BY ED CHURCH (JANUARY 2025) If the past is “a foreign country”, as L.P. Hartley once wrote, then the advent of mobile phones is its hard border. I’m always glad I got 25 years on the pre-mobile side of that dividing line. Glad I got to experience things like school, university, and travel, before we all became tethered – for better or for worse – to that little device in our pockets. Yes, communication was trickier, but the world felt far bigger, way more of an adventure, and human connections more meaningful.
Bear with me, there’s a point to all this.
But first a snapshot of the old world. Sweden… Mid-90s… A younger version of me (with hair!) working as a bouncer in Uppsala… To call my parents, back in Birmingham, I would walk a few hundred yards from the basement room I rented, kick away the snow beneath a phone booth, huddle into the canopy, and dial a sixteen-digit number. The digits were unrelated to my parents’ actual phone number – some kind of British Telecom travel card – but I still remember them. Just as I remember the excitement whenever a handwritten letter landed in the cage outside my door. Sometimes I would wait until I was settled in a café before reading it, and always more than once.
The very fact communication was harder meant it had a totally different value compared to the throwaway convenience of modern comms. A different feeling. And, when it comes to storytelling, there are significant consequences to that cultural shift. Not least in the dilution of the “farewell” moment.
Imagine, for example, the ending to Casablanca taking place amid modern tech. Humphrey Bogart persuading Ingrid Bergman to board the plane and leave him behind or she would regret it: “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life… Oh, and I’ll text you the Zoom details so we can have a proper catch-up any time. Okay, see ya.”
Ugh. The scene falls apart.
Or how about Birdsong? Sebastian Faulks’ epic WW1 tale of heartache, longing, and fragile hope. Give Stephen and Catherine a couple of smartphones to ping WhatsApp messages to each other and all the emotional gravitas evaporates.
It was actually something far more recent that got me thinking about the great mobile phone divide in stories: the ending to Crocodile Dundee, of all things. I saw it on TV for the first time in years and, for all the 1980s cheesiness, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in it as Sue sprints through New York to stop Mick catching the subway out of town – her shouted messages, culminating in “I love you”, eventually relayed along the platform by a bunch of strangers. As crowd-pleasers go, it’s right up there.
The things is, all the drama of that situation stems from the fact Sue is about to lose contact with Mick (he has told the hotel porter he’s thinking of “going bush” around America). So, in the world of 1986, Sue has to catch him before he gets that train. Give the characters mobile phones and email addresses, and, wham, suddenly there’s no peril whatsoever.
Of course, the scenes and storylines that would flounder in the modern world are not confined to romance. The vast majority of detective / mystery novels are firmly locked into their time period. As for modern writers who want to keep “old school” detective work alive, you’ve probably noticed how often the CCTV wasn’t working, the phone battery was dead etc. That’s not a criticism – I use those tricks myself. But, as time goes by, it’s going to get ever harder to pull off without the reader rolling their eyes at the sleight of hand.
(Heck, even the world’s most famous cellphone refusenik, Jack Reacher, is struggling to stave off the 21st century. In his last outing, the big guy seemed to be using a phone all the time. He was just, technically, borrowing it from his sidekick).
Back when I was pitching Non-Suspicious to literary agents, the one who showed most interest said they liked my writing, but that people were growing tired of World War 2 stuff so I should write a different book. Naturally, I disagreed – which is why Non-Suspicious exists and I have no agent – and I’m still convinced the level of interest in that era, and historical fiction more broadly, shows no sign of waning.
One reason, I realise now, is that there are myriad plots that simply can’t work in an age of instant communication. So much so, I wonder if the turn of the millennium will come to be seen as a kind of dam in the history of storytelling, a disproportionate number of narratives building up on the tech-free side of it.
Then there’s the fact that, far from the past happening in black-and-white, there is a vivid definition to human interactions before mobile phones blurred the edges. An in-the-moment clarity and consequence to encounters.
And maybe a final factor – the more our lives become stress-loaded with technology, the greater the appeal of stories where it is all stripped away.
The full opening line to L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Written in 1953, it is remarkable how relevant it feels today. There is, however, one element I might take issue with in 2025, and perhaps I am not alone.
Increasingly, it is the present that feels like a foreign country.
The past feels like home.