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Booth says the great novel is finished

14.01.08

Mark Booth, publishing director of Century, believes the future, when most books are sold on the net as downloads, spells the end of the novel. Writing in the Independent, he explains his view through esoteric philosophy. According to Booth, the role of the great novel in the 18th and 19th centuries in "forging the sense we all have – and take for granted – that we have an interior narrative" is now finished, "and a new form of consciousness is emerging".

Booth writes: "What we're dealing with here is not a decline in reading, but a decline reading printed books. I am fascinated to learn in the New Yorker that a recent survey in the States shows that a TV in a child's bedroom lowers academic grades, but a parallel survey shows that time spent on the internet encourages better grades.

"Clearly interactivity is the key. Perhaps the creative things my children do on the net are less passive than reading books? If Caxton's was a revolution in reading, what we are seeing now is a revolution in reading and writing combined.

"The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery. But it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.

"Because we are all plugging ourselves into one great electronic mind, we will gradually lose the sense of each being shut off in a private mental space, as esoteric philosophy has long predicted. Our mental space will be out there and, as with Facebook, everyone else will have access to it. I don't know what this new literary form will be, but I suspect it will be co-operative and as slinkily responsive to whoever is looking at it as Schroedinger's cat. I can't wait."

 

Independent

Book Media century Mark Booth

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