Asked to explain “Why the novel matters”, my first question is: “Well, does it?” As soon as I typed that sentence, I then thought that the second logical question would probably have to be “Has it?” But, after typing that, I opened my browser and went to look at the news because I was a little concerned that tanks might be rolling down the Mall in order to disperse pro-democracy protesters. After all, it was 10 September and the night before Boris Johnson had prorogued parliament – illegally as it later turned out – so I, along with plenty of others, was feeling rather like the chair had just been kicked out from under the feet of this country’s democracy. I feared, because this had been allowed to happen, we were on the way to a future in which anything might become possible. I have certainly read enough Thomas Mann, Milan Kundera, Agota Kristof, Solzhenitsyn and Margaret Atwood to know that the trajectory of anti-democratic leaders who manage to shoulder their way into the seat of democratic power is rarely upwards.
In my moment of media-mediated and media-medicated fright, it didn’t occur to me to reach for my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or The Handmaid’s Tale or Doctor Faustus rather than the flashing screen and the – necessarily somewhat undigested – prose produced by journalists in the rolling 24-hour news cycle. Without the distraction of the news feeds, I fear my brain will fill up with imagery that frightens me and leaves no space for the words and stories I have spent my life surrounded by.
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