On a wet Sunday afternoon at boarding school time seems to pass slowly. Today a week passes more quickly. This is because aged eight a single afternoon takes up as much memory space as a month now that my memory has become chocker.
Creators of books, plays and films can play ducks and drakes with time. Actually it’s more noticeable when they don’t. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf takes place in real time – over the course of a dinner party. The set included a working clock the only time I have seen it.
Othello has a double time-scheme. Most of the action takes place over the course of a single day in Cyprus but there are exchanges of messages with Venice that would have taken days by ship. Martin Amis pushed his luck with Time’s Arrow in which time goes backwards: reverse chronology.
Flashback is a ”narrative technique of interrupting the chronological sequence of events to interject events of earlier occurrence. The earlier events often take the form of reminiscence. The flashback technique is as old as Western literature. In the Odyssey, most of the adventures that befell Odysseus on his journey home from Troy are told in flashback by Odysseus when he is at the court of the Phaeacians.
The use of flashback enables the author to start the story from a point of high interest and to avoid the monotony of chronological exposition. It also keeps the story in the objective, dramatic present.” (britannia.com)
The Famous Five is a series of twenty-one novels written by Enid Blyton between 1942 and 1963. It has a floating timeline.
“The seemingly perpetual youth of the Famous Five, who experience a world of apparently endless holidays while not ageing significantly, is known as a floating timeline. Floating timelines allow for an episodic series with no defined end-point, but at the expense of losing a sense of the characters growing up. J. K. Rowling commented of her Harry Potter series that she deliberately intended to avoid this in her writing: “in book four the hormones are going to kick in – I don’t want him stuck in a state of permanent pre-pubescence like poor Julian in the Famous Five!”“ (Wikipedia)
The famous five are also five trees in Kensington Gardens. They are a double flowered variant of Horse Chestnut, meaning they have no conkers as all double flowered trees are sterile. They are about 150 years old but I never noticed them until yesterday. They live in real time.