A while back, the combined might of Steve Connor, John Mullan and Alex Clark huddled together on the BBC to debate the death of theory. All are veterans of the 1980s: when fiction about writing fiction and ideological subversion were all the rage. Sales and a sizeable readership were old hat. The better you were, the more PhD theses you inspired. However, as the three declared that day, that era seems to be passing. Three-digit sales figures don’t make for much of a pension pot. And so rather than letting the James Pattersons of this world have all the fun with story, pace and plot, a new breed of novelist is evolving.
Most noticeably David Nicholls’ One Day has been revving up steam recently and reshaping ideas of the literary and the popular. John le Carre kept the flame alive through the 70s and the 80s, Nick Hornby and his brother-in-law Robert Harris continued it through the 90s and now the new-boy Nicholls is starting to make the literati fear a revolution from below.
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