If it’s Tuesday
Tony Peake
A novel
Round Fire Books
2025
216 pages
South African writer Tony Peake is no stranger to LitNet – his last novel, North facing, received warm approbation from the critics. His forte, as with his four earlier books, is an exquisite approach to the nuances of relationships. Nor is his stylistically delicate description of character absent in his latest, very readable novel, If it’s Tuesday.
Older readers will recall the title of an amusing travel film of 50 years ago as providing the inspiration: If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium. Unlike the film, Peake's latest book is an altogether more serious affair. It also offers something new in the Peake oeuvre – for this reviewer, in any event – a coded interpretation of one of the greatest of modern poems, TS Eliot's Four quartets.
The nearest comparable book I know of to If it’s Tuesday is The magus by John Fowles. Peake’s book employs the lightest touch of magic realism as well, as a device to achieve its effects, a bit like in The magus, but both works rely more on deft word footwork to achieve the magic effect. In The magus, it’s all about the smoke and mirrors that a magician would use on stage, and in If it’s Tuesday, Peake cleverly short-circuits the mechanics of travel for his protagonists. But in both books, there is a “magus” – a magician – and Peake deploys a wrinkled old fellow, Cedric, to coordinate and direct the sudden shifts of scene, like the director of a play. This allows us to follow the inner emotional and intellectual life of his characters. It is not unlike Shakespeare, in fact, with the unexpected scene changes – one moment a character is alone, the next a donkey seemingly drops from the sky. The audience understands these stratagems.
Peake achieves this in practice through the prism of a “mystery tour” involving four protagonists – a young man, Simon, going through coming of age confusion about his sexual identity; Geoffrey, a frustrated would-be writer in his fifties; Margaret, Simon’s aunt, who is tormented by a deep secret involving her past life; and Cody, Simon’s generation, who is the tour guide. He knows exactly where to eat, what art exhibits to see, what streets and buildings to visit. All the protagonists have to do, is say where it is they have always wanted to visit, and Cody whisks them there. Gradually, we intuit that he reports to Cedric and that all the places he directs the protagonists to are synchronistic. It is like the great debate in the 19th century – free will versus predestination – and it turns out that all the choices, all the places they’d like to visit, and all the things on their wish list to see, are far from choices of free will, but are in fact acts of fate; destiny is all. Peake quotes WB Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
As with The magus, this book is a paradox – the end of the journey is a return to the beginning, but with new eyes. Spiritual discovery doesn’t take us away from the world; it transforms how we see it. This is the experience of Margaret as she visits Baroque churches in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, and in the process experiences something of an epiphany, which allows her to confront her demons with pure honesty – and, moreover, to unburden herself bravely to the others. Likewise, Geoffrey, who sets out as the quintessential colourless everyman teacher he is, emerges from the mystery tour as a man who has unlocked his writing potential. Simon, too, comes of age and declares his gay leanings to his aunt, Margaret – to tell more would be to spoil the surprise for the reader. The last lines from Eliot’s Four quartets reads:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Eliot is saying that human beings – both individually and collectively – are always seeking, questioning, exploring life’s meaning. But, after all our searching, we ultimately return to where we began – to our origins, our home, our own inner selves – and only then do we truly understand it.
This is the essence of If it’s Tuesday – and if you read it with this frame of reference in mind, then all kinds of other connections spring to mind. Peake’s characters become more multilayered, particularly Margaret. Her spiritual journey is a little like that of the pilgrim in Dante’s Paradiso. She is the pilgrim that ends the journey not in some new place, but in understanding the love that moves all things. In fact, all the characters have spent their lives in various ways seeking truth always outside themselves, in experience, ambition and knowledge. Peake describes Margaret and Geoffrey visiting a gallery to see The Jewish bride by Rembrandt:
Margaret turned into the side alcove that contained what she was after, with Geoffrey following. Here they stood side by side, absorbing the painting’s every brushstroke. The way the man leaned protectively towards the woman, one hand placed upon her breast. The way her smaller hand brushed his, a feather’s touch. The fact that neither of them was looking at the other, nor at the viewer, which made their intimacy all the more telling. The glow of golden light on the man’s voluminous sleeve. Her ruddy cheeks and the corresponding hue of her dress. Tenderness and absorption.
“They say it reduced Van Gogh to tears,” said Margaret. “He wrote to his brother Theo, you know, to the effect that one must have died many times to paint like this.”
What she is beginning to see is that the truth she has been seeking outside of herself, has always been there, at the centre of her being and her world.
Elsewhere in the book, we see time and again themes tackled by Eliot in the Four quartets. Peake’s characters wrestle with regret and a desire to recover lost “what might have been” moments. In their small way, they are all struggling to find meaning amid the flux of life, and the possibility of renewal through love. Different in tone from his previous books, If it’s Tuesday sets Peake on a higher, more spiritual road.
In conclusion, the weeklong journey the characters undertake provides a marvellous readymade itinerary for anyone wishing to follow the tour – although personally I think you’d need two weeks, not one! But do read If it’s Tuesday before you go, since each gallery, eatery and so on, has a singular message for everyone, really.