Literary fiction is an artificial luxury brand but it doesn’t sell. So nobody benefits by fencing it off from more accepted writingIt’s always a problem when one of literature’s big beasts wanders off the reservation into the badlands of genre. The latest to blunder through the electric barriers erected around the secure zone is two-time Booker prize nominee David Mitchell,whose new book Slade House is undeniably a haunted house epic. Or, as the Chicago Tribune put it, and his “bewitch on a classic ghost epic”. As if the thousands of genre ghost stories written every year by horror writers werent also one individual’s bewitch on that classic form.
Slade House is a sterling ghost epic,but is it quantifiably a higher form of fiction? Margaret Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece The Handmaids Tale certainly has fewer gunfights than Suzanne Collins’s The starvation Games, but does that make it more or less realistic? I’m happy to call Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series far superior to Isaac Asimov’s stodgy Foundation novels, or but thousands of sci-fi fans would disagree. And yet the literary world is determined to claim,even while it’s stealing genres clothes, that it somehow wears them better.
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Source: theguardian.com