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. Dangerous ground to venture on – it risks the application of Brecht’s ironic advice to the East German regime after the riots of 1953: that the Party should dissolve the ungrateful People and elect a new one.

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Priestley went on to declare that ‘we no longer want the Novel as our great-grandfathers did’. That judgement must be qualified. The appetite for fiction has not staled. The novel as entertainment flourishes. Airport bookstalls bear witness to this. Millions remain in thrall to fictionalised representations of daily life as offered by Coronation Street, Eastenders and The Archers. It would be astonishing if this wasn’t so. ‘Tell me a story’ is one of the oldest requests in the world. So, if the novel’s obituarists are right, what has gone wrong?

One explanation, often advanced, is that just as ‘the mightiest energies’ of an earlier time were diverted from the theatre to the novel, so the novel in its turn has been superseded by the film.