It is not a question of ' what happened to novels?' but rather one of 'what has happened to the readers, or rather to the brains of readers?' The answer to that can largely be found in the writings of Maryanne Woolf in books such as Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins) and 'The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins). In a recent podcast to be found on The New York Times website she discusses the pleasure of 'deep reading ' and how that is compromised by 'skimming, scanning, scrolling' associated with smartphones and computers.
Personally, I am currently re-reading 'Middlemarch' and discovering the real pleasure of 'deep reading' in a long novel.
Mar 25, 2023·edited Mar 25, 2023Liked by The New Statesman
Listen rather than read. 35 years ago it was books on cassettes, then CDs. Now it’s Audible on my phone or Alexa. From Crime and Punishment on 35 cassettes whilst driving up and down the A1, to Dickens, Greene, Orwell and Shute whilst in the gym or my room
hands down, the best closing line of any story I’ve read:
Joyce’s The Dead: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Hi Will (and Harry) If you havn't read a novel in months then I'm going to have the brass neck to recommend MY novel, JADED JERUSALEM by Roger Cottrell, published recently, a retrospective crime thriller set during the 1984-85 miners strike, where the road to our current dystopia began. David Hencke, formerly of the Guardian, loves the book whose subtext alludes to the role of a Deep State pedophile ring in helping establish and maintain Margaret Thatcher in power. Part of the Cursed Albion trilogy, it aspires to expose the corrupt criminal underbelly of British politics, in the most corrupt country in Western Europe, through the lens of crime fiction, much as James Elroy did with the Underwold Trilogy in the US and there are obvious points of contact with Jake Arnott and David Peace. A former crime and investigative journalist I am now a film and TV script writer by profession and have already written a seven episode long form adaptation of the book. I was also inspired by an article by Julian Rathbone IN the New Statesman in 1998 to do a PhD on British Crime Fiction as a lens to social and political commentary. Your proposed discussion of Dickens sounds great. Currently module leader in Politics and Communication at University of Winchester, which looks at the corrupt relationship between media and political power in the UK and the failure of the UK Fourth Estate to hold power to account, I'd also love to write for The New Statesman. The links for my book (and David Hencke's review) are:
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. Novels teach you about life and let you escape from life. And the best of them put into beautiful and clever words things you’d maybe thought but not realised. The Economist teaches you stuff but doesn’t make you feel like that.
I used to fear I’d become like most men, even great novelists, and turn exclusively to nonfiction as I aged. But at 47 I love fiction now more than ever. It’s true I’ve given up reading new fiction. I think I got tricked one too many times by all those lying blurbs.
Well for myself, a day off ( or two ) and a good novel still reign supreme in my world of simple and relaxing pleasures . Nothing compares to fiction and getting lost in a good story and visualising all the characters and the settings . Using one’s imagination to create the scene surely is one of our greatest pleasures ?
What’s happened to all the novels ? I have oodles and oodles of them , on half a dozen book shelves ( my own private library) and in boxes that I just can’t bring myself to take to the charity shop .
Yes I’m a book hoarder ! I’ve every novel that I first ever read from childhood . I could simply not ever part with them ( even if I don’t re-read them ) they are of great comfort to me knowing they are there , like memories or landmarks of a certain place and time in my life . I do occasionally use audible, and have enjoyed the whole talking book thing when travelling . However I do still very much prefer the old school , tangibleness of a novel , the smell of an old book , or the inscription of it if it was a gift .
I've had two separate conversations about how wonderful fiction is in the last 24 hours - novels have so much to teach us about stories far from our own, they teach empathy, and are incredible insights into the human condition. And sometimes it's just nice to get lost in a narrative!
You may not know it but your weekly analysis is as good as that of the FT and the Economist. Alright you don’t do banking collapse or property funding but excellent in every way. Thank you.
I tend to favour non-fiction, but have been guided by friends to some excellent novels this year. My current read is Percival Everett’s ‘The Trees’, which I’m finding to be very good.
Mar 25, 2023·edited Mar 25, 2023Liked by The New Statesman
Author: you better check the hyperlink in your sentence: "I’ve read 100-page novels that changed my life (here’s ONE)". It correctly takes the reader to Albert Camus' book, but both the kindle version of the book on that site, and many of the reader comments below the Amazon blurb, refer to the book of the same name by Alexandre Puttick. I assume the book that changed your life was the one by Camus and not the shabby thriller. By the way, I read or listen to a novel, daily for a couple of hours at least, five or six days a week.
In my novel, Jaded Jerusalem, I try to open up aspects of the fall-out from the Brinks Mat robbery that are only touched upon in the later episodes of Neil Forsythe's The Gold. In 1993, in the same year that Bulic Forsythe was murdered in Clapham, the same cabal of corrupt cops who covered up Vishal Mehrota’s murder and set up the Brinks Mat robbery also undermined the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation. This, as we now know, was because Noye's nephew was one of the killers.
According to my trilogy, the same police cabal was also protecting Epstein's London operation by this time.
In other words, whether or not Noye’s county lines network was also recruiting, or grooming, vulnerable youngsters for the Deep State paedophile ring, he still owed his corrupt police associates heaps when he carried out the premeditated murder of Stephen Cameron in 1996. That this was later passed off as a “road rage” attack shows just how corrupt and irredeemably broken Britain’s criminal justice system is. Noye, who becomes Alex Wheelan in the story, was flown out of the country on Palmer's private plane and safe housed on Palmer's yacht in Tenerife. Here, and unbeknown to his police contacts, Wheelan tells the whole story on the Deep state paedophile operation. This then becomes part of the 500 hours of Palmer's taped interviews that Paul Blanchard indeed handed to his police protectors that have since been buried from public scrutiny.
As part of a trade-off, Wheelan is then instructed to set up the murder of a BBC Crimewatch journalist who has been investigating the paedophile ring and is about to expose Jimmy Savile himself. In fact, the Irish journalist Orla O’Regan, who is in many ways the second protagonist of the whole trilogy, is only partly based on Somerset born Jill Dando and I’m not going to tell you how the murder plot pans out. Unlike Orla, Jill Dando was not a hardcore investigator and had never worked on The Sun, although Simon Regan, who later exposed the Deep State paedophile ring in Scallywag magazine, did.
Again, unlike Orla, Jill Dando didn’t “moonlight” for Scallywag, while also working on Crimewatch, when its proprietor went to Northern Cyprus to court finance from Asir Nidal – late of Polly Peck. In real life, the proprietor of Scallywag was murdered in Northern Cyprus, in 1996, just as John Allen was sent down for life on paedophile charges in Wales, when William Haig was busy burying the Jillings Report and when an arson attack on a warehouse in Crewe destroyed much of the evidence pertinent to the case.
After Jill Dando was murdered in 1999 a local man with learning difficulties, Barry George, was framed for the murder. Although later acquitted, he was placed under a surveillance order and the police resolutely refused to pursue any other line of inquiry. The Met and the Home Office, as we have seen, have also blocked any effort by either Vishal Mehrota’s father or the Hampshire Constabulary to reopen that murder case or that of Bulic Forsythe, the black social worker murdered in Clapham in 1993.
Meanwhile, roughly one year after Jill Dando’s murder, Simon Regan also died suspiciously at his home in Weymouth. He had still been investigating the Deep State paedophile network and the murder in Northern Cyprus in 1996. As in the example of Bulic Forsythe, his landlord allowed unidentified officials to take away all his documents and records which then conveniently disappeared.
Hardly the self-styled Robin Hood figure that his fictional persona aspired to be, in Neil Forsythe’s admirable but flawed BBC narrative, Kenneth Noye was rewarded with a stretch for manslaughter for the very obvious premeditated murder of Stephen Cameron. Indeed, much of his sentence was served in the open prison in Gloucester from which he could have very easily continued to run his criminal empire.
When John Palmer was murdered in 2015 it was with exactly the same kind of low velocity 9mm gun as killed Jill Dando. This is a professional hit man’s weapon and in both cases, neither gun nor the cartridge cases were ever found. In my informed opinion, this is scarcely surprising given that the same Bulgarian hit man, based in Tenerife, known as “Joe the barman” in real life and “Joe the DJ” in my novel were involved.
Palmer, as Mohammed Derbah claimed, was almost certainly trying to blackmail members of the Deep State paedophile ring. Shortly after his death, which had nothing to do with any “Brinks Mat curse,” and thanks to the psychological warfare operation and false trail laid by Carl Beech and Harvey Proctor, no newspaper in the land would handle the paedophile ring story. It was in this context that Paul Blanchard published his sanitised memoir while that of Mohammed Derbah has been all but ignored.
And sadly, what this says about the state of British journalism, and the Fourth Estate’s failure to hold power to account applies equally as much to the state of British crime fiction, both in print and on film and TV. This in turn is quite astonishing given the historical role of British crime fiction as one of the key lenses to social and political criticism as described by my PhD in 2008.
Since the Thatcherite 1980s, much of UK crime fiction has retreated from the noir universe into cosy middle class settings, from academic Oxford to Barnaby-land, where there is no social crisis and people with a stake in capitalist society kill each other out of arcane passions or simply (as Raymond Chandler would have said) to produce a corpse. In this parallel universe, like something from a Frank Capra movie or novel by William Gibson, the criminal justice system isn’t broken, the cops aren’t bent and when they solve the murder a Durkheimian “order” is restored to the campus, the village or the seaside town as before.
Meanwhile the defacement of every single Metropolitan Police recruitment poster that one sees on the underground every morning, usually with words like “cunts,” alludes to what most people actually think of the police – certainly since Louise Casey’s damning report. So why do the same people buy into the recuperative fantasy of a functioning law enforcement and criminal justice system in a functioning democracy that has long ceased to exist? Is it because only middle class people buy crime novels any more or that publishers, like producers, move in agreeable social circles that look like Midsomer whatever that we don’t? Is it as simple as that, as indeed the criminologist Robert Reiner once suggested?
Alternatively, could one talk about a “crisis in crime fiction,” much as Gavin McFaddyen, late of World in Action, talked about a “crisis of investigative journalism” when he founded the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the early 2000s. Front line crime fiction after all, that we now define with that French word “noir,” has always had a symbiotic relationship with crime and investigative journalism, from the days of Defoe and Fielding through Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Conan Doyle, to the contributors to Black Mask magazine, Ted Lewis and his Scandinavian counterparts. The latter, it seems, are still doing rather well.
If corporate media in general is 80% Tory and 60% Murdoch, enjoying a corrupt and toxic relationship with political power, will this relentless squeezing of investigative journalism as out of a toothpaste tube have a knock on effect for the crime novel and TV long form drama? If journalists like Carole Cadwalladr and Eliot Higgins can be threatened by weaponized defamation laws, that have long ceased to serve anyone but the corrupt and powerful, or still worse under a proposed National Security Act, where does that leave the lowly novelist or script writer? And what about the appointment of a Johnson crony like Richard Sharpe as Director General of the BBC or a level of governmental interference in broadcasting that saw Gary Lineker suspended for telling the truth? Above all, what is the effect of a weaponised OfCom staffed by enemies of the BBC like Paul Dacre, holding the sword of Damocles over the BBC, going to have on courageous and innovative broadcasting, as Rupert Murdoch lurks like a predatory shark awaiting the feeding frenzy of privatisation?
It is not a question of ' what happened to novels?' but rather one of 'what has happened to the readers, or rather to the brains of readers?' The answer to that can largely be found in the writings of Maryanne Woolf in books such as Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007, HarperCollins) and 'The Reading Brain in a Digital World (August, 2018, HarperCollins). In a recent podcast to be found on The New York Times website she discusses the pleasure of 'deep reading ' and how that is compromised by 'skimming, scanning, scrolling' associated with smartphones and computers.
Personally, I am currently re-reading 'Middlemarch' and discovering the real pleasure of 'deep reading' in a long novel.
Join us in the Common Reader Book Club Will! We’re reading Dickens next month...
Listen rather than read. 35 years ago it was books on cassettes, then CDs. Now it’s Audible on my phone or Alexa. From Crime and Punishment on 35 cassettes whilst driving up and down the A1, to Dickens, Greene, Orwell and Shute whilst in the gym or my room
hands down, the best closing line of any story I’ve read:
Joyce’s The Dead: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
https://brain2mind.substack.com/p/weekend-reading-the-dead-james-joyce
Hi Will (and Harry) If you havn't read a novel in months then I'm going to have the brass neck to recommend MY novel, JADED JERUSALEM by Roger Cottrell, published recently, a retrospective crime thriller set during the 1984-85 miners strike, where the road to our current dystopia began. David Hencke, formerly of the Guardian, loves the book whose subtext alludes to the role of a Deep State pedophile ring in helping establish and maintain Margaret Thatcher in power. Part of the Cursed Albion trilogy, it aspires to expose the corrupt criminal underbelly of British politics, in the most corrupt country in Western Europe, through the lens of crime fiction, much as James Elroy did with the Underwold Trilogy in the US and there are obvious points of contact with Jake Arnott and David Peace. A former crime and investigative journalist I am now a film and TV script writer by profession and have already written a seven episode long form adaptation of the book. I was also inspired by an article by Julian Rathbone IN the New Statesman in 1998 to do a PhD on British Crime Fiction as a lens to social and political commentary. Your proposed discussion of Dickens sounds great. Currently module leader in Politics and Communication at University of Winchester, which looks at the corrupt relationship between media and political power in the UK and the failure of the UK Fourth Estate to hold power to account, I'd also love to write for The New Statesman. The links for my book (and David Hencke's review) are:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1915330262
and
https://davidhencke.com/2022/12/29/book-review-jaded-jerusalem-a-horrific-serial-killer-thriller-set-in-wales-and-london-during-the-miners-strike/
Yours in comradeship and struggle
Roger Cottrell, PhD
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. Novels teach you about life and let you escape from life. And the best of them put into beautiful and clever words things you’d maybe thought but not realised. The Economist teaches you stuff but doesn’t make you feel like that.
Novels are going to make a comeback
I used to fear I’d become like most men, even great novelists, and turn exclusively to nonfiction as I aged. But at 47 I love fiction now more than ever. It’s true I’ve given up reading new fiction. I think I got tricked one too many times by all those lying blurbs.
Hi Harry and Will,
Well for myself, a day off ( or two ) and a good novel still reign supreme in my world of simple and relaxing pleasures . Nothing compares to fiction and getting lost in a good story and visualising all the characters and the settings . Using one’s imagination to create the scene surely is one of our greatest pleasures ?
What’s happened to all the novels ? I have oodles and oodles of them , on half a dozen book shelves ( my own private library) and in boxes that I just can’t bring myself to take to the charity shop .
Yes I’m a book hoarder ! I’ve every novel that I first ever read from childhood . I could simply not ever part with them ( even if I don’t re-read them ) they are of great comfort to me knowing they are there , like memories or landmarks of a certain place and time in my life . I do occasionally use audible, and have enjoyed the whole talking book thing when travelling . However I do still very much prefer the old school , tangibleness of a novel , the smell of an old book , or the inscription of it if it was a gift .
'Buddenbrooks' requires no force. It's long but effortless. You are thinking of 'The Magic Mountain'.
I've had two separate conversations about how wonderful fiction is in the last 24 hours - novels have so much to teach us about stories far from our own, they teach empathy, and are incredible insights into the human condition. And sometimes it's just nice to get lost in a narrative!
You may not know it but your weekly analysis is as good as that of the FT and the Economist. Alright you don’t do banking collapse or property funding but excellent in every way. Thank you.
I tend to favour non-fiction, but have been guided by friends to some excellent novels this year. My current read is Percival Everett’s ‘The Trees’, which I’m finding to be very good.
I find it difficult to concentrate on novels unless I’m on holiday.
Try a bit of Philip Roth- ‘American pastoral’ or ‘the human stain’.
Author: you better check the hyperlink in your sentence: "I’ve read 100-page novels that changed my life (here’s ONE)". It correctly takes the reader to Albert Camus' book, but both the kindle version of the book on that site, and many of the reader comments below the Amazon blurb, refer to the book of the same name by Alexandre Puttick. I assume the book that changed your life was the one by Camus and not the shabby thriller. By the way, I read or listen to a novel, daily for a couple of hours at least, five or six days a week.
In my novel, Jaded Jerusalem, I try to open up aspects of the fall-out from the Brinks Mat robbery that are only touched upon in the later episodes of Neil Forsythe's The Gold. In 1993, in the same year that Bulic Forsythe was murdered in Clapham, the same cabal of corrupt cops who covered up Vishal Mehrota’s murder and set up the Brinks Mat robbery also undermined the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation. This, as we now know, was because Noye's nephew was one of the killers.
According to my trilogy, the same police cabal was also protecting Epstein's London operation by this time.
In other words, whether or not Noye’s county lines network was also recruiting, or grooming, vulnerable youngsters for the Deep State paedophile ring, he still owed his corrupt police associates heaps when he carried out the premeditated murder of Stephen Cameron in 1996. That this was later passed off as a “road rage” attack shows just how corrupt and irredeemably broken Britain’s criminal justice system is. Noye, who becomes Alex Wheelan in the story, was flown out of the country on Palmer's private plane and safe housed on Palmer's yacht in Tenerife. Here, and unbeknown to his police contacts, Wheelan tells the whole story on the Deep state paedophile operation. This then becomes part of the 500 hours of Palmer's taped interviews that Paul Blanchard indeed handed to his police protectors that have since been buried from public scrutiny.
As part of a trade-off, Wheelan is then instructed to set up the murder of a BBC Crimewatch journalist who has been investigating the paedophile ring and is about to expose Jimmy Savile himself. In fact, the Irish journalist Orla O’Regan, who is in many ways the second protagonist of the whole trilogy, is only partly based on Somerset born Jill Dando and I’m not going to tell you how the murder plot pans out. Unlike Orla, Jill Dando was not a hardcore investigator and had never worked on The Sun, although Simon Regan, who later exposed the Deep State paedophile ring in Scallywag magazine, did.
Again, unlike Orla, Jill Dando didn’t “moonlight” for Scallywag, while also working on Crimewatch, when its proprietor went to Northern Cyprus to court finance from Asir Nidal – late of Polly Peck. In real life, the proprietor of Scallywag was murdered in Northern Cyprus, in 1996, just as John Allen was sent down for life on paedophile charges in Wales, when William Haig was busy burying the Jillings Report and when an arson attack on a warehouse in Crewe destroyed much of the evidence pertinent to the case.
After Jill Dando was murdered in 1999 a local man with learning difficulties, Barry George, was framed for the murder. Although later acquitted, he was placed under a surveillance order and the police resolutely refused to pursue any other line of inquiry. The Met and the Home Office, as we have seen, have also blocked any effort by either Vishal Mehrota’s father or the Hampshire Constabulary to reopen that murder case or that of Bulic Forsythe, the black social worker murdered in Clapham in 1993.
Meanwhile, roughly one year after Jill Dando’s murder, Simon Regan also died suspiciously at his home in Weymouth. He had still been investigating the Deep State paedophile network and the murder in Northern Cyprus in 1996. As in the example of Bulic Forsythe, his landlord allowed unidentified officials to take away all his documents and records which then conveniently disappeared.
Hardly the self-styled Robin Hood figure that his fictional persona aspired to be, in Neil Forsythe’s admirable but flawed BBC narrative, Kenneth Noye was rewarded with a stretch for manslaughter for the very obvious premeditated murder of Stephen Cameron. Indeed, much of his sentence was served in the open prison in Gloucester from which he could have very easily continued to run his criminal empire.
When John Palmer was murdered in 2015 it was with exactly the same kind of low velocity 9mm gun as killed Jill Dando. This is a professional hit man’s weapon and in both cases, neither gun nor the cartridge cases were ever found. In my informed opinion, this is scarcely surprising given that the same Bulgarian hit man, based in Tenerife, known as “Joe the barman” in real life and “Joe the DJ” in my novel were involved.
Palmer, as Mohammed Derbah claimed, was almost certainly trying to blackmail members of the Deep State paedophile ring. Shortly after his death, which had nothing to do with any “Brinks Mat curse,” and thanks to the psychological warfare operation and false trail laid by Carl Beech and Harvey Proctor, no newspaper in the land would handle the paedophile ring story. It was in this context that Paul Blanchard published his sanitised memoir while that of Mohammed Derbah has been all but ignored.
And sadly, what this says about the state of British journalism, and the Fourth Estate’s failure to hold power to account applies equally as much to the state of British crime fiction, both in print and on film and TV. This in turn is quite astonishing given the historical role of British crime fiction as one of the key lenses to social and political criticism as described by my PhD in 2008.
Since the Thatcherite 1980s, much of UK crime fiction has retreated from the noir universe into cosy middle class settings, from academic Oxford to Barnaby-land, where there is no social crisis and people with a stake in capitalist society kill each other out of arcane passions or simply (as Raymond Chandler would have said) to produce a corpse. In this parallel universe, like something from a Frank Capra movie or novel by William Gibson, the criminal justice system isn’t broken, the cops aren’t bent and when they solve the murder a Durkheimian “order” is restored to the campus, the village or the seaside town as before.
Meanwhile the defacement of every single Metropolitan Police recruitment poster that one sees on the underground every morning, usually with words like “cunts,” alludes to what most people actually think of the police – certainly since Louise Casey’s damning report. So why do the same people buy into the recuperative fantasy of a functioning law enforcement and criminal justice system in a functioning democracy that has long ceased to exist? Is it because only middle class people buy crime novels any more or that publishers, like producers, move in agreeable social circles that look like Midsomer whatever that we don’t? Is it as simple as that, as indeed the criminologist Robert Reiner once suggested?
Alternatively, could one talk about a “crisis in crime fiction,” much as Gavin McFaddyen, late of World in Action, talked about a “crisis of investigative journalism” when he founded the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in the early 2000s. Front line crime fiction after all, that we now define with that French word “noir,” has always had a symbiotic relationship with crime and investigative journalism, from the days of Defoe and Fielding through Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Conan Doyle, to the contributors to Black Mask magazine, Ted Lewis and his Scandinavian counterparts. The latter, it seems, are still doing rather well.
If corporate media in general is 80% Tory and 60% Murdoch, enjoying a corrupt and toxic relationship with political power, will this relentless squeezing of investigative journalism as out of a toothpaste tube have a knock on effect for the crime novel and TV long form drama? If journalists like Carole Cadwalladr and Eliot Higgins can be threatened by weaponized defamation laws, that have long ceased to serve anyone but the corrupt and powerful, or still worse under a proposed National Security Act, where does that leave the lowly novelist or script writer? And what about the appointment of a Johnson crony like Richard Sharpe as Director General of the BBC or a level of governmental interference in broadcasting that saw Gary Lineker suspended for telling the truth? Above all, what is the effect of a weaponised OfCom staffed by enemies of the BBC like Paul Dacre, holding the sword of Damocles over the BBC, going to have on courageous and innovative broadcasting, as Rupert Murdoch lurks like a predatory shark awaiting the feeding frenzy of privatisation?
Roger Cottrell, PhD.
Author: JADED JERUSALEM
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1915330262
https://davidhencke.com/2022/12/29/book-review-jaded-jerusalem-a-horrific-serial-killer-thriller-set-in-wales-and-london-during-the-miners-strike/