To-morrow and to-morrow ... a novel — A Closer Reading

The Narrator's Ironic Distance

The narrator's first-person voice is the novel's central instrument. He reports conversations and scenes with a detached, almost anthropological precision, yet his own judgments keep breaking through. When Lady Dainton condemns the party's tone, he notes that she was 'criticizing it with her eyes' even before speaking. He agrees with her but will not say so directly: 'Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation.' This habit of mental reservation—thinking one thing, saying another—creates a persistent gap between the reader and the narrator's inner life. He is a participant who refuses to participate fully, a husband who watches his wife's world with a mixture of affection and bemusement. The effect is a narrative voice that feels both intimate and withheld, as if the story is being told from behind a veil of politeness.

Social Rituals as Stagecraft

McKenna lavishes descriptive attention on the mechanics of a 1920s party: the endless supper, the musicians 'imprisoned on a landing,' the butler Robson who acts as 'generalissimo.' The narrator observes that the party's success, like that of 'the late war, lay in unity of command.' This comparison is telling—it reduces social life to a military operation, with Robson directing traffic, supplying powder, and even playing waltzes when the band stops. The narrator's eye for such details turns the evening into a piece of theatre, complete with stage managers and unwitting actors. Barbara, meanwhile, murmurs that she would marry Robson if anything happened to her husband—a joke that underscores how much the household's order depends on servants. The scene is comic, but the comedy is edged with unease: these rituals are all that remain of a vanished world.

The Weight of a Vanished Generation

Throughout the excerpts, the narrator measures the present against a remembered past. He recalls his first London dinner-parties, which had 'the ceremony and pomp of a levée,' and contrasts them with the improvised informality of 1920. The opera and ballet are trying to revive pre-war gaiety, but 'there was no public for both.' Even the architecture of memory is precise: Loring House still bore its hatchment when he first stayed there; old Lord Loring hunted guests into smoking-suits at eleven o'clock. These details are not mere decoration—they establish a baseline of lost formality against which the present falls short. The narrator does not simply say that things have changed; he shows the change through specific, sensory recollections. The result is a portrait of a generation that feels itself to be living in the aftermath of something irrecoverable, even as it tries to dance.

Conversation as a Failed Bridge

The narrator's attempts to engage with Barbara's literary friends reveal a deeper disconnection. He hopes to discover 'what inspiration they had won from the war,' but finds the quest more dangerous than delightful. The young writers welcome him at first, then make it 'abundantly plain' that his curiosity is unwelcome. McKenna does not dramatize the confrontation; he lets the narrator's understatement carry the sting. The war, which ended in the novel's first line, is a subject that cannot be discussed—or can only be discussed on certain terms. The narrator, who gave up dancing on the outbreak of war, is left to 'look on, listen' while others fill the silence with jazz and bridge. Conversation, meant to connect, only underscores how far apart these people are. The novel's title, borrowed from Macbeth, hints at a creeping futility: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but no real progress.

McKenna's novel is best approached as a character study in the key of social observation. The narrator's voice—ironic, nostalgic, and deliberately limited—shapes every scene. Readers should attend to what he chooses to report and what he leaves unsaid, to the gap between his inner judgments and his spoken words. The party scenes are not digressions; they are the novel's method. The war is present only as an absence, a rupture that has reshaped every relationship and ritual. This is a book about the difficulty of living in the aftermath, told by a man who would rather watch than join.

That rainy afternoon, his brittle laughter at the party rang false enough that I half-remembered the quiet ache behind my own summer glories, and before I knew it, I’d pulled down Daisy of "Old Meadow." — where that same wistfulness whispers through every page, softer, more forgiving, like remembering a garden after the storm. Daisy of "Old Meadow." — Themes and Context