Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
(Gollancz, 2022)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
As reported on his blog, Christopher Priest wrote Expect Me Tomorrow, his seventeenth novel, over the course of the 2020 pandemic period, submitting the manuscript at the end of October at more-or-less the same time as his previous novel, The Evidence, was published. It has therefore taken nearly two years to come out in English, although a French edition, Rendez-vous demain, has already been published in April of this year. In the meantime, Priest has written another ‘new book’, which is due out next year. It’s not clear, but I presume this will also be a novel; at which point Priest will have published seven novels and a substantial collection of short stories since 2011. In other words, he has produced a major body of internationally respected work in the twenty-first century proper (understood as beginning after the financial crash of 2008) that deserves to be considered highly significant in terms of both artistic creation and (admittedly sometimes oblique) social commentary. In Expect Me Tomorrow, decades of writerly craft are honed to produce not the great British novel, but a deadpan, darkly comic anti-novel charting the attenuated social life of the island we live on against the backdrop of radical climate change across a period of nearly 200 years.
The novel begins with a third-person omniscient (possibly authorial) discussion of the 1877 trial of ‘John Smith’, a petty con man preying on women, before skipping forward briefly to 1905, to the first-person account of glaciologist and climate scholar Professor Adler J. Beck, who is completing the proofing of his forthcoming book, Take Heed!—A Scientist Warns of the Terror to Come. Beck looks back at his career over the previous decades and also ponders the relationship with his bohemian twin brother, Adolf, which is mainly conducted via the letters that ‘Dolf’ dictates to passing acquaintances found during the course of his travels. Meanwhile, in 2050, Adler’s descendant Chad Ramsey lives in an increasingly heatwave- and sea-ravaged Hastings, where he works as a profiler for the police, and occasionally communicates with his twin brother, Greg, a freelance political journalist. The set-up sounds familiar, but Priest has teased on his blog, ‘To anyone who has read some of my past books I should mention that this time there are two sets of identical twins, but no one muddles them up and none of them is a magician.’ This is also misdirection because despite the 19C sections, Expect Me Tomorrow bears far less resemblance to The Prestige than to the counterfactual alternate history of The Separation; indeed, at one point we are told that ‘Chad and Greg Ramsey were born in 2002’, which was the year of publication of that latter novel.
Chad, who allows an ‘instant mental communication’ (‘IMC’) device to be inserted into his brain while away on a training course, which turns out to be shortly followed by his redundancy, is possibly the most extreme example of distracted detachment in (in)action within the entire Priest canon. At some level, he embodies what we all, by falling for misdirection, have allowed to be done to us by climate change, which is a man-made artefact of capitalism. However, there is a lot else going on in this novel, which in an unexpected parallel with Kim Stanley Robinson’s equally climate-centred The Ministry for the Future, led me to look up a fair amount of science, not to mention British legal history and even the changing name of Norway’s capital city, on Wikipedia (there is also a useful bibliography at the end of Expect Me Tomorrow). To be sure, Priest is not as didactic as Robinson, although he might be read as strongly suggesting it would be a good idea to move away from the South-East coast and possibly go as far as Scotland or Norway. Indeed, the title of this novel might best be understood as a warning.
Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.