| Ghosts in our machines: Fiction from a century of hi-tech life – and death
Everything changes,” sighed that great ironist, the French poet Paul Valéry, “except the avant-garde”. In Britain, we are nearing the notional centenary of an avant-garde moment at which modern life – or so its artistic cheerleaders supposed – made a nonsense in all its velocity, complexity and relativity of the old ways of depicting it. Speaking in 1924 about new means of portraying people in the novel, Virginia Woolf memorably announced that “On or about December 1910, human character changed”. The seemingly solid, in-depth, full-dress portraits of Victorian fiction and its inheritors told lies. On this view, the 20th-century personality demanded from its fictional investigators something more like an expressionist colour-field – or even a cubist collage.
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