Review: Expect Me Tomorrow, by Christopher Priest

Review: Expect Me Tomorrow, by Christopher Priest

a review by Rich Horton

Christopher Priest was born in 1943 and died earlier this year, at the age of 80. His first sale was "The Run", to Impulse in 1965. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, appeared in 1970, and he began to get wide recognition for his reality-bending fiction with novels like Inverted World (1974) and A Dream of Wessex (1977). His best known novel is probably The Prestige (1995) which was made into a successful movie by Christopher Nolan. A large portion of his work concerns the Dream Archipelago, a world-spanning belt of islands on another planet, which is featured in a number of short stories (including the classic "An Infinite Summer") and five novels.

Priest's fiction shows an abiding interest in the nature of reality, often involving virtual reality, or dream worlds (mental creations), or, in The Prestige, illusions. He also seems fascinated by twins, though to my knowledge he was not himself a twin (unless you count the comics writer named James Priest who works professionally as "Christopher Priest", a situation which could plausibly have become fodder for a Priestian story.) Expect Me Tomorrow, from 2022, his second to last published novel (in his lifetime, at any rate), features two sets of twins, and a sort of virtual experience to boot. It's also a climate change book.

It's set in two different times. One thread follows Adler and Adolf Beck, identical twins born in Norway in the middle of the 19th Century. Adler becomes a glaciologist, like their father, who died while studying a Norwegian glacier, while Adolf, called Dolf, is less stable: at first an aspiring opera singer, and later devoted to somewhat risky business ventures. We follow their story mostly from Adler's point of view, as he becomes interested in climate, not just as affected by glaciers, but also the Gulf Stream and sunspots and volcanoes. He and his brother move first to England, then to the US, where Adler meets a brilliant woman astronomer, and after the two marry they return to England. Meanwhile Dolf has traveled to South America to pursue his opera career, but eventually returns to England pursuing some business plans.

The other thread is set in 2050, and concerns another pair of identical twins, Chad and Gregory Ramsey. Chad is a psychological profiler, working for the police, while Greg is a journalist. Catastrophic climate change has made Europe a very dangerous place, with most of the continent descending into chaos. Chad lives in Hastings, on the English coast, and his life there is getting difficult -- he has lost his job (the police aren't interested any more in the subtleties of profiling now that they are dealing with internal and external climate refugees), while Hastings is clearly not going to be inhabitable much longer. But Greg revives Chad's interest in an old family story -- their disreputable great-great-granduncle Adolf. The reader figures out right away that Adolf is the Dolf Beck of the other timeline, though Chad's investigation is complicated because he had not realized that his Norwegian ancestor had changed names from Beck to Ramsey at one point, presumably due to Adolf's notoriety as a criminal. However, Chad has a breakthrough when he learns that some (frankly grossly implausible) police tech allows him to communicate through time with his ancestors via their DNA samples. This is complicated because Adolf and Adler Beck, as identical twins, have identical DNA -- and Chad randomly contacts both of them at different times.

In the end, then, the story intertwines three plots -- 1) Adler's life as a climate scientist, eventually leading him to conclude that sometime in the middle of the 21st Century the world will be plunged into a new ice age; 2) Chad's struggle to adapt to the worsening climate conditions, even as eventually he gets involved with a company that may have found a hopeful path to a solution to the climate crisis; and 3) Adolf Beck's criminal past.

I found the novel quite enjoyable, with some reservations. I've already mentioned the magic tech that enables communication with the past -- but I was willing to swallow that as a story-enabling device. But also, there are a great many infodumps in the book, presented mostly as Adler discussing his scientific ideas, which come off as the writer letting his research notes take over the novel at times. Priest is not typically a writer of beautiful prose, and that's the case here -- nothing sings. But it is very clean and clear writing.

I should also mention that Priest has used an actual, and quite significant, historical character as one of his main characters, for Adolf Beck was in fact a Norwegian immigrant who was at times an opera singer, and a speculative investor, but who was sent to prison multiple times for running schemes to defraud women. This case is well-known to this day, as Beck was a victim of mistaken identity, and of very shoddy police work, and his case, in which he was eventually exonerated, led to important reforms in the British court system. (The story is so well documented that by the end it's quite implausible that Chad would have had the difficulty he's shown having in finding out what happened to his "Uncle Adolf", especially once he learns Adolf's name was Beck.)

The real Adolf Beck was not a twin, so Adler and his ideas are invented. But the whole thing works nicely together, with the double twins (the Becks and the Ramseys) being oddly mirrored by the additional "twin" -- the criminal who looked just enough like Adolf Beck to have Beck confused with him. The two threads held my interest, and the contrast between Adler's theory of a coming Ice Age and the actual 2050 catastrophic warming due to greenhouse gases (of which Adler was aware) ends up driving the conclusion of the novel in a moving and cautiously optimistic fashion. Adler and Chad are the primary POV characters, and they are both pretty ordinary men, with happy marriages, and good jobs at which they are quite skilled -- not perhaps the stuff of drama but effective enough to me. Having said that, it's fair to say that Adler and Adolf's story is only tenuously connected to the 2050 climate change story -- though the linkage via Adler's research interest, if slight, is just enough to hold things together.

I don't rank this among Christopher Priest's best novels, but I did like it. I think it might have done better with one more revision pass -- I don't know, of course, but I wonder if Priest knew he didn't have much time left as he wrote it, so didn't have a chance to do the revisions. He also may have felt that the climate change subject was urgent enough that he wanted to get the book out quickly.