The latest Christopher Priest novel is a science fiction novel that combines crimes of the past with a cli-fi setting of the future. It is rather unnerving and impressively clever.
If you’ve read a few Christopher Priest before, such as The Prestige or The Affirmation (I reviewed his last novel, An American Story HERE), you may think you know what to expect, until you don’t. Underneath a veneer of normality, Chris is the master of misdirection*, of cumulatively building up a story whose disparate elements make little sense together – until they do.
This time around, we begin with what seems like a Victorian crime story. There is mention of a London court case where in 1877 a man by the name of John Smith is on trial for what we would now call gaslighting fifteen women in Victorian London. Taking advantage of ‘fallen women’, he offers them a job and leaves a cheque with them but borrows some money and their jewellery from and then disappears. Fourteen other cases are mentioned. In each case the women are left a note – “Expect Me Tomorrow.”
The story then goes forward to 1902 where we meet two blonde and blue-eyed identical twin brothers, Dorf (short for Adolf) and Adler. Adler is quiet and studious and examines glaciers, convinced that there is a link between them and climate change. Dorf is the rather more flighty one who disappears for stretches at a time and loves opera – he can sing tenor. They travel to the USA for Adler to continue his research whilst Dorf after nearly a month decides to go to South America. This part reads like Jules Verne meets Angela’s Ashes.
We discover that both Adler and Dolf have sudden and mysterious ‘incursions’ – times when their body freezes for a few moments, and, unable to move, they hear voices. Both appear afflicted at different times and hear different voices refer to them by name. Is this schizophrenia, or multiverses doing their thing?
Adler spends his time in the USA researching sunspots, coming to the conclusion that they are connected to temperature changes which in turn may be connected to the melting of the glaciers. Dolf makes a living by singing opera and joining a troupe in South America.
Adler makes the calculation that if patterns are repeated then by the end of the 20th century the Northern hemisphere will have entered another Ice Age, bringing the world as we know it to an end. This is obviously of great concern. Meanwhile Adler finds himself settling down and getting married.
Much of the rest of the novel concerns itself with Charles and Greg Ramsey, who are descendants of the Becks’ children. Set in 2050, this is a vision of what a future Britain and Europe could be like. Desert dust storms, dying vegetation and nasty biting insects are all part of daily life, with power outages and food scarcity common. Greg is a journalist working for news media outlet BNN, and travels around the world. Much of this part of the story is about Charles/Chad, who is a police profiler made redundant with the advent of new technology. As part of his job he was fitted with an experimental piece of technology, something called an IMC, which is rather like being personally fitted for wifi to enhance communication. Using small graphene batteries, the idea was that this equipment would make his job – and therefore Greg – redundant, although he still has a connection as he has a graphene nanoshield permanently attached to his skull.
These different strands initially seem totally unconnected. This difference is also reflected in each section often having different styles of writing, with much (but not all!) of the Victorian/Edwardian passages written by Adler in the first person or in letters to Adler from Dolf. The future passages are written from the first-person perspective of Greg Ramsey.
As is now rather typical in a Priest book, readers may notice that there are themes and similarities running through the stories. Both the Becks and the Ramseys are twins, and anyone who has read Priest’s novel The Separation (2002) may feel that they’ve come across this idea of identical twins in his work before. It’s an interesting idea that this may create a bond that non-twins may not necessarily have – Heinlein also used this idea in his story A Time for the Stars (1956). Here, though, in each case one of the twins seems to be the model of conformity – a research professor, a police officer – whilst the other is more wayward.
As this is a Christopher Priest novel though, things are not always what we think they are. Christopher is a master writer, in setting out stories that are puzzles. They all sound perfectly sensible – this one begins with a real court case with photos to match, which adds a certain layer of reality to the plot, and adds to the mystique that what you’re reading is real or seems real.
What Christopher then does is lure you in with such reasonableness that you may not immediately realise that there are elements that that don’t always match up and that they’re actually unreliable narratives from unreliable narrators that mesh together in some places but not in others. Part of the fun of a Priest novel is deciding what is real and important and what is not, details that on their own seem quite logical, but then don’t.
Clearly on the pulse of current global concerns, Chris manages to convince the reader that his own research is impeccable. There’s a comprehensive bibliography at the back of the novel to show research should you wish to examine the scientific concepts of the novel further.
Descriptions of changes in climate, mini Ice Ages, glacial melting, ocean current changes and atmospheric conditions such as El Nino are all given here, and explained based on real scientific papers and data. (As a Geographer in my other life, I can say that Chris has managed to do that tricky thing of giving a depth of detailed information and understanding whilst at the same time moving the plot along without too much information dumping.)
In summary, Expect Me Tomorrow is never dull. It actually deals with current issues but in the unexpected way that only a skilled writer can achieve. It is by turns twisty and turny, but always mesmerising, with a satisfying conclusion that doesn’t entirely tie everything together but feels satisfyingly appropriate. Recommended.
*Actually that might be a misdirection – the clues are there, you just might not realise it!
Expect Me Tomorrow by Christopher Priest
Published by Gollancz, September 2022
ISBN:978 1 473 23513 7
326 pages
Review by Mark Yon
