“Office Space doesn’t have to be a documentary for all of us, Helen. What can I get you?” – Laura Clarke Walker, Coldharbour II: The Dead Land
Why Coldharbour is set in the Nineties and Noughties
It’s a fundamentally Gothic series, so shouldn’t it be set in the 1890s? Probably. But I’m a Millennial, so Nineties nostalgia hits particularly hard for me (a post all about that here) and if you look back at the earliest Gothic or Romantic stories, they were often set at a slight remove from our world, such as twenty years before or in another country.
Also, nostalgia is just fun. It adds an extra richness to the atmosphere that a truly contemporary novel can’t achieve (in my opinion) – and it can’t become dated. In fact, some readers have called the first Coldharbour ‘timeless’, which seems ironic, but actually, it kind of makes sense.
Finally, the overarching story would struggle logistically if everyone had a smartphone and social media. Most of the Coldharbour books have a mystery and being able to just Google something would wreck a lot of the dramatic tension. Which means we see a lot of people go to a lot of libraries to use the dial-up internet and no, they’re not immediately contactable or accessible – this is a world of phone boxes and pagers.
A Recap: Y2K and Tamagotchis
So what was 1999 like? Well, politically, Clinton was President (and had just about survived impeachment) and Blair was still riding the high of his first term as Prime Minister. I was seven at the time, so I can remember Tamagotchis and Furbies being prolific.
The top films of the year still (mostly) stand up: we’ve got The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, The Matrix, Tarzan, The Mummy, Notting Hill, The World is Not Enough, American Beauty, and Austin Powers. In terms of TV, in the US, this was the year of The Sopranos, The West Wing, and Family Guy; here, we had the start of The League of Gentlemen, Bob the Builder, and The Naked Chef. Friends was still very much going strong too.
As for music, we’re talking about Britney, Backstreet Boys, and, well, Lou Bega. But we’ve also got Westlife and Destiny’s Child making moves, not to mention Whitney’s comeback (most of the singles from ‘My Love is Your Love’ came out in ’99).
And of course, we had the looming existential dread of…
The Millennium Dome.
Just kidding, I actually mean Y2K, when all the computers were going to turn against us Terminator-style.
But also, they’re bloody lucky they managed to repurpose the Dome as the O2 Arena.
Highlights (and Lowlights) of the Year 2000
What I’ve found fascinating about writing Coldharbour is just how much changed in the early Noughties, especially from year to year. So, what happened between October 1999 and Christmas 2000? Well, quite a few pivotal things in terms of society worldwide:
31 December 1999: Yeltsin resigns as President of Russia
1 January 2000: we survive entering a new Millennium
17 February: Windows 2000 is released
7 July: the draft assembly of the Human Genome Project is announced
14 July: Big Brother begins
1 September: the Nokia 3310 is released
31 October: the first resident crew are sent to the International Space Station
7 November: the US presidential election – no winner is declared (Bush vs Gore)
15 December: the final reactor at Chernobyl is shut down
22 December: Madonna marries Guy Ritchie
Coldharbour 2000
So, after a whole year, we’re returning to everyone’s favourite desolate seaside town – so what’s changed in Coldharbour?
Coldharbour was still a strange place:
That weird little mishmash of Victorian seaside town, mediaeval marshes, and ancient cobbles that had been marched on by Romans and Vikings and, as Alex had heard and had no reason not to believe, the Devil himself.
And it still didn’t have a Millennium Dome or an Eden Project.
Coldharbour II: The Dead Land is out now.
