But Then, Inexplicably: On Chris Beckett's "Tomorrow"

Chris Beckett | Tomorrow | Corvus | 2021 | 236 Pages

For anyone with a tendency to procrastinate, “tomorrow” is a familiar word. It evokes the optimistic, comforting feeling that our future self will complete whatever our present self does not want to do. The intentionality can be fierce and pervasive, prolonging doing the thing itself long after the initial tomorrow has passed. 

In Tomorrow, Chris Beckett’s protagonist is one such habitual procrastinator. They are a writer who gives up their job and city apartment to retreat to a cabin in the jungle, where they intend to write their groundbreaking, genre-defying novel. They, the protagonist, do not identify themselves with a name, gender, or nationality. They are human, certainly, in a world where people have these traits, but in a purposefully strict first-person narrative, we only glean snippets about their appearance from what others say. There is no scene in which the protagonist looks into a mirror. This type of narrative non-conformity pervades the novel, echoing the narrator’s desire that their own work be truly experimental: “I want to write a story that doesn’t have a story, or a beginning or an end. At least not in the usual sense. Obviously, I realize it must have an ending in a literal way.” 

Thus, the crux of Tomorrow is challenging narrative boundaries. The story itself is non-linear, sporadically jumping forwards and backwards in time through a jumble of events across the protagonist's life, from getting stoned in their cabin to same- and opposite-sex relationships and being kidnapped by guerillas. Although it is divided into three parts, there are no chapters or dates. Like the vagaries of the protagonist, pertinent details remain indistinct. We know the protagonist took “a plane” to this “wide, green river” from “the big city,” but nothing more. 

Whether the novel even takes place on this Earth is unclear. It reads like it could, but then, inexplicably, there are pterosaurs making a meal of a gorilla. Storytelling logic dictates a fever dream or alternate timeline, but a simpler answer is that this fits in with the larger thematic mission of repudiating narrative norms. Fittingly, the protagonist takes issue with the past tense:

The trouble with the past tense is that it’s a lie. Okay, it’s not a conventional lie, because we all know it is fiction we are reading, but still, it’s pretending these things actually took place somewhere other than in the book itself… I might include imaginary animals from time to time as a reminder of that.

Perhaps, as the protagonist alludes, the inclusion of imaginary creatures and rejection of the “lie” of the past tense by writing entirely in the present is simply a way of showing us that this is fiction. If this is the case, it shows a level of self-awareness that threatens to break the fourth wall: is this protagonist aware that they are fictional? If so, is the protagonist an overt self-insert of the author? Are the protagonist's thoughts on writing and literature a reflection of Beckett’s own, or simply a vehicle to explore and push narrative boundaries further? “If you have the choice between writing a novel and being a character in a novel, you’ve got to choose the latter, haven’t you?” the protagonist muses.

For a while, the protagonist chooses to be a character in a novel, using the self-excuse of living their life to not write at all. We view the world through the protagonist's eyes, jarring and blurry as it is, with regular sojourns into grand, intellectual and philosophical monologues on important literary fiction—“written to admit only those who are worthy”—and thoughts on the physical nature of being—”cars are bodies,” “there are reckless cars, timid cars.” Drug-fueled hallucinations are sometimes the cause, but mostly this is erudite thinking coming from a place of privilege and wealth. The protagonist is at minimum middle class. Their father is a famous television personality and they are financially comfortable. Yet the protagonist and their friends are often contradictory, eating richly while lamenting the troubles of the poor as though they are their own. “[J]ust because you can point to someone even richer,” the protagonist reflects, “you think you are on the same side as the poor.” 

During late-night political discussions, the protagonist shrewdly observes that “the important thing, it seems, is that we believe the right things, not that we do the right things,” and they demonstrate this wavering ethos throughout the narrative. They vilify armed forces but pray for army rescue when they are kidnapped. They are anti-gun in public but in the solitude of their cabin find power in holding a gun, at the immense damage it causes from a distance. Their constant musings become a reflective social commentary on what other people perceive of us compared to the beliefs we, and other people, actually hold. In an era when social media demands vitriol and outrage with performative activism, there are uncomfortable truths in the protagonist’s inconsistencies.

Yet for all their moral righteousness and certainty, the protagonist constantly second guesses their own writing, which is novel-writing kryptonite. Their dream of subverting writing norms, of writing a novel that reads “like a stained glass window, in which all the stages of a story are presented at the same time, each in its own little panel” is what intrigues us, but that pursuit of perfection and genius molds itself into the protagonist's own special set of stalling tactics. Their procrastination is unceasing, trailing like the green, wide river throughout the narrative. Surprisingly, there is an ending of sorts, but unsurprisingly, perhaps, not in the traditional sense. 

British author Chris Beckett has been delighting readers with his unconventional science fiction stories since 1990, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel Dark Eden in 2012, and the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award for his story “The Turing Test” in 2009. These are challenging texts, and Tomorrow is no different. Ultimately, it is an experimental novel that reinterprets the rules of narrative, which will undoubtedly divide readers, as boundary-pushing fiction tends to do.