Tomorrow Will Be Sunday

Gildas Roberts is a university professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

This book established Horwood’s name as a Canadian writer but never
sold particularly well. In 1972 it was reissued as a PaperJack, and then
remained out of print for several years. Now, thanks to the enthusiasm
of Harry Cuff, this third revised edition has appeared, elegantly reset
and given a handsome cover.

The basic plot is a familiar one: sensitive, intelligent lad grows up
unloved and unappreciated in his working-class home and village;
catastrophically loses his innocence; and gains the wisdom that enables
him to venture into the outside world.

The protagonist is Eli Pallisher, a fisherman’s son living in a small
Newfoundland outport. A new teacher and apostle of free love,
Christopher Simms, arrives and opens Eli’s mind to the world of books.
At the same time, Brother John McKim arrives, as pastor of the
fundamentalist church, and he gives Eli wisdom of a sensual kind. Major
entanglements—both legal and romantic—ensue.

This book is a socio-historical guide to the dottiness of the 1960s,
Newfoundland-style—that is, the dottiness of early 20th-century
European intellectuals who advocated nude bathing, free love, and hatred
of organized religion. Nude bathing may be a fine symbol of sloughing
off the dead weight of repressive convention, but in the real world none
of these characters would have survived all their nude plunging into the
cold, killing waters of Newfoundland.

The great strength of this book is the author’s masterly descriptions
of Newfoundland’s natural splendor. Not surprisingly, Horwood’s
masterpiece remains his “nature book,” The Foxes of Beachy Cove
(1967).