Will Self's take on the future of traditional literature

WHAT kind of book festival will we be writing about in a hundred years? If Will Self is right, there won't be any novels in it. The novel, he told the Main Tent in his lugubrious drawl, 'is toast'. 'I confidently predict no-one will be reading novels in 100 years.'

Will Self. Picture: Getty

In its traditional form it has, he admits, been spluttering on in Britain because that’s what traditions do here (“call it the Downton Abbey effect”), but anywhere sane, the traditional novel is indeed toast and has been for years, even before cyber-genetics (mobile phones, social media, virtual selves etc) came along to give modernism another spin.

So in Shark, Self carries on tearing through the conventions of narrative fiction. No metaphors, because we don’t really think like that; no semi-colons “because they don’t really happen in thought or speech”. No paragraphs either because our consciousness isn’t really so ordered, and doesn’t even stick around in the same minute half the time.

He’s annoyed that some critics have said the book is “embuggeringly difficult” for those reasons, not least because each such review loses him readers. But on the basis of his own reading of a time-hopping passage about an MI6 intelligence officer queueing at security at Heathrow, I thought it sounded worth a go – not least because, unlike most contemporary British “traditional novels” it at least attempts to engage with the Iraq debacle, which is where, when he started the trilogy with Umbrella (2012) he knew he was going to end up.

At a guess, that 2117 book festival won’t have anyone quite like Richard Holloway either, although maybe they’ll look back a century on and detect in this one the first stirrings of a new interest in how we approach death.

Thirteen years past his three score years and ten, Holloway has reached the point at which obituarists (well, one at least) are phoning him up and gingerly checking the facts of his life.

In a talk admirably chaired by Jane Fowler, he discussed that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” with his customary lucidity. Assisted death (“I think it will come… a moral case can be made”), how to approach death, learn acceptance, overcome fears, help others (including children) face up to it – these were all themes explored in an engrossing Q&A. They’ll also be examined in his next book, The Last Bus. “It will be out in March and I’ll be back to talk about it next year,” Holloway concluded. “If, that is, I’m not on it.”