LP Davies 1972 Science Fiction thriller revisits Davies' intense obsession with lost identity, deception and small english country villages. Enter a world of chain smoking and gentle chauvinism where the recent past becomes the distant future.. One moment the privileged scion of a wealthy family in the pharmaceutical family deciding on his future, the next moment inexplicably a prematurely aged, poverty struck clerk working for his families' arch enemy, The Solmex Corporation: Howell Trowman battles invisible enemies and his own unreliable pysche to try and unravel the mystery of his own compromised identity.
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About the Author
Leslie Purnell Davies (20 October 1914 - 6 January 1988) was a British novelist whose works typically combine elements of horror, science fiction and mystery. He also wrote many short stories under several pseudonyms. Davies' books deal with the defects, evolution or manipulation of human consciousness, and in some ways are comparable to the works of Philip K. Dick. (The premise of The Artificial Man certainly bears some resemblance to that of Dick's Time Out of Joint.) His protagonists frequently suffer from amnesia or other loss of identity, and their quest to find out who they really are drives the plot. Davies' novel The Alien (1968) was very freely adapted into the 1972 film The Groundstar Conspiracy, starring George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin. Davies worked as a pharmacist, postmaster, optometrist and gift shop owner, and served in the British Army Medical Corps in France, Italy and North Africa. A critical essay on Davies' novels can be found in S. T. Joshi's The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004).
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Blood. On his clothes, on his hands. Blood everywhere.",
By Mark Louis Baumgart (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: What did I do tomorrow? (Hardcover)
Seventeen-year-old Harry Trowman wakes and goes outside and strolls about the palisade of Buddleigh Hall School and reminiscences about when he was first sent there, this will be important later on. While he is doing so he meets schoolmates Martin Debroy and Andy Brett and they discuss their futures after graduation. Harry is trying to decide whether or not to go into the family business or go on to universe. Later he goes back to his room and as he sits in a chair, the present suddenly morphs into the future and he finds that instead of sitting in his room, he is now sitting in somebody's office. He panics and leaves through a window, and finds that he has somehow traveled five years into the future, and he has no memory or idea of what has happened in the last five years.
Let's give Davies some credit, he doesn't have Harry go into denial and spend pages going "Oh my God! This can't be happening!". No, Harry goes into survival mode and as he searches through his pockets he finds an address, he travels there and he finds Christine "Tina" Martin. While he doesn't remember her, she remembers him, as she met him at a party the night before. At first she is skeptical of Harry's story of being transported five years into the future, and that he is now occupying the body of his future self. But, as the novel progresses, and Tina partners up with him to find out what has happened to Harry, the more convinced she becomes that there might be something to his story after all. As they investigate the last five years of his life, they find out that he has done SOMETHING, what they don't know, that has caused Harry to be excommunicated from his family, and family business, that has caused him to be now an employee at his father's rival business, and to be a suspect in the murder of his friend and flatmate. As they investigate they find that Harry's presence has a strange and hostile effect on people, that a mysterious doctor is after him, his very own mother has relocated and will not reveal her new location to anybody, INCLUDING Harry, and suddenly somebody is trying to kill him. L. P. Davies is a forgotten writer now, even though at least two of his novels have been filmed. All of his books explore the slippery barriers that exist between reality, unreality, and surrealism, and "What Did I Do Tomorrow?" is no different. Most of his novels, if not all of them, are essentially science fiction novels that are marketed as suspense. They mostly all start off the same as somebody starts figuring out that he is not who he thinks he is; in the few that I have read ("Pychogeist", "The Artificial Man"), it is usually an average guy who gradually finds out that he is some form of alien being. In this novel the formula starts off the same, as Harry has to find out who and what he is, and "What Did I Do Tomorrow?" will eventually come across as borderline science fiction. He also has the tendency to come across as a British Phil Dick, only with Davies' books set in the present instead of the future or some alternative reality. "What Did I Do Tomorrow?" is a short, and quick moving working class novel. All of the characters are just average working class people struggling to get by. While some of the writing here is a bit clunky, Davies tells his story here mostly in dialogue, a trick that Dean Koontz did later in many of his novels (go read "The Vision" for instance). By doing so, Davies can explore a character not just through the way that they act, but also though the way that they speak, this novel filled with commonly used British slang and colloquialisms. This style of writing also allows a reader to more easily read Davies' novel, as it's often like listening to people having an interesting conversation. Another interesting thing is that to keep the story moving, and to give "What Did I Do Tomorrow?" a more urgent feel, the novel is told over the space of only two or three days. Many British novels have a stiff and formal tone to their prose, here, as Davies is reaching out to the common person, and by using a lot dialogue, the novel has a smoother more accessible feel to it. A negative is the novel's abrupt ending, as the mystery is solved and explained, and then the novel just ends, just like that, even though some things are never resolved. I mean, what's going to happen to the budding romance of Harry and Tina? Another good Davies suspense novel with strong possible science fiction elements, and the American hardback has a good cover illustration by Emanuel Schongut.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Time travel or Insanity?,
One second, this guy is 17 years old and it is 1969 then the VERY NEXT second it is 1974. The guy is very afraid, did he fall into a time-warp or is he going crazy? He sets out to find out. A fun book.
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