Dystopian novels are a literary mixed bag. Done well they can transform tiny seeds of present danger into a living, breathing, terrifying vision of a future. Done badly and they feel hammy, didactic, just a little bit YA.
[…]
And if I had to judge Prophet Song on conveying this political message, I would say it had succeeded. But I have to judge it on its value as a novel, and this is where things get trickier. Printed on the back of the book is a glowing blurb by the author Samantha Harvey. Reading Prophet Song, she says, “you remember why fiction matters”. So why does fiction matter? Should it influence hearts and minds, provoke political change? Or should it do more? Should it, as Nabokov famously said, provide “aesthetic bliss”, invoking a little shiver of pleasure in our spines?
There are plenty of great political novels, but they start off with the story, not the message.
[…]
But these remain rare glimpses of Lynch’s talent, of what the novel could have been. It’s a pity that it becomes an exercise in totalitarianism-by-numbers.
Month August 2023
“To write a good book you have to have certain qualities”
To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy. Pornography is at one end of that scale, great art at the other end.
I am reading therefore I am 