...this helps to explain why the study of history is important and why it still continues, to a limited degree, even now when so many other aspects of intellectual life have become unaffordable luxuries. We need to cover up our nakedness, and the past is one of the places we go to find clothes. [loc. 1530]
Zoe is an historian, living 250 years from now in a London that has been transformed by civil war, the climate emergency and a Protectorate. She's researching the early twenty-first century, and discovers two diaries written by people whose lives intersected: Harry and Michelle. Harry is a left-wing middle-class Londoner, an architect who voted Remain: Michelle is a hairdresser in a provincial town who voted Leave.
To Zoe, of course, this is all ancient history: 'pretty trivial stuff by comparison with what was to come'. It has no relevance any more, because neither the European Union nor the British State have survived. Instead, her London is rigidly stratified by class, surveilled by Chinese technology that can monitor conversations, and ruled by a Guiding Body of informed, scientifically-minded experts. Sometimes grey dust falls on the city: Zoe understands that this is the ash from distant wildfires. Much of the tropical zone is no longer habitable, and most of the remaining population live in poverty.
So! Back to the cheering narrative of 2016, when Harry rents a room from Michelle and they drink wine and end up in bed. Both are single, though Harry's only just come to terms with his divorce; both have lost children. Their political views differ massively, but perhaps they can value one another enough to compromise. Michelle's views are sympathetically described, and Harry's snobbery and elitism made me wince: Michelle, at least, is less of a hypocrite. There are a few characters (mostly on the Remain side) given to lecturing, and Zoe's framing narrative gives some context. Leave voters aren't necessarily stupid; there are more important issues affecting us; however you vote, the long game will play out in the same way.
Zoe also marvels at some aspects of 2016 life: private cars! Free healthcare! Twitter! (Apparently there are huge archives of social media from the period, available to those who work for the Cultural Institute.) The life she describes, with her crush on a colleague and their excursions into the Vauxhall Camp shanty-town, reminded me somewhat of Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden, except without the photosynthesis. And the seeds of that future are being sown in Harry and Michelle's time.
I'd say Two Tribes was as much about social class as about politics. (Of course, one might also say that about Brexit.) Harry wants to change Michelle: he's embarrassed by her. Michelle is having none of it. Harry's London friends form a kind of echo chamber; Michelle's provincial friends have a wider, if not always well-informed, range of views.
A surprisingly enjoyable read given the subject matter, though both stories (Harry and Michelle, Zoe writing her 'novel') fizzle out rather than ending. I don't want Zoe's future, but then I don't really want this present ...
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