Two Tribes

by Chris Beckett

 

As a historian in the bleak, climate-ravaged twenty-third century, it's Zoe's job to record and archive the past, not to recreate it. But when she comes across the diaries of Harry and Michelle, who lived two hundred years ago, she becomes fascinated by the minutiae of their lives and decides to write a novel about them, filling in the gaps with her own imaginings. Harry and Michelle meet just after the Brexit referendum when Harry's car breaks down outside a small town in Norfolk. Despite their different backgrounds, and Michelle having voted Leave while Harry voted Remain, they are drawn to each other and begin a relationship. From her long perspective, the way Zoe sees their world is somewhat different from the way we see it now. Two Tribes becomes a reflection on the way our ideas are shaped by class and social circumstances, and how they change without us even noticing. It explores what divides us and what brings us together. And it asks where we may be headed next.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Ebooks, London

304 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2020

About the author

Chris Beckett is a British social worker, university lecturer, and science fiction author.

Beckett was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and Bryanston School in Dorset, England. He holds a BSc (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Bristol (1977), a CQSW from the University of Wales (1981), a Diploma in Advanced Social Work from Goldsmiths College, University of London (1977), and an MA in English Studies from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (2005).

He has been a senior lecturer in social work at APU since 2000. He was a social worker for eight years and the manager of a children and families social work team for ten years. Beckett has authored or co-authored several textbooks and scholarly articles on social work.

Beckett began writing SF short stories in 2005. His first SF novel, The Holy Machine, was published in 2007. He published his second novel in 2009, Marcher, based on a short story of the same name.

Paul Di Filippo reviewed The Holy Machine for Asimov's, calling it "One of the most accomplished novel debuts to attract my attention in some time..." Michael Levy of Strange Horizons called it "a beautifully written and deeply thoughtful tale about a would-be scientific utopia that has been bent sadly out of shape by both external and internal pressures." Tony Ballantyne wrote in Interzone: "Let’s waste no time: this book is incredible."

His latest novel, Dark Eden, was hailed by Stuart Kelly of The Guardian as "a superior piece of the theologically nuanced science fiction".

Dark Eden was shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA Award for Best Novel.

On 27 March 2013 it was announced that Julian Pavia at Broadway Books, part of the Crown Publishing Group, had acquired the US rights to Dark Eden and Gela's Ring from Michael Carlisle at Inkwell Management and Vanessa Kerr, Rights Director at Grove Atlantic in London, for a high five-figure sum (in US dollars).

Beckett comments on his official website: "Although I always wanted to be a writer, I did not deliberately set out to be a science fiction writer in particular. My stories are usually about my own life, things I see happening around me and things I struggle to make sense of. But, for some reason, they always end up being science fiction. I like the freedom it gives me to invent things and play with ideas. (If you going to make up the characters, why not make up the world as well?) It’s what works for me."

Reviews

[Mike Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chris Beckett is a science-fiction writer, and a successful one (his 2012 novel Dark Eden, in particular, was very well received and won the Arthur C Clarke award). Two Tribes may be a bit of a departure for him. There’s a sci-fi angle, but it’s very much about the present. From other readers’ reviews of Two Tribes, it looks like some of his readers may have been a bit taken aback, and it hasn’t worked for everyone. But it absolutely did for me.

The book has two main characters. Harry’s a middle-aged architect getting over the death of a child, followed by a divorce. We meet him first on his way to a weekend with wealthy friends in their Suffolk cottage. Michelle has also lost a child. She is an attractive Brexit-voting hairdresser from a working-class background who lives in the small Norfolk town of Breckham. Harry listens to his fashionable friends raving about the stupidity of Brexit. He agrees with them, but deep down their anger and their certainties are beginning to grate on him. He starts feeling curious about the other side. Then one day his car breaks down. In Breckham.

Two Tribes is, amongst other things, a love story, and I did get quite invested in Michelle and Harry and wanted things to work out for them. (This isn’t the place to say if they do.) But what Beckett really seems to want is to show us the divisions in English society and where they could lead. There’s a wealthy retired Army officer on the outskirts of Breckham who is trying to recruit a right-wing militia, and you see exactly how he does it by playing on working-class frustrations and resentments. Meanwhile one of Harry’s fashionable friends has a daughter who lectures at LSE and argues that there might now be a need for a “guided democracy”. The so-called liberals lap it up. In fact I got the impression Beckett had equal sympathy for both tribes; at any rate, he doesn’t take sides. He seems more concerned with what all this could mean for the future.

To that end, he’s used the plot device of a researcher in the 23rd century, who is reading Harry and Michelle’s respective diaries and filling in the blanks to make a narrative. This device does let him tell us what happened in England in the years that followed, with a picture of division then conflict – and cataclysmic climate change, which no-one prevented as they were too busy fighting teach other. It’s a bit artificial compared with the present-day bits, which are immediate and resonant. I did wonder if Beckett should just have written a novel set in the here and now.

Still, it does sort of work. Besides, the book’s well-paced and the characters are very alive. Harry’s the hero if there is one, but he’s very real; he is tactless with Michelle, introducing her to people who clearly make her uncomfortable. He also seems to have an almost anthropological interest in her, as if she came from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon basin. The anti-Brexit crowd preach liberalism and tolerance but this doesn’t seem to extend to Brexit voters – yet they are too self-satisfied to see the paradox; Beckett has quite a lot of fun with this. The fascist old officer gets guest speakers to talk to his militia, and it is chilling how the recruits’ psychology is manipulated. It is also very believable. I found myself thinking of Eric Hofer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, and the historian Peter Fritzche’s Germans Into Nazis – both books that show, albeit in very different ways, how Fascism preys on those who feel a need for unity and belonging.

This is a shrewd, well-observed novel about England and where it is post-Brexit, and the dangers of division.

[Stuart Dredge · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's an exchange in this book which neatly summarised my feelings about it. It's when one of the main characters, Michelle, is taking the other (Harry) to task:

"She put on her super-posh voice. 'Oh, but you and I are so different, Michelle!' I mean, for fuck's sake, Harry, if that really bothers you, then we can end this now. And if it doesn't bother you, why do you have to keep on and on and on about it all the fucking time?"

He really does. One of the things I struggled with in Two Tribes is that Harry really *does* keep on and on and on about the differences between his tribe (liberal artsy middle class remain voters) and Michelle's (working class leave voters). I found him a truly unsympathetic character, constantly mansplaining at Michelle about why she thinks what she thinks, and why that's different to him and his friends. He's tiring to read.

That was my main difficulty with the book. Harry may well be a perfectly-drawn character in terms of his condescension and his ability to overthink everything. And maybe that's a good thing to be confronting readers with – am I like Harry? Are all of us who're likely to read Two Tribes like Harry? Christ!) It's just that by halfway through, the prospect of his next bout of word-soup was making my heart sink even before starting to read.

I do love the setup: a 23rd-century historian piecing together the lives of two ordinary people in 2016 through their diaries and social-media postings. I was a lot more interested in the 23rd century characters and world – after a destructive war and with the climate emergency wreaking terrible effects – than I was in endless conversations in 2016 about Brexit.

This may be a very personal response: perhaps there'll be lots of readers with more of an appetite for that. The book does have some sharp and important points to make about the insularity of much of the post-Brexit-vote conversations, particularly among some remain voters ("they kept interrupting one another, not to disagree but because their need to agree was so vehement").

I also enjoyed some of its jabs, from the imagined 23rd-century perspective, at social media in general and Twitter in particular. "His timeline, this little stream is called, or, more expressively, his feed. Like chicken pellets, as Harry observes somewhere. Or pigswill." Also, on Twitter pile-ons: "Harry didn't join in. He didn't have the energy. But for forty five minutes, neither did he have the energy to withdraw."

The verdict on our current society can be brutally refreshing too. "People like Harry and Michelle were indeed fucking up the world, and that theirs was the first generation in history knowingly to fuck up the world, and yet still carry on doing it. That's why some people these days refer to their era as the Age of Selfishness." Oof.

But... a lot of the characters felt a bit too much like mouthpieces for views on Brexit and/or society, rather than fully fleshed-out characters. This may be deliberate: these are characters and dialogue created by Zoe, the 23rd-century historian, who's writing a novel based on the diaries. But I found it a bit wearing to read. The ending also felt quite... sudden.

Two Tribes is a clever idea with some sharp points to make. Maybe it's just unfortunate timing. Mid-Covid-19 pandemic, I'm looking to escape into fiction as much as possible, and a bunch of unpleasant people banging on about Brexit is not my happy reading place just now!

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a free advance reader copy (ARC) via NetGalley, in return for an honest review.

[Ben Thurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Chris Beckett's work, but found this deeply disappointing. Readable, but probably not worth reading.

Despite a purportedly science fiction framing (a 23rd Century historian in a Chinese-dominated and climatically-altered England, discovers diaries and social media posts of two people from 2016), it is in fact a fairly yawn-inducing reflection on social tribalism and Brexit. One of the characters, you see, is Harry, an architect and "Remainer" who begins an intense and improbable (and cringingly Pygmalion-esque) affair with Michelle, a hairdresser and (probably, but not definitely, non-racist) Brexiteer.

The analysis of social tribalism isn't particularly insightful, with Harry ponderously journaling through a series of personal revelations about his own liberal-progressive biases and blindsides. The future England, disrupted by conflict and climate change, is a thinly painted backdrop only. And the romance between the main characters is drawn with a clunky earnestness and dialogue never spoken by actual human beings.

"Do you really want me, Harry? My mind, my body. Well, actually forget the body part. I know you want my body. But do you want me as a person? Or is it just a bit of a thrill for you to leave that posh world of yours up in London and go with a woman who's common and talks like I do?"

"It is a thrill. I don't deny it. I'm tired of my own kind of people. Our self-importance, our self-righteousness. It's much more than a thrill, though. I love the way that you aren't like that. But I'm wondering what you and I would be like when we were too tired for sex, and we knew all there was to know about each other. What would we talk about, do you think?"

I wish Beckett had just written a blog-post or op-ed on social and political divides in post-Brexit England and been done with it.

[Steven Shaviro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Beckett’s novel Two Tribes (Beckett 2020) contains a more or less naturalistic account of events set in the author’s actual time and place: the book is about class differences in the UK during the Brexit disputes of the late 2010s. But this account, while it is contemporary for us, is framed as being written by a historian in the year 2266. This future narrator uses (fictional, but naturalistic) diaries from the 2010s as her raw material, in order to describe a failed romance between an upper-middle class man who is an architect, and a lower-middle class woman who is a hairdresser. Though these protagonists are both small business owners (and hence petit bourgeois in Marxist terms), they are very far apart in their values and assumptions, their habits and interests, and their social circles. The text moves back and forth between third-person descriptions of these characters’ lives, and first-person reflections by the narrator, who seeks to understnad these lives from her own perspective as someone living in a twenty-third century Britain ravaged by climate catastrophe, economic decline, and authoritarianism. There is also a third time level to the novel, consisting in scenes that the narrator admits to inventing out of whole cloth, due to the absence of sufficient documentary evidence. These added scenes are also supposedly set in the late 2010s. But the narrator acknowledges that they would actually have taken place a bit later in time: the near future for us, but still the distant past for her. These scenes point to the origins of a violent civil war in the later twenty-first century, between high-tech armies bankrolled by the professional and managerial elites, on the one hand, and fascist militias controlled by Tory aristocrats who recruit soldiers from the resentful white working class, on the other. This civil war is recounted as being nasty and quite destructive, even though the novel reveals that the instigators on both sides come from the same tiny ruling class. Beckett’s novel thus works on multiple levels with the estrangement effects that come from both class difference and temporal displacement.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dogshit, if I'm honest.

There's been a recent trend of fiction in Britain which has been dubbed "Brexlit", novels which consciousnessly deal with Brexit in one form of another. Titles include Ali Smith's Autumn, Perfidious Albion, and even to a certain extent, something like Jasper Fforde's Constant Rabbit. All of them essentially come at the problem from a liberal-left perspective, which makes sense, when one considers that the Guardian/London Review of Books type scene is almost entirely dominated by the sort of mostly aimacable inner city, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberal middle classes. Inevitably, the sort of fiction is going to end up representing this milleu. It also makes sense in another way too, losers can often only deal with their failure and give themselves a sort of consolation prize by creating a retroactive victory in the works of cultural propaganda after the fact. You can see it in its extreme case in white supremacist Southern USA, where they managed to turn the South's treasonable insurrection against the legitimate democratic government of America in defence of the right to own other humans as the Lost Cause, a noble crusade to protect a humble Southern way of life destroyed by northern invaders, subsequently unleashing the horrors of the carpetbaggers and the unrestrained negro rapist onto their once fertile ground. W.D. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation helped cement a propaganda myth in lurid, gratuitous epic form, sustaining a lie that continued right up to the 50s, with Gone With the Wind being a toned down, but effectively identical narrative. Culture becomes a means for the losers of history to sublumate their own often crushing defeats into a safer realm, where it can be dealt with, a narrative cultivated to their desire, and thus never actually manage to deal with the problem in the realm of actual politics. One can see the torture and agony of post war Japan's cultural and global position in almost every Japanese TV and film production after it - the spectre of the Hiroshima mushrook cloud lurks across everything from Godzilla to Akira.

To a far less extreme degree of course, the recent trend of Brexlit is a similar, trauma-denying, sublumating act of wishfufliment. The liberals, and their worldview, collapsed in 2016, and in Britain at least, has never recovered. The liberal centrist elites, incapable and unwilling to even engage in one millisecond of self reflective criticism over why they fucked the Remain campaign so badly, engaged from 2016-2019 in the longest, most prolonged act of hysterical, tone deaf, whining, miserable hissyfitting perhaps seen in politics. Recasting themselves in pathetically self-valorising faux-indentities, the worthless liberal shits pretended they were valiant noble knights defend their country against a hoarde of ravenous semi-human filth, failing to realise at all that the economic system of neoliberalism they by-and-large supported created the conditions that partly created Brexit, and equally failed to realise that the supposed 'liberal values' they ridiculously inflated from a set of principles into some kind of holy virtues, were ones they barely supported either. They ignored the fact that their beloved, useless cretin-in-chief Obama was deporting migrants at record speed, ignore the fact the culture of migrant demonisation, border obsessions, crude racist paranoid fantasies about "scroungers" abusing the system and Pearl clutching hysterical tirades about the supposed "cultural balkanisation" (to use Trevor Phillips, the truly laughable head of the EHRC, term) of communities under the weight of multiculturalism, was created, fed, nutured and allowed to proliferate under Blair and New Labour, the supposed period of 'pragmatic centrist governemt' liberals constantly hark back to like senile geriatrics vaguely recalling the pallid shade of a memory of better times. They forget the rancid islamaphobia and relentless targeting of Muslims was generated by Blair during his whole hearted support of the War on Terror (and to see the sights of people like Alistair Campbell, a glorified Julius Streicher with a drink problem, waltz about pretending to be Mr fucking oh-so-principled, after having allowed the toxic politics of islamaphobia to be unleashed in his role in creating the dodgy dossier in the run up to the war in Iraq, is a truly pathetic and shameful sight). Liberals are truly dumb cunts, they have no knowledge about anything, nor do they even want to, or even probably can, remember or know about any of this. The lesson of the early 21st century (although it was proven in the 19th and the 20th as well) is that liberals have lost their right to be considered the gaurantors of liberalism. They responded to the Brexit defeat with about as much emotional maturity and intelligence as a teenager would breaking up with their girlfriend, absurdly overexaggerating the supposed wonderous state they were previously in (the EU as a cuddly liberal paradise, as long as one ignored the drowned migrant corpses on the coast of the Mediterranean or the Greek truck drivers killing themselves due to austerity) followed up by a truly vomit inducing spectacle of jumped up, wallowing self-pity and narcissistic denial.

In that sense, Chris Beckett's book is a good and accurate depiction of this particular stratum of people's opinions and their response to Brexit. Their abject political cowardice, smug self satisfaction, glib regurgitated barely thought out talking points, nauseating sense of arrogance, startling incuriosity about why they lost, almost pathological inability for humulity, staggering levels of stupidity, amazing capacity for self-delusion, and a new found penchant for anti democratic authoritarianism that would make certain aristocrats of the 19th century whince in its outpouring of contempt for they people they failed to convince, is captured well. While Beckett is obviously not a pro Brexit fan, he is more subtle and nuance than most of the other works I mentioned, exposing the liberal piss weasels logical absurdities and glib, appaling opinions. To watch the main character, Richard, bit by bit, move further and further away from their position, to the point where he can even use his imagination to conceive of what it might possibly be like to be on the other side of the argument, is truly funny to read. One recalls Daniel Keye's Flowers for Algernon, where the mentally disabled main character gradually develops more and more intelligence, discovering first in drips, then in leaps and bounds, the range of the potentiality of his mind. Watching a liberal gain sentience is rather amusing, if only in the same way some distant alien observer seeing the first chimp jump the evolutionary barrier and start to use a stick as a tool must have done.

Unfortunately, the positives end there. Beckett, despite mildly critical and occasionally sharp in his representation of the metropolitan liberals, is himself, still, ultimately one himself. The book is laced with the same kind of dull liberal talking points and ideas. To take this weird, tired, and overused point of "tribes" (currently in vouge by morons these days as a catch all term to describe political disagreement, reducing the complexities of politics to the simplicity of a sort of anthropological primitive mythology), which already hopelessly mystifies and moralises the issue, and projecting it forward so the two sides become literal tribes fighting each other, is so fucking dumb and lame it's unreal. It's precisely the kind of simplifying stories that he's supposedly criticising in the book. The dystopia aspects are generic, weak, and unoriginal. Of course, China are the big evil, one of the officials of the regime even being described as wearing a "Mao suit", as if the Cold War never ended, with the "Mao suit" (actually technically called the Neru suit) being the modern day symbolic equivalent of the old Fu Manchu image of long sharp talons, whispy moustache and ornate mandarin clothing as a representation of something evil, vaguely foreign, and probably Oriental. This crude ham-fisted liberal fantasy is punctured by even stupider class politics. As for all liberals, class is treated as a form of culture, with "Remain" being represented as very well off London middle classes, and "Leave" being represented as outer suburb, run-down, 'left behind', rough Chavtown. This fits his dumb idea of 'tribes', compartmentalising groups into easily delineated boxes, but is dumb as shit. For one, the fact that most Leavers were not left behinders, but pretty well off, property owning petit bourgeois ex or current tories, with large levels of support amongst the rural middle classes, is an irrelenvce to him. As is the equal fact that much of the inner city metropolitan Remain leave were poor, indetted, precarious, insecure, renting young people, who by any stretch of the definition are working class, voted for Remain. Liberals can't see class, and when they do they can only see it through a relentless preoccupation with the symbolic, generic, and artificially generated signifies of "class" (rough, preferably northern accent, maybe a flap cap, football shirt, rottweiler dog firmly gripped in big Gammon hand, down the pub every day = worker, and posh, turtleneck sweater wearing, glasses wearing, frappucino drinking, avocado on toast eating, Lacan spouting, multicultural restaurant eating and Guardian reading = middle class). It's a vision of class that is as stupid as it is insulting, as if no working class person has every eaten at a Curry house, or that no middle class person has ever drank heavily in a pub.

Of course, slippages as to whom the real enemies of the Remoaners pops in occasionally, that of the radical Left, represented during this time in the fevered liberal imagination in the demonic incantation of Jeremy Corbyn. Demonized beyond recognition, lied against at every turn, denounced by almost all 'respectable' liberal-left opinion makers as some kind of Frankenstein's monstrosity of Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Osama bin Laden all at once, this crude spectre ran untrammaled across the liberal's increasingly rotting brains like the image of God must have been to medieval peasants, a totally imaginary concoction that nevertheless had absolute and total reality to them, causing them spasms of ever increasing insanity. It eventually led most of the liberal slime mould into incessantly crying to Corbyn to support the hated and ridiculous second referendum position, then attacked him relentlessly when he electorally tanked on precisely that position (which of course, was their plan all along). By attacking Corbyn so incessantly, they effectively were the unofficial propaganda machine for the Tories, effectively allowing the only opposition to Boris Johnston be destroyed, this opening the door to his accent to power despite him being the face of the very Leave campaign they spat and roared their teeth at like the worthless, pathetic, stupid, scummy little diahorrea specks they are. Richard, the main character, at one point, says that Corbyn is "too left wing and not pragmatic enough", which is ironic, considering Corby was lambasted by Remaniacs for being precisely *too* pragmatic when it came to Brexit, taking the sensible, sane and correct course of moderate support for the EU buttressed by the desire of genuine reform, against the Remaniacs hard core extremist lunacies. There's a truly laughable bit when one of the future historians says to the other that Lenin was "the ultimate middle class expert", his goal of leading the working classes to communism "led through famine and terror and created a new and brutal class which, seventy years later, would kick away even the pretence of communism, appropriate the hitherto socialised means of production, and become a particularly ruthless capitalist oligarchy of the exact kind Lenin had claimed to be an expert in overthrowing".

This jambled pot pouri of generic anti communist talking points is, by the way, literally being spoken off while the two future historians are walking through a climate devastated wasteland, with poverty stricken shanty towns everywhere and bits of city underwater. It seems even while walking amongst the literal ruins of capitalism's enforced holocaust, the bourgeoisie still cannot retain their urge to hate communism, like some kind of in built race memory that is kept alive even though the historical conditions that justified such hatred have been totally shattered.

So it's politics are vapid, inane, shallow drivel. The characters suck too. Richard and Michelle are boring non entities with nothing interesting about them, and all the other surrounding characters are stereotypes. Their romance is forced, unconvincing, and reduces the plot to a kind of tawdry melodrama, where true love can overcome hate and blah blah all that crap. The writing is atrocious, lifeless and pedestrian, with dialogue so utterly contrived, fake sounding, cliche written and awful you can practically feel it clanging in your head as you read it.

The endings rubbish too. In short, don't bother reading at all. There's nothing of interest to note in its angle on Brexit, and it sucks as a piece of sci fi. As a sort of picture postcard, looking back on the positions of the liberal left in Britain from 2016-2019 with the benefit of hindsight, near enough to have real insight to how they were but at a position where enough dust had settled to be able to view it somewhat more objectively, it has some value (and indeed, in 2022, after the horrors of the pandemic and the mountingly apparent climate armageddon, Brexit and its related issues seems like seems like some kind of half remembered fever dream, one everyone can seemingly recall experiencing but one that also no one can quite believe actually happened). There could have been value in this approach, contextualising the small little lives of people in their (our) time, showing how petty and irrelevent our issues were compared to the future disasters oncoming, rather akin to how we now view the pre-WW1 Edwardians, stuck in a seeming glorious summer of tranquil liberal peace before the storm hit, each image of their middle class beachside adventures utterly stained with melancholy longing and impregnated with a sense of inevitable foreboding. But it doesn't do that, and the result sucks.

[Elli (Kindig Blog) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading for me is all about escapism. Particularly at the moment with my industry in free-fall after Covid-19, I’m using reading as a heavy distraction from the utter craziness of politics and the insane world going on around me at the moment. A book based on Brexit therefore, was in hindsight, not particularly the best choice of ARC to request! However, I was drawn in by the apocalyptic angle, the idea of events we are in the middle of right now shaping the future was interesting. I also liked the idea of future historians looking back on our choices and trying to work out what we were thinking and where key decisions had been made in our timeline to affect theirs.

Two Tribes for me fails on all counts. The apocalyptic angle that I had been most interested in was completely side-lined. We understand the Chinese are in charge, there’s been some flooding and a new government with ‘nine principles’ and there’s talk of soldiers that can see all of your personal details at a glance. That is about the full extent of the world-building given to the reader and we know even less about the two historians – just their names and their jobs with a bit of romance thrown in extremely last minute. It’s so shallow and so undefined and so… disappointing. Give me a world to be engrossed in – if you’re making the point that Brexit started something so massive that it’s still being looked at when the world is half destroyed in 250 years time then show me that world!

Instead of focussing on the future element of the book, the author instead mainly focuses on Brexit and flashbacks of our main characters in the past through ‘diary entries’. There’s Harry who is a Remainer and massively unlikeable - he is ashamed of his girlfriend because she dares to have different viewpoints as him, is upper-class and self centred and makes some truly awful statements that made me want to throw my Kindle out of the window (and I’m on his political side!). There’s Michelle, a Leaver who is an uneducated hairdresser who unfortunately crosses paths with Harry. She is also not very fleshed out; I wanted to actually know more about why she felt the way she did, but the author just ended up speaking in clichés for most of her inner reasoning. We then also get a few other side-characters who are around for a chapter or two including Charlie, a clueless lad who gets drawn into an EDL like club.

The book is supposed to have been scraped together by the future historians from diary entries and glimpses of their social media accounts which are still inexplicably available to view. This is unrealistic on so many counts – how many people do you know at the moment that write in a diary? How many of those people who write diaries write them in such a detailed way that you could recreate the scene down to the minute detail? The author has tried to be clever here by saying the historian made up some details and padded the accounts using artistic license. This is someone living 250 years in the future - surely they would be unable to seamlessly patch stories together without in-depth knowledge of the time. I think of all the slang I don’t know that the generation behind me use on a daily basis and vice versa – there’s no way someone from the future could fill in those gaps without it being instantly noticeable by someone living in the time. This could have been a really nice little touch – words and phrases used that perhaps didn’t make sense and created more of an insight into the future world but was a missed opportunity.

This book didn’t teach me anything I didn’t know about Brexit, this book didn’t challenge my way of thinking, this book didn’t paint me an interesting picture of a possible future now that the decision has been made and this book didn’t make me feel anything but anger for its poorly drawn, cliched and unlikeable characters. This book, in short, was not for me.

Thank you to NetGalley & Atlantic Books – Corvus for the chance to read the ARC of Two Tribes in exchange for a (very) honest review.

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly good and kept my interest until the end, but the main characters (and their friends, families etc) are a bit too one dimensional and the narrative feels on occasion to try and make the "two tribes" point rather than develop naturally; the future narration is interesting in its own way but the main part and focus of the novel is the Brexit part

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a pity that this book should be published as science fiction: it limits its readership and makes it sound like what it isn't. The premise (someone from the future reconstructing the past) is not new, and has been used many times in mainstream fiction, often in the guise of 'I publish a manuscript I found' (Nabokov being the prime example, or Abbott is Flatland). But this is really speculative fiction as commentary on the Now, with an eye on possible developments: Beckett's main line these days, as exemplified by his excellent America City.
This novel might not the best novel-as-novel you read this year, but it's bound to be one of the telling, important ones nonetheless. The world it explores is yours, and more importantly, the people it explores are you, or me. Its title seems to refer directly to Disraeli's Two Nation idea.
Now that, then, doesn't sound very new, or exciting, or worthy of comments, but: Beckett puts a magnifying glass on our beliefs, which he relates to class. Better: he forces his readers to question the validity of their belief, especially those who (like me, say) fancy themselves as liberals (socially and politically). Of course I was against Brexit; of course I loathe Trump - but why am I so sure I'm right? Am I right?
Class, in England and elsewhere, is hidden in everything: language, Art, restaurants, pleasures, leisure, location...and we've known since at least Bourdieu how that environment makes us members of a class. But what about the others? What about those who think Picasso's paintings could 'have been drawn by a child'? Are they wrong? Why? What makes us feel superior when we do know about Picasso, and dismiss such remarks? And really: is Art important? Is it more important than, say, knowing makes of cars? Socially, culturally, we know the importance those things have, but have you asked yourself whether there was, objectively, something superior to something else?
Why do we think knowing Dickens is more important than, I don't know, a Mills and Boones author?
Of course, Beckett is pretty gloomy about the possible direction we're all taking, and the future he only alludes to doesn't seem that different, under the superficial details, so I imagine his message, as it were, is clear: if we continue that way, we're damned.
But he's much too smart to assert the superiority of one tribe over the other: the tribes need to meet, and understand one another. That's the thing throughout: the two tribes do not know each other, they only think they do.
This is, or can be, an uncomfortable read, but I think a necessary one. Yes the main character may come across as annoying, but he's a vehicle for thoughts - hence the earlier remark that as purely novel, this may not be the best you've read. But again: it's an important one nonetheless, and would ideally be read by all - from both tribes.

[Daren Kearl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Tribes (Frankie Goes to Hollywood reference?) is set 250 years into the future since the 2016 Brexit referendum. There has been a civil war (as the two factions of Leave and Remain crystallised into Liberal and Patriot armies), a takeover by China which sees them in charge and a natural catastrophe linked to climate change. All this, however, is by-the-by in Chris Beckett's novel, as he examines the tired debates and view points of both sides of the referendum.

In diaries left behind by characters on both sides of the fence, historians examine what happened and one uses the material as source for a novel. The author backs up his own stance by saying "This is a novel, isn't it? It has to be about characters and conversations.." Trouble is all the conversations are about Brexit!
I found it interesting that it did look at both sides of the fence and that it looked at group dynamics and the sociology behind self-affirmation, disillusionment and loneliness that leads to people with the same point of view blocking debate and those who disagree. It can also be seen with people in the far-right, far-left stances taking shape across the world at the moment and the anti-racism / anti-anti-racism responses.

In this way, I guess the book is a warning about not finding common ground, engaging in debate or ignoring the issues that may prompt a certain viewpoint. Michelle and Harry are the two characters with opposite views and different backgrounds who try to form a relationship despite prejudices and pre-judged ideas from themselves and both sides of their families. Sadly the conclusion gives no hope.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I refuse to tag this as sci-fi, as the futuristic framing tale element isn't enough to hide the fact that this is a long diatribe about Brexit. So much yawn. That it was as readable as it was is something of a minor miracle, but can't make me actually like the book or its whiny characters. Sorry, not for me!

Full review is up on my blog.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Two Tribes" von Chris Beckett ist provokante Sozialkritik mit wenig echter Handlung und einer Science-Fiction-Fassade. Es bietet aber viel Stoff zum Nachdenken und sich daran reiben.

Vollständige Rezension: https://weltenfluestern.de/57

[Anthony Moreau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading Chris Beckett's work for 16 years and this is the best thing he has ever written.

It's thoughtful, realistic, concerning, and I couldn't believe how quickly I made it to the end; I can't recommend this enough.

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having loved Dark Eden, I was prepared to try this book on a completely different topic because I enjoyed Chris’ writing so much. However, this book sounds like it focuses on a post-Brexit world and its consequences when it really is about contemporary middle-class people and their endless discussion.

The book consists of Zoe who discovers the diary of Harry a middle-class architect and essentially authors his story. The only delight in this is we never know how much is really what Harry wrote in his diary and how much of it is Zoe imagining or deciding what took place. Through Zoe’s retelling or imagining we get a very lengthy discussion of Brexit and it’s very dull, very boring. Perhaps because if you’re living through it, it’s really not something you want to read again and again and again.

The book brings the element of class and the divide of voters in England, through the introduction of a romantic partner for Harry, in the form of a woman named Michelle. Michelle voted to leave, Harry voted to remain and so whilst they very much enjoy each other's bodies, they butt heads over their voting choices. I’ll admit, I expected the portrait of Michelle to be a lot worse, but knowing Chris’ background I now realise he is not the sort of author to ridicule and antagonise the working class.

The setting of the book in the 23rd century provided a nice separation for Zoe’s reflections, she is someone so far removed from that time that the whole thing seems odd to her. We get very little time with the people of the 23rd century, and truthfully I’m glad, the world sounded bleak and boring and yet still full of the poor/rich divide.

This book feels very current, I will give it that. The conversations and commentary about class are things we’ve all heard in discussions about Brexit and I really think that’s why this book is boring because I’ve lived through, I’m living through it and so the debates back and forth (especially by middle-class people) are trite.

[Han Whiteoak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because I loved Chris Beckett's Dark Eden series. Two Tribes contains some similar themes, such as social class ("big people vs small people") but personally I didn't find this exploration as interesting as the Dark Eden books.

The framing device of someone from the future going through diaries from our present and trying to piece together a narrative was interesting, but underused. I kept wanting to know more about the dystopian future and how the world had ended up that way, but the book gives only basic details. The ending failed to move me because I didn't know enough about either of the characters to care about them.

Most of Two Tribes is about Harry and Michelle - two diarists from 2016 that future historian Zoe is studying. Harry is a typical middle-class liberal whose friends are eternally moping about Brexit. Michelle is a leave-voting hairdresser from a working-class town. The weird thing about these characters is how hyper-conscious they are at all times about how the difference in their social class affects their relationship. Yes, class affects British society, but they literally never stop going on about it.

A lot of the dialogue in this book sounds very inauthentic, particularly that of the working class characters. You can explain it away by saying, "ah, but it's acutally a historian from hundreds of years into the future putting words into their mouths," but given how little payoff there is from the future-framing, this doesn't end up being a satisfying explanation.

That said, despite all the cringey dialogue, it's a surprisingly readable book. It has some interesting ideas. I just wish they'd been presented in a more interesting way!

[Steve Gillway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cleverly written. Whizzed through it. Will it all resurface as we approach Dec 31st?

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Tribes is narrated as if by a historian called Zoe from 250 years in the future. She lives in a post-Catastrophe England now under the rule of something known as The Guiding Body which consists of “qualified, able and scientifically minded people the Liberals now regard as the correct way to run the country.” The world is globally warmed, with parts barely habitable. What were roads are now underwater, with boardwalks at first floor level to allow access to buildings’ upper floors. Praying mantises are a common sight. Culture is heavily Chinese influenced after a Protectorate which helped the Guiding Body into power. The currency is the yuan. Militiamen patrol the streets, their goggles giving them information about everybody. The poor work on flood defences and in one scene are patronised by an official.
As well as having access to twenty-first century social media records Zoe has come across the diaries of two people from our time, before the Warring Factions era. These are Harry, an architect, and Michelle, a hairdresser, but who actually met and whose differing attitudes she sees as a precursor to the times now in her past. Despite her friend Cally’s reservations Zoe conceives of writing Harry and Michelle’s history in the form of a novel to illustrate the beginnings of how her society came to pass saying that the past’s remoteness makes it comforting.
The bulk of Two Tribes is made up of that novel and describes the evolution of the relationship between its two protagonists, one from either side of the Brexit debate, each impatient of the other and each embarrassed by their families and friends but each beginning to accommodate the other’s viewpoint.
This is a subtle but risky piece of writing by Beckett. Subtle because it captures the slightly off note that manuscripts by inexperienced writers tend to have; but risky since it may fail to provide the richer satisfactions readers find from more accomplished practitioners.
Beckett renders that unpolished type of writing (the kind of story treatment that we’re often told authors who are later successful have consigned to a drawer in the deepest part of their desk, never to be resurrected) well; the unnecessary repetition of information, the going over the same ground in a slightly different context, some characters who are little more than mouthpieces and others who at times lean over into the cartoonish, the somewhat stark oppositions between those with contrasting attitudes, the necessity for Zoe to explain things to her putative readership which do not need explanations to Beckett’s readers. (For example, the derivation of the term Brexit.)
The sections set in the future of course do not suffer from any of that and read as assuredly as any “normal” novel. Whether that is enough in this case to offset the infelicities of the part supposedly written by Zoe is a moot point.

[Kendal Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set partially in the 23rd century, but mostly in 2016, Two Tribes follows the story of Zoe, a historian looking back on Brexit through the writings of two diaries which have survived from the era. One belongs to Harry, an upper middle class architect living in London, while the other has been written by Michelle, a working class woman from a less prosperous UK town. When Harry and Michelle cross paths in the aftermath of the EU referendum, each of their strongly held world views are called into question.

If you're thinking of picking up this book because you enjoy a good sci-fi/ dystopia, this is not the novel for you. The 23rd century setting works excellently as a means of creating distance between the researcher Zoe and her subject, Brexit, allowing Beckett to add a somewhat emotionally disconnected perspective on the referendum debate. The sections of the book set in Beckett's future Britain are intriguing but never fully elaborated on. We're offered only a glimpse, adding nothing more to the story than a longer-term context to today's social discourse.

The social commentary in this book is incredibly well observed, for the most part. The repetition of slogans and key phrases being sounded into insular echo chambers on both sides of the Brexit debate is highlighted effectively. Discourse on classism in the UK and the unequal distribution of power and wealth is astute.

Harry, a wealthy and inherently middle class 'remainer', meets Michelle, a working class 'leaver' and falls almost immediately in love and reassesses everything he's ever believed about Brexit and society at large. This creates a great opportunity for Beckett to discuss many of the apparent 'truisms' bandied about on both sides, and offers some interesting observations. It also, however, makes Harry almost insufferable as a character. Now conflicted, he continually obtusely challenges everyone and anyone on their views, which does begin to grate. His conversations with Michelle are so condescending and class-obsessed that I was forever willing her to give him whatfor. Their chemistry was entirely lost on me, except for what they offered in terms of narrative progression.

This novel had me thinking constantly, and offered some valuable insights into the Brexit debacle. As a story, it had a couple of flaws - some narrative streams strangely trickled into nothing, the ending was fairly abrupt and the dialogue between characters was ocassionally unnatural. But as a reading experience, this book had me hooked.

Thanks to NetGalley and Corvus for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Ricardo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desde que leí la trilogía de "Dark Eden", Chris Beckett se convirtió en un autor del que pienso leerme todo lo que saque. "Two Tribes" es un libro completamente distinto de todo lo que ha hecho ya que pese a que tiene técnicamente un marco de ciencia-ficción, la mejor forma de definirlo es hacerlo como "su novela sobre el Brexit". De hecho, el marco al que me refiero no es sino una excusa para hablar de un hombre a quien un encuentro afectivo casual le hace replantearse toda su vida y las consecuencias de su tribalismo, en un esfuerzo titánico por entender al "otro" mientras en el plano nacional se va gestando un enfrentamiento político de mucha mayor envergadura. El detalle de que toda esta historia esté enmarcada por un futuro lejano y post-apocalíptico forma parte del discurso del autor en el que expresa su lamento por el hecho de que la humanidad parece dividida por cuestiones políticas de escasa trascendencia si se les compara con una catástrofe medioambiental que todos pueden ver venir pero que nadie tiene la voluntad de enfrentar.

Es fácil hablar de esta novela ya que las intenciones de su autor quedan muy claras hasta el punto de que pasajes del libro parecen en realidad un ensayo sobre la frivolidad con la que asumimos nuestras posturas y de cómo estas hablan de nuestro sentido de comunidad más que de nuestras auténticas creencias. En ese sentido es un libro muy bueno y varias partes me hicieron sentirme muy identificado con el protagonista y sus constantes dudas y carencias de todo tipo. Por ese motivo me parece frustrante que el libro se sienta tan "incompleto", como si sólo fuera el abreboca de una historia que no llega a desarrollarse del todo ya que nada de lo que ocurre aquí tiene un auténtico desenlace: ni la historia de amor entre los protagonistas, ni la formación de los dos grupos neo-fascistas (cada uno de un lado de la palestra política) ni mucho menos la parte ambientada en el futuro. De hecho, llegado un momento el libro simplemente terminó, hecho que me desconcertó por completo. Siento que Beckett está intentando decir algo con ese final tan abrupto y anticlimático, pero a falta de saber exactamente qué es, para mí se ha sentido como un bajón producto de un libro muy bien escrito con unas ideas tremendas pero que no se desarrolla de una manera que pueda decir satisfactoria.

[Louise O' Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I was given an Advanced Reader Copy of Two Tribes via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. See below:

This book was, in brief: disappointing. The concept, at first glance, seemed interesting; a retroactive look at Brexit from a post apocalyptic wasteland? Yes, please! The reality was far less interesting.

Above all the novel appeared a thinly veiled, self-indulgent excuse to discuss at length the two sides of the Brexit debate. It was patronising in its efforts to capture the working class, did very little to develop the narrator’s character, wasted its opportunity to discuss the dystopian society by creating disparate imagery and the author appears to have frequently forgotten the means by which they were telling the story (a historian mixing diary entries with some clearly fictionalised elements and others not very clear elements).

I picked up this book some time ago and put it down. I’ll be honest in saying I wish I hadn’t picked it back up again. It was frustrating to see an author toy with these fascinating concepts only to muddle them into a book which never managed to flesh them out. It was frustrating to see the author flit between periods of weighty, literary descriptors to clunky exposition. And it was frustrating to read passages which seemed self-conscious only to then see a rather arrogant, condescending section on a niche topic further down (I appreciate a well-researched book, but don’t want an explainer on constitutions, thanks.).

The ending was not only ambiguous, but rather pointless. Whether the narrator or the subject of the narrator was successful in their respective relationships was honestly not that tantalising a topic as the author seems to have imagined it.

All in all, a disappointment for sure. Hopefully this author’s Brexit fever will abate so they can return to business as usual and better writing as a result.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was presumably written in 2019, when Brexit was still raw for a lot of people in the UK. It's a schematic sociological musing disguised as a novel, exploring the "two tribes" which were - if all you read is Twitter - sitting in the UK in that era; it predicts a civil war coming of their enmity. Reading it just 3 and a half years after it was published, it's amazing how quaint and dated it all feels - most people on Twitter have moved on to new battles - the pandemic and lockdowns, BLM, gender identity, Israel/Gaza - some of which share similar demographic outlines as the Leave/Remain "tribes" but not entirely.

I've read Beckett's short stories, which I enjoyed, but for the most part I thought this was embarrassingly bad. He's not invented characters but rather, like the sociologist he is, used board social demographics and opinion-poll reasoning to construct his cardboard cut-out exemplars. His dialogue is awful - his characters only speak about politics - and his plotting is (to put it kindly) clumsy and lazy. He seems to know the latter, as in the thinly developed post-apocalyptic chapters, he has the narrator discussing some of the narrative choices with a friend, as if he's wrestling with how he can get away with inventing characters who are merely mouthpieces.

There are one or two good, small ideas - Facebook being used as a historical archive - and some of the satire on the contemporary classes is pointed at times. But it's not enough to make a novel out of what are a set of deeply stereotypical observations. His biggest omission - no doubt down to his own class and social box - is that he does not see religion as being a player in shaping the future conflicts and solutions. He should have turned this into a couple of blog posts, as it's really a wretched example of creative fiction.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 ...

[Richard Kettlewood · Rating 5 out of 5]

RA

Having followed every rhetorical aspect of the acrimonious brexit debacle I found the theme of this tale enjoyable and satisfying. It might seem absurd and insignificant in a post civil war climate ravaged nation to reflect back on the brexit period. But it's the historian's job to look at all minutia. And brexit is a good historical pivot that has lead to divisions and massive consequences we've yet to experience; setting the 'elitist' middle class brain against working class emotion. Breaking the aspiration of international consensus and cooperation in the face of the world's intractable problems. The 'class war' and tribal myopia was well done. Any first generation working class person who's been to university will identify with the uncomfortableness of social identification if they have the 'wrong' accent. And why shouldn't future historians take a Hilary Mantel perspective on the past? Societal entropy was very much at the fore in this fantastic book: however sophisticated and elaborate our ideas and edifices, they'll all come to strife and ruin. At times the book was profound: we are all constructs of memory and very incomplete knowledge, barely understanding anyone or anything, despite our prejudices and certainties. There were moments of good nature writing too, like Michelle's woodland clearing, showing nature is the true reality.

[Horia Ursu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had only read (and liked) some stories and the novel The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett, when I came across a review of Two Tribes and, in the current times of turmoil, it seemed like appropriate reading. And indeed it was.
I am familiar with Brexit only as an outsider, from what I read and seen on the news. But Chris Beckett managed to convey the sense of being there and living through it.
My problem with this book was that, while well written and very much thought provoking, the fact that it was written from the POV of a person from a bleak future, instead of giving it a semblance of objectivity, it just managed to complicate unnecessarily the structure of the novel. Harry and Michelle's story would have been sufficient on its own.
One more thing: Harry, who comes across as the protagonist of this „historic” book within the book, is too conflicted for his own good and, because of this, while illustrating the ambiguity of a contemporary character, he comes across as annoying and sometimes quite dumb.
In short: read this book if you want to get an inside view of a historic event, told in agreable but overcomplicated prose, with a lot of questions and less answers.

[Joseph Carr · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not his best but there are some things I really, really liked: some of the class and social critique felt very real and well observed. A climate disaster as an assumed backdrop made loads of sense.

However, whilst ambitious, the structure of the book, with parts of the 'historical novel' being interrupted by the 'future author' didn't quite work - it didn't really make sense that the 'future author' could be so precise and correct about the world and personalities of the late 2010s, notwithstanding the social media records. The diaries she relied upon really would have had to have extraordinary clarity and self-reflection in terms of explaining the main characters' thoughts and reactions.

In addition, some of the social critiques felt like rather naked rants by the author and sometimes the dialogue felt stick thin, particularly when some of the characters, who were too obviously cyphers, were explaining their political views.

That said overall I enjoyed it and found great moments of tension and I enjoyed the direct challenges to some of the mire pervasive thinking.

[Wendy Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Tribes - Chris Beckett - Dec 20 very good
Its written as if a historian in a couple of hundred years has got some diaries that tell an interlocking relationship between 2 people from different classes and topically on either side of Brexit. We know there's been wars and catastrophic climate change. The remainer character who is the middle class intellectual starts to question the assumed superior attitude of his lot toward the leavers and that made me think reflect on how I act. There were some lovely bits that stuck with me; the historian explains mass holiday flights and single occupancy journeys in gas guzzling cars as things we did knowing full well the impact but choosing to ignore it & kick the can down the road. I picked it to try something different and was pleasantly surprised.

[Sally Hirst · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't work out if I liked this or not. I read it in two days flat mostly because of waiting around in hospitals. I'm not sure I'd have gone through it entire or even gone through it at such speed otherwise and yet, I find what he is trying to articulate important (hence the stars). I'm just not sure how well he has managed to articulate it. The main characters are both deeply ordinary in their own way, but they are embedded in deeply different social groups and the painful and inarticulate honesty of the middle class chap almost makes the relationship work. But that tension between being with someone you are content with in many ways, yet bumping up against situations or people that make that relationship less comfortable on either side is an interesting one. Maybe I should read it again when I am less distracted.

[Leanne Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly good read! Drawing on the fallout of the 2016 referendum and the arguments for both Leave and Remain, Two Tribes examines the differences within the social hierarchy and the deep divide in the social system, the influences that shape our view of self and others and the inevitably of unforeseen consequences The novel follows Cally and Zoe, 250 years from now, whose job is to record the historical map of society. Through the 250 years old diaries of Michelle and Harry, the future historians weave an imagined and fictionalised unfolding of their developing relationship and their diametrically opposed views of the class system.

[Roger Whitson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The set-up of Beckett's novel, a history of Brexit told from the perspective of the 23rd century, is brilliant. I was less enthusiastic with the way Beckett told what was essentially a story about class without mentioning race very much. There are one or two discussions of racist ideas held by some of the Leavers, but those are explained by what boils down to a feeling of alienation. I don't disagree with that feeling regarding Leavers (or the so-called rust belt that contributed to Trump's election), but it seems an insufficient explanation of the difficulties of our time in an ill-begotten attempt to rescue a middle that never really existed.

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a clever look at the differences over the Brexit question and how they split the country. By setting this in a distant future the prep is a clear sense that the damage done to the country is less about the impact of Brexit itself and more about the fractures in society that the vote caused, hence the two tribes of the title. Of course nothing is simple and it could be read that the two tribes are the haves and the have nots who still exist in the as they do now. Although an interesting take on Brexit I found this ultimately disappointing as other significant and more far reaching changes were skimmed over. I was left feeling that I just didn’t want to read no more about Brexit.

[A J HOOPER · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I wrote a brilliant review that managed to totally disappear. So, to reiterate, this is the Brexit argument analysed as a sociological study, pointing up the influences of class and culture. Threaded through it is the love story of Harry and Michelle, all of it examined by researchers from a couple of hundred years in the future. And it's a future where London has been demolished by Chinese invaders who have now retreated leaving behind swathes of the population living in rubble. Possibly not such a brilliant review second time around but at least I bothered to re-hack it.