Uneven realities

Nigel Pearn

The elasticity of fiction, the ‘what if’ – in other words, the genre’s very virtues and interests – are often the characteristics that alienate ‘sensible’ readers. To the literal-minded, literature can present as a self-defeating puzzle. All that pretence is exhausting, irrelevant at best, or, drawing a long line from the Ancient Greeks, morally bankrupt. ‘I don’t read fiction anymore,’ Everyman says (and most often it is a man): ‘thank goodness for non-fiction, for plain speech, for things as they truly are.’