First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

It’s easy when you know how. Here’s the technique—as demonstrated by Louis de Bernières’s forthcoming novel, A Partisan’s Daughter (which is set in the London of the 1970s, in case you have any trouble working it out).

Chapter one sets the scene:

…it was during the Winter of Discontent. The streets were heaped high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.

Chapter two clinches the culture:

The place was full of do-it-yourself revolutionaries, hippies, guys who played bass with imaginary bands, scarecrows, girls in ethnic skirts, amateur dope dealers, actors adrift, 1970s orphans with troubled minds and vague big ideas, all looking for the authentic life and wishing they were really in New York, hob-nobbing with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, or in Paris throwing cobblestones at the CRS.

And then just mix throughout a series of cunningly precise details that really nail the period:

I came by on the day that Airey Neave was killed by the IRA…

I’d just heard on my car radio that President Bhutto had been hanged in Pakistan…

The Ayatollah Khomeini was saying that there wasn’t going to be any democracy in Iran. Everyone was still on strike for preposterous wage rises, and the only good news was that Idi Amin had absconded…

The next time I saw Roza I was feeling uneasy because the Yorkshire Ripper had just killed another woman in Halifax…

Mrs Thatcher came to power, and everyone was wondering what was going to happen. I wasn’t sorry to see the end of Callaghan…

I was feeling a bit sad because I had just heard on the radio that John Wayne was dead…

“That’s the end of an era… Muhammad Ali packing it in. He’s retiring.”

I came back after Wimbledon fortnight. I remember feeling a bit sorry because Chris Evert had just been beaten by Martina Navratilova…

Instant historical atmosphere. It’s easy, really.