TWO weeks ago I mentioned George Steiner's forecast of doom for the novel, and I see that his remarks have also been taken up by Auberon Waugh in the current issue of his invigorating Literary Review, available from Eason's, Books Upstairs and other enlightened outlets.
Recent statistics in England, says Mr Waugh, "proved we really are losing the habit of reading books," and that the demise of the novel is "not just a fevered prophecy" of Dr Steiner's.
However, Mr Waugh is characteristically sanguine about this. Novel reading, he states, "is a minority diversion. Perhaps it always was, but in days gone by there were fewer rival diversions, fewer well regarded novelists, and members of the minority to whom literary novels might have appealed were also the arbiters of society.
Nowadays, he argues, "to talk of an `important' novel or novelist is an absurdity. Nothing is important within the small society of novel readers. Novels and novelists divide into good, bad and indifferent ... I do not think that any useful purpose is served by encouraging novelists to believe they may be prophets, or the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as poets were once encouraged to believe.
All a good literary novel has to do "is to find a readership and please it. Those novelists who please more intelligent or sensitive readers will bask in the approval of their peers, as well as make a respectable living.
With this in mind, he believes that "the prize system has gone mad. Why should novelists, in particular, be so extravagantly rewarded?" He cites the £20,000 Booker and the £21,000 Whitbread and the £30,000 Orange, but "this is before we even start casting our eyes towards Dublin, which inaugurated the IMPAC Literary Award with a £100,000 prize to the Australian novelist David Malouf.
"One observes that the Prix Goncourt is fixed at 50 francs and the Pulitzer Prize is worth only 5,000 dollars. It seems to me that with all the carrots being offered to literary novelists in the British Isles, there may be need for a little stick."
Gay Mitchell, the man responsible for the whole idea of the IMPAC award, would probably argue that biggest is best, but my sentiments are those of Mr Waugh's.
DO we really need any more James Bond books? Yes, say LJ Hodder, who have just signed up a new Bond man the third to have a shot at 007 since the death of Ian Fleming.
You may recall (though why should you?) that in 1968 Kingsley Amis wrote one Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, and that since then John Gardner wrote fourteen more. Gardner finally wearied of the antediluvian spy's exploits and his place is now taken by Raymond Benson, a computer games designer from Chicago.
Mr Benson has never written any kind of a novel before, but that obviously didn't worry Gildrose Publications, which owns the Bond copyright and which is headed up by Peter Janson Smith, who used to be Fleming's literary agent. Mr Janson Smith was clearly impressed by the fact that Benson has been a Bond fan since the age of nine and boasts of an encyclopaedic knowledge of the character. Whether he can string a few sentences together, too, you can judge for yourself when his first Bond opus comes out next year.
Meanwhile, I hear that Simon & Schuster has just snapped up a first novel by Irish comedian Sean Hughes. When the first Channel 4 series of Sean's Show was screened a couple of years back, Hughes was able to make teenage girls go weak at the knees, and possibly that's still the case, though the competition on the comedy circuit is vicious, and Eddie Izzard now appears to be the adored one among chuckle loving pubescents.
Still, Hughes's whimsically scatty Sean's Book did sell 40,000 copies for Pavilion, and no doubt Simon & Schuster will be hoping for similarly healthy sales of The Detainees, described as a "darkly comic story of revenge in a small town near Dublin". Incidentally, the publishers paid "a very decent five figure sum" for it in other words, somewhere between £10,000 and £99,999.