in the least clue what country the invaders could even be from. Clueless
teenagers? Fine, believable. Clueless but suddenly full of liberal Christian
forgiveness grounded in observation? Not so much. I understand the need to
fudge the identity of the potential invader, but the disjunction here leads to
a lack of internal credibility and logic.
The character selection is a heavy-handed
pick-and mix selection, thumping down the diversity belt. Kevin represents a
thuggish right-wing working class, Lee the thoughtful Asian, Robyn the
Christian lefties, Ellie the narrator is the agrarian, hardworking backbone of
the country, and so on. Rarely have we seen such cut-outs since characters were
called names like ‘Vice’, ‘Patience’, or ‘Sloth’.
There are several examples of sloppiness.
In an episode in which the supposed narrator is participating, they write
‘No-one mentioned the possibility that they
might not get back.’ This is not the gender-neutral ‘they’. It’s simply the
writer forgetting who is where. It’s not narrative idiosyncrasy or
characterisation, either. No-one would refer to themselves in a group as
‘they’. These things happen to the best.
We all need an editor, and ‘they’ have failed here.
Lol moment. They find ‘Heart of Darkness’
in the Hermit’s hut? Seriously? Why not just read that instead?
The instance of Ellie being ‘in the habit
of doing things without looking over my shoulder every sixty seconds to see if
an adult was nodding or shaking his head,’ because she gets on with farm work. What
kid thinks of themselves like that? Would much better have been a show, not a
tell. The novel as a whole struggles with this concept, and the premise that
the document is supposed to be a public record of what has happened doesn’t
tally with what is on the page. No-one would carefully set down secrets and
inner thoughts as part of a collective testament in case they all get blown
away. It really isn’t that hard to contrive a different framework. Even if it’s
a private diary, for Pete’s sake.
You get the picture. I understand there’s
been a film made of this. Oh dear. Not the worst book I’ve read but was not a
pleasure. Two moose hoofs up out of five.
Author: Andy
Mulligan
