Madam, – It is, of course, both nonsensical and provocative of The Irish Timesto suggest – based on John Banville's current antipathy towards "stories" – that nobody bothers with fiction any more. And I would suggest that Salman Rushdie's move to science fiction is merely a genre change, not a sudden departure from fiction itself.
It is further nonsense to suggest that fiction has fallen behind when dealing with hot topics, particularly with regard to the recession which – according to your paper – “has yet to feature centrally in the work of a major Irish novelist”. The fall-out from the recession has featured centrally in the work of many contemporary female novelists, including Cathy Kelly and Patricia Scanlan. As indeed, have topics such as domestic violence, addiction and bereavement. The sales of these novelists, both at home and abroad, and the esteem in which they are held, surely qualifies them for the term “major”.
But as massive sales are apparently interpreted by you as commercial and not literary success, I suppose The Irish Timesconsiders this irrelevant. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Mick Heaney's vigorous defence of the continuing significance and vitality of the novel (Weekend Review, June 18th) is to be applauded, not least for the fact that one of the country's main newspapers was willing to devote a full page to it. However, in light of Mr Heaney's passing references to me, I must attempt a clarification. I may indeed have told an Irish Timesinterviewer that "I have no use for fiction any more", but if I did it is an example of the kind of intemperate, foolish and inaccurate things one can find oneself blurting out in such circumstances. The absurdity of the statement is surely apparent from the fact that I was being interviewed to mark the publication of a novel, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, and the announcement that I had been awarded this year's Franz Kafka Prize for fiction.
What I thought I said to your interviewer, and certainly what I meant to say, is that I read very little contemporary fiction, and that this is a cause of sadness to me. It is well-known that readers, and male readers especially, read less fiction as they grow older – George Steiner begins one of his essays by declaring bluntly: “Old men do not read novels”. Yet I remain passionately convinced of the centrality to civilised values of art in general and of the art of fiction in particular. I do feel that culturally we are in a phase of transition, rather like the 1890s, say, when the great Victorians were falling silent and the mighty Moderns were still finding their voice, and who knows but that even now new fictional wonders may be in the process of composition, works that will astound us with their mastery of style, their imaginative breadth, their ontological daring.
I have, as I said, just published a Benjamin Black novel, and recently finished another one, as John Banville. Far from having no use for it, as I seem rashly to have asserted, I devote to the glorious project of fiction most of my waking hours and many of my sleeping ones, too, and will continue to do so until I come to my final full stop. – Yours, etc,