1980s

The 1980s is a temporal and cultural reference point in the novel: 15 July 1988 anchors an early scene, while later descriptions and arguments turn the decade into a shorthand for political conviction, formative education, and a particular social style. Its importance lies not in a broad survey of the period, but in the way characters remember, resist, and redefine what it means to have come from it.

Chronology and the 1988 starting point

The novel gives the decade a precise foothold with its opening calendar marker, Friday 15 July 1988, and the location Rankeillor Street in Edinburgh. In that scene, a woman says that the important thing is to make some kind of difference and actually change something. The statement sets an idealistic register for the beginning of the chronology: the 1980s enters not through an account of national events, but through an aspiration to act on the world close at hand.

That date is part of a wider pattern of July fifteenths used to observe lives changing over time. The next supplied date, Thursday 15 July 1993, places a later chapter in Brixton, Earls Court, and Oxfordshire; Monday 15 July 1996 takes the narrative to Leytonstone and Walthamstow. By 15 July 2005, the first anniversary of Emma Morley’s death is being marked in London and Oxfordshire. These later dates do not make the 1980s the novel’s only historical frame. Rather, they give 1988 the force of a starting point whose hopes and assumptions can be reconsidered as the characters enter new stages of adulthood.

The decade as an argument

The 1980s also becomes a point of dispute between Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. During a later dinner, Dexter tells Emma, “It’s not 1988, Em.” The remark is not merely a calendar correction: he uses the year to argue that she is continuing to fight battles whose terms, in his view, have changed. He distinguishes equality in pay, opportunity, and civil rights from the question of whether a woman may choose to display her body for tips. Emma objects to his framing, so the exchange exposes different ideas of what political commitment should mean in the present.

The disagreement is sharpened by the circumstances of the dinner. Dexter insists on paying, while Emma is uncomfortable with the setting and challenges the values he associates with it. His appeal to a new era thus sits alongside older tensions between them: how each understands feminism, personal choice, money, and the right to judge another person’s choices. The 1980s functions as the name Dexter gives to what he considers outdated resistance; Emma’s response makes clear that the past cannot be dismissed simply because he declares its battles over.

Style, class, and memory

A restaurant scene gives the decade a different kind of presence. Its interior imitates the romance of a luxury liner from the 1920s, with velvet booths, liveried waiters, and decorative portholes opening onto nothing. The lack of natural light makes it feel submarine, while noise from the open kitchen and the mingling of youth, sex, money, and deep-frying undercut the intended elegance. Emma reads the room as an arrival at the 1980s. The effect is deliberately mixed: a polished fantasy of luxury is crowded by commercial bustle, and the decade’s glamour appears as something staged rather than seamless.

That atmosphere resonates with the class tension surrounding the dinner. Emma worries about the expense, while Dexter treats the meal as his treat and leads her downstairs with a theatrical flourish. Later, his private reflections reveal his irritation with what he sees as her attachment to the politics and self-presentation of an earlier period. He remembers the “grim ideological gulag of a mid-Eighties education,” with its guilt and combative politics, as the background from which he has finally escaped into cocktails, cigarettes, and flirtation. His language presents pleasure as liberation, but also shows how sharply he wants to separate himself from the moral atmosphere he associates with his schooling.

Emma and Dexter therefore do not share a settled memory of the decade. The restaurant’s elaborate surfaces and their argument over its pleasures bring that difference into the same room: Dexter wants to enjoy what he sees as a more permissive present, while Emma’s questions make the social and political costs of that enjoyment visible. Neither the setting nor the year settles their disagreement. Instead, the 1980s becomes a flexible label each can use to interpret the other.

Narrative significance

The novel’s treatment of the 1980s depends on movement between a dated scene and retrospective references. The opening date fixes one moment in 1988, but the decade’s later appearances arrive through characters’ judgments rather than through a continuous historical account. A remembered education, a rebuke about changing times, and a restaurant Emma associates with the period give the same decade distinct emotional meanings: aspiration, ideological fatigue, and conspicuous modern pleasure.

This shifting use of the 1980s also makes the novel’s chronology consequential. The dates in 1993 and 1996 move the story beyond the initial moment; the 2005 anniversary scene places loss within a life measured across years. Against that longer span, 1988 remains both a specific point on the calendar and a reference that characters can invoke when they disagree about how much has changed. The decade matters because it supplies no single answer: its ideals can inspire action, become an object of resentment, or survive as questions that the present has not resolved.