The Whole Day Through

When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since.

Are Laura and Ben brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the insidious need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?

Patrick Gale’s thirteenth novel is a brief, even terse, love story, in which a man and a woman are reunited after a twenty-year interval and have a short taste of delight. It is also a novel about obligation. Both Laura and Ben have turned their lives upside-down in order to care for relatives, she for her cranky, brilliant mother, and he, for his gay younger brother who has Mosaic Down’s Syndrome.

But the implication is that, while the caring is genuine, it is also ever so slightly an excuse for failures elsewhere in their lives…

The novel takes its structure from a high summer day in Laura’s life in her mother’s house, from a rude awakening to a late-night nightcap in the garden after her mother has gone to bed. This progression through her day is interleaved with a parallel journey through Ben’s, as he copes with the complications of young Bobby’s late-flowering sexuality and the myriad half-truths told him by patients attending his venereology clinic. Only as the day progresses and the weather experienced by the characters sharply differs do we begin to wonder if all is what it seems.

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