The death of the novel

Charles II apologised for being ‘an unconscionable time a-dying’, and, if it could speak, the novel might do the same. Its death has been so often decreed. More than sixty years ago J B Priestley called it ‘a decaying literary form’ which ‘no longer absorbs some of the mightiest energies of our time’. Does this mean that in continuing to try to write novels one is either a decadent, or engaged in energetically flogging a dead horse? Should the novelist apply to himself these lines from one of Pound’s ‘Cantos’: ‘Yuan Yin sat by the roadside pretending to receive wisdom/ And Kung said/ “You old fool, come out of it,/ Get up and do something useful”.’

One of the curious things is, however, that it is often novelists themselves, Gore Vidal a prime example, who pronounce the death of the craft they practise. This, in their eyes, may of course be less a condemnation of the form itself than of contemporary society.