Review: The Whole Day Through

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POSTED: 06 JULY 2009

Patrick Gale, The Whole Day Through

(Fourth Estate; 242pp paperback; $27.99)

At first, Patrick Gale's new novel The Whole Day Through appears a simple love tale, but before long the subtleties and nuances of the story and characters emerge.

Both the main characters — Laura, a successfully self-employed accountant, and Ben, a medical specialist in genito-urinary disease — have heroically forsaken lifestyle, career and relationships to care for a close relative. In the case of Laura it is her ailing elderly mother, and for Ben it is his gay brother who has Mosaic Down’s Syndrome.

But are they really so heroic? Is the sacrifice made from love or obligation, or to suspend dealing with a budding realisation of personal emotional failure?

Laura and Ben were lovers during their college days a decade or two earlier, and when they chance on each other in their new circumstances, the spark (and a bit more) soon re-ignites. You might think, as we discover that Ben's marriage is barren and that Laura's relationships have fallen over one by one, that this might be adult soul-mate territory and the pair could be looking at a happy future.

It is not that easy. And really, it is the complexity of who Laura and Ben are (Laura the only child of renowned radical academics and naturalists, Ben the underprivileged eldest son of a broken home), what they both have experienced, and what that means for their sense of self, rightness and morality, that rules the outcome.

Some might like to kick Ben in the butt and tell him to be bit more decisive, but then, life is not meant to be fair, is it?

A fine book about the niceties of human behaviour.

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