When is something out of date? by Elizabeth Kay
Times change far more quickly than they did in the past. Honest.
It’s not just my age, although it does seem as though only yesterday that we
had mobile phones the size of bricks. If you’re writing children’s fiction, the
vocabulary mutates with an alarming rapidity, and the technology does too.
Unless you’ve opted for the safe haven of fantasy or historical fiction,
yesterday’s electronic device is as extinct as a plesiosaurus. This applies to
adult fiction as well, of course. What self-respecting criminal wouldn’t use a
drone, or a burner phone? What detective would ignore social media or digital
photography? What police force wouldn’t employ the cast of Silent Witness? Oh, hang on, that’s fiction. Real forensic science
is ahead of that, and it’s as well to keep some of it secret. Terrorists are
well aware that you need double pairs of gloves these days, and murderers know you
need to keep your DNA about your person rather than scattered around the crime
scene.
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I think
something feels dated when it appears to be set in the present (especially if
it’s written in the present tense) but feels wrong. Current preoccupations are
not those of thirty years ago. Everything has become more extreme, led by what
we watch on television, what we play on the computer, and what we see on social
media. There is a lot more violence. And I mean a lot. Thirty years ago we were all agonising about how much sex we
should see, and whether gay scenes were quite the thing. No one bats an eyelid
these days – and sex seems to be a declining interest. It just can’t compete
with social media, which requires far less physical effort. Violence, on the
other hand, has become far more inventive and cruel and frequently very
graphic. I tend to switch off.
…We
humans deal with investments here. Buying and selling really modern works of art,
and making a tidy profit in the process. We’ve got quite a few of the big names
– Tadeusz Twardowski, who paints with body fluids; Roland Spickett, the one who
uses microscopes and bacteria, and Donald Barnes. Donald Barnes was the really
big money-spinner with his series on toenail clippings, and the fact that he’d
died of a heart attack the previous week had made him worth considerably more.
Cranford Smith (my employer) always held back plenty of pieces in the warehouse
so that he could make a killing after a death. Sound economic sense, really…
I loaded up Toenail
Clipping number 43 with London Clay to see what it looked like. It was a
remarkably faithful portrayal, with the little twist at the end of the clipping
smeared with grey. The Third World ones have sold the best, with the one encrusted
with oil-soaked sand fetching a quarter of a million. ‘This tragic
reconstruction of human debris is a powerful comment on the sharp practice
employed by the shoe industry in under-developed countries’, was what one
leading newspaper had said, and although a rival paper had come back with‘Donald
ducks the issue’, the first observation stuck. Donald became known as an
extremely serious exponent of the New Organic School of painting, and his
prices rocketed.
I never quite knew how seriously Cranford viewed his work, however.
Sincerity wasn’t Cranford’s strongest suit, although he was very well regarded
by the critics and regularly appeared on Spot
The Forgery. He had all the right phrases on the tip of his tongue and
that’s half the battle, isn’t it, whatever field you’re in.
And that’s the problem. The right phrases won’t be the right
phrases any more in twenty years’ time. And the technology will be the stuff of
science fiction!
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