The novel as a form is a fundamentally capitalist enterprise. It was invented at the same time as capitalism – Robinson Crusoe tots up his situation in the form of double-entry bookkeeping. Its interests dwell on the disparate and unequal natures of human beings and feed off rivalry, social transformation, moneymaking, profit and loss. No rigid feudal society has managed to create an effective school of novelists; and having once struggled through Cement, Fyodor Gladkov’s classic of socialist Soviet literature, I would say that systems dedicated to forcible equality also struggle.
Evident, astonishingly, is just how much in the novels is based on events Fleming had witnessed or engineered
Novels thrive during periods of brutal inequality, such as late Victorian Britain, but also when thrown into violent opposition to societies attempting to restrict personal enterprise. One of the most extravagant moments of fiction’s flourishing in our country came about in this mood of opposition after the second world war.
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