TOMORROW'S WORLD

 

THE England of 'Bill Invisible' is perhaps thirty or forty years from now; the date or decade is not specified, but there are a few pointers dotted throughout the story. A King is on the throne, but his title remains unrevealed. At one point, Queen Elizabeth II is referred to as 'the grandmother of our current king', so we can take it the country has either a William or a Harry as sovereign. References are also made by a middle-aged character to riots that took place during her youth, which perhaps suggests civil unrest of a recent vintage. Also, Freebie (who is in his 50s) says his father was a journalist ruined by the phone-hacking scandal.

  

We do know that the retirement age is now 75 - presumably a result of a growing populace living longer than their ancestors. We also know the UK is no longer in the EU. The police force has been privatised and the police now use 'drones' to sniff-out criminals evading the law. Artistic radicalism, mainly in the field of popular culture, is very much a thing of the past; the Government's Cultural Taskforce is an elite cartel working in tandem with the media to keep pop culture sterile and therefore controllable. There are no longer physical newspapers, and most online news outlets have dispensed with journalists in favour of broadcasting the unpaid viewpoints of their readers; mobile phones are now called micros and the most popular technological toy is the Cube. Cigarettes are illegal and anyone under eighteen is no longer allowed to be served in burger-bars. Crime rates and unemployment are low and politics are now the exclusive province of public school-educated career politicians who have never inhabited the world as known to the majority of the electorate. Some things, at least, never change.

TOWN AND COUNTRY

THE division between town and country is even more pronounced in the England of 'Bill Invisible' than it is today. Cities are overpopulated and overstretched, even though most of the major metropolitan monsters have swallowed up surrounding towns and have, in the process, become mega-cities - in theory freeing-up more valuable land for their inhabitants, but in practice enabling more of them to be crammed into every available space; each big city in England now has the 'Greater' prefix attached to it.

   One reason why the urban environment is so tightly-packed is due to a constant influx of rural refugees, forced out of their green and pleasant homeland as wealthy urbanites buy up countryside properties for use as holiday homes. However, the exodus of natives, coupled with the fact that holiday home-owners only occupy their rural retreats during the summer months, has left most picturesque hamlets as virtual ghost-villages for the rest of the year.

TOMORROW'S LINGO

KNOWING 'Bill Invisible' would be set in an unspecified future, one conundrum that faced me was what to do about slang. Whilst some words survive for decades, others remain fixed in the moment and invariably age once the moment has passed. I surmised a teenage character such as Holly would no more speak in the sub-Jamaican patois of today's adolescents than a teenager of 2013 would infect their dialogue with phrases such as 'far out' or 'groovy'. But as she was the only representative of her age group within the story, it didn't make sense to me to go to the trouble of inventing an entire 'Nadsat' for her alone. Therefore, I hit upon the quirky idea of giving her the vocal rhythms of a 19th century Cornishwoman, influenced perhaps by Demelza in 'Poldark'. Who's to say tomorrow's teenagers won't adopt another unlikely lingo?

   As for more general words that are common parlance - specifically insults - I realised I'd have to come up with dozens of replacements for the likes of 'dickhead', 'knobhead' and so on. To spare myself endless hours concocting them, I figured it'd be more interesting to plunder the past and revive insults that haven't been used in living memory, and where better to look than in Samuel Johnson's dictionary? To be honest, the variety of linguistic riches on offer left me spoilt for choice, but their insertion into the dialogue served to give the world inhabited by the characters a unique identity. The words themselves sounded recognisably English, yet were unfamiliar at the same time, and their inclusion worked. Some examples...

Bedpresser (A heavy lazy fellow); Bellygod (A glutton; one who makes a God of his belly); Belswagger (Whoremaster); Buffleheaded (A man with a large head - like a buffalo; dull; stupid; foolish); Clotpoll (Thickskull; blockhead); Dizzard (A blockhead; a fool); Draffy (Worthless; dreggy); Fopdoodle (A fool; an insignificant wretch); Fren (A worthless woman); Furcifer (Latin for rascal or someone bound for the gallows); Jack-pudding (A buffoon); Jobbernowl (Loggerhead; blockhead); Nidget (A coward; a dastard); Ninnyhammer (A simpleton); Pundle (A short and fat woman).

   So enraptured did I become by words so wonderfully vivid that their disappearance from the English language left me baffled, it was inevitable others would creep into the narrative...

To balbucinate (To stammer in speaking); Blatteration (Noise; senseless roar); Bombycinous (Silken; made of silk); Feculent (Foul; dreggy); To illaqueate (To entangle; to entrap; to ensnare); To impinguate (To fatten; to make fat); Jiggumbob (A trinket; a nick-nack); Orgillous (Proud; haughty); Spindleshanked (Having small legs).

   There are many more in the text, all of which help lift the narrative out of the modern day and place it somewhere that almost feels like our own world, but not quite. And that's the point!

GIDEON'S GOVERNMENT

IT would be dishonest of me to deny the influence of contemporary politics on the administration of Gideon Buggerman. Certainly, the Prime Minister himself, sharing a Christian name with Mr Osborne and a surname that rhymes with Cameron, could be interpreted as a caricature of our loathsome leader or an amalgam of the unholy trinity of Cameron, Osborne and Duncan-Smith. The fact that the character of Jack Ketch shares the generic name given to 18th century hangmen is, of course, no accident; the arrogant, self-serving Ketch embodies Tory policy at its most callous and contemptuous, whereas Buggerman, with his chief concern being whether or not he is perceived favourably by the public, represents the more ideologically shallow end of the modern political spectrum. Together, Buggerman and Ketch make the ideal double act to run such an administration, the good cop/bad cop twosome - one the ultimate exponent of all style-no substance PR, the other gleefully wielding the axe with no need to make concessions to appease the electorate.

THE COMMUNITY ENTERPRISE CENTRE

Yesterday's social solution transplanted to tomorrow

'To call these institutions twenty-first century workhouses in all-but name is an insult to the years of care and consideration that have been devoted to the project and reveals nothing but the ignorance and prejudice of those who would rather we sweep this country's social ills under the carpet and hope they go away. We have taken the courageous step of being prepared to actually tackle these ills head-on, unlike our predecessors in government; and we have left no stone unturned in our tireless quest to improve the lives of the less fortunate.'

So goes the official line, pedalled by Gideon Buggerman's Government and promoted by its powerful media allies. Dissenting voices are firmly in the wilderness; the Community Enterprise Centres are removing what the British people have been educated into believing are idle scroungers from the public landscape and hiding them away behind self-contained citadels within every major city. The groundwork to neutralise liberal opposition was laid many years before; by the time Buggerman came to power, the climate was right to reintroduce what would have been unthinkable throughout most of the previous century - purpose-built buildings designed to contain the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged. Workhouses, the disgraced and discredited social policy emblems of less enlightened times, were ready for a revival, a twenty-first century makeover that the majority of the British people were no longer resistant to. Decades of a propaganda campaign portraying the needy as undeserving of sympathy had ground down resistance and the CECs were applauded as a positive step. If the Government could get away with this, then they could get away with anything...

FOLKLORE

As if in deliberate stark contrast with the soulless modernity and mediocrity of urban Britain in 'Bill Invisible', when Bill and Holly relocate to the abandoned rural landscape of England they immediately sense a different kind of country, one that is both strange and strangely familiar, even if they lack the first-hand experience that can put it into any recognisable context. On one memorable occasion, Holly enters a dreamlike realm in which she encounters Robin Hood, King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Tom Thumb, and the horrific half-man/half-fox figure of olde English folklore, Reynardine. The notion that the arcane Albion of legend lurks beneath the technological surface of 21st century Britain is one that eventually draws the characters to Stonehenge, the beating heart of the ancient nation. It is this element of the adventure that serves to widen the scope of the story and take a deeper detour into what makes England what it is.

WULFRIDA THREADNEEDLE
'Mother figure' at the countryside camp Bill, Holly and Bullock are welcomed into

WULFRIDA is another character for whom the city had no place. Joining a community of like-minds in rural exile, she followed their cue by taking a new name, one derived from England's discarded Saxon lineage and one that sealed her rebirth. Wulfrida's hippie spirit and eccentric individualism immediately appeal to Bill and Holly, who had come to imagine they were amongst a tiny handful of disaffected urbanites averse to the style that has suppressed substance in the great metropolis. In Wulfrida they find a kind maternal figure who had once been a fully paid-up member of the Rat Race, working for a big city bank merely because she'd never been made aware she could do anything else; when she heard the distant rhythm of the 'real' England calling her and abandoned the material trappings of a society she had no idea made her miserable until she escaped it, Wulfrida felt she had finally connected with the person she was supposed to have been all along.

  As for the image of the character, the early 70s incarnation of actress Sarah Miles kept popping up, all flowing curls and floppy hats, embodied as the exotic aunt we all wished we'd had.

ICARUS WASP

Spin-doctor to Gideon Buggerman, British Prime Minister

ICARUS WASP I constantly saw as the late actor Ian Richardson, though strangely enough, not in his most celebrated role as Machiavellian Tory politician Francis Urquhart in House of Cards, but as devious double agent Bill Haydon in the earlier BBC drama, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

   If a character in a work of fiction isn't based upon someone I've known personally, then I often envisage them as an actor in a dream dramatisation of my story - albeit usually an unfortunately deceased thespian! The number of times I've thought - 'This part was made for Margaret Rutherford' or 'Alastair Sim would have been great playing this character' - all to no avail. In the case of Wasp, I wanted him to be in possession of a certain energetic arrogance that made him a lively character to be in the company of, regardless of how most readers might find his opinions and politics somewhat objectionable. I couldn't get Richardson's performance as Bill Haydon out of my head as I wrote a description of Wasp in his introductory scene and found that from then on I couldn't see anybody else inhabiting Wasp's shoes.

   Even when Bill Haydon is exposed as the traitor by Smiley, it's still hard not to like the character, and I felt the same symptoms when putting words into the mouth of Icarus Wasp. No matter how vile the sentiments he expressed, I loved writing every line!