Who bothers with fiction any more?

IT WILL BE a red-letter day for bookshops, already dubbed Super Thursday. On September 29th the main UK imprints will publish a raft of their biggest autumn titles, signalling the most lucrative time of year for book sales: the Christmas run-in.

The much-anticipated works highlighted by the Bookseller trade magazine include volumes by the comedians Lee Evans and Johnny Vegas, the sportsmen Paul Scholes and Colin Montgomerie and the cooks Jamie Oliver and Martha Swift.

Among the various celebrity scribes, however, one subspecies is scarce: novelists. Of the 20-odd authors in the list, only five write fiction. (Six if you include the late JRR Tolkien, with his children's book, Mr Bliss.) British bookshops, which operate in a market similar to Ireland's, do not seem to be pinning their hopes for 2011 on fiction.

Even away from the fickle marketplace, there are signs that the novel is losing ground to non-fiction in the popular imagination. In Ireland, for example, the economic shocks that have had the country in convulsions since 2008 have been better captured by economists and journalists than by fiction writers.

But perhaps the cruellest blows have come from within the world of fiction. Salman Rushdie, once the embodiment of the uncompromising novelist after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against The Satanic Verses, last week announced he has put his fictional efforts to one side to work on a science-fiction series, so inspired is he by recent American television drama.

And in an interview with The Irish Timesearlier this month, the novelist John Banville said he now reads little fiction, putting it in stark terms: "I find I have no use for fiction any more." When such marquee names of fiction are turning their backs on the form, it raises a question: has the novel, for years the foundation stone of the book world and the main vehicle for the written imagination, lost its central position in our culture? Using the most basic indicator, sales figures, the answer seems simple.

“Fiction is key – it’s what sells. Look at the top-10-bestsellers list: for 10 months of the year it’s predominantly fiction,” says Michael McLoughlin, the managing director of Penguin Ireland. Although nonfiction grabs the headlines, not least for the large advances paid to celebrity authors such as the late Gerry Ryan, its popularity compared with fiction has declined.

Irish sales of adult nonfiction slumped by 7.5 per cent between 2009 and 2010; by contrast, the figures for adult fiction fell by only 2.5 per cent. "In a recession, there's the argument that people are turning to fiction for escapism and entertainment," says McLoughlin. Sure enough, Stieg Larsson's Millenniumtrilogy accounted for the top three bestsellers in Ireland last year.

Sales have not been driven by escapist blockbusters alone. Literary fiction, particularly by local authors, has also fared well. Emma Donoghue’s intense, claustrophobic novel Room, for example, was the fifth-bestselling book in Ireland last year, while Sebastian Barry’s lyrical narrative The Secret Scripture topped the 2009 chart, with sales of nearly 75,000. Far from being a rarified niche, literary fiction is growing more valuable to publishers.

“We’re always on the lookout for new authors of literary fiction, even more so these days,” says McLoughlin. “The women’s fiction market, for example, is more challenging than it once was. The big names still sell, but it’s difficult to break a new writer. Whereas with a literary novel, if it gets publicity and maybe wins a prize, it’s easier to break a new name.”

But if the commercial side appears positive, the broader picture – whether fiction has remained relevant – is less clear. Despite encouraging sales, the fact that a novelist as finely attuned as Banville doesn’t “seem to need stories the way I used to”, instead turning to history, biography, poetry or philosophy for stimulation, highlights the issue of who reads fiction now, and why.

In one respect, Banville’s waning interest in the novel is typical: it has long been a maxim in the book world that men read less fiction than women. Much of the evidence for this assertion is anecdotal. In 2005, the British author Ian McEwan gave away 30 novels in a London park, with all but one of the takers female. “When women stop reading,” McEwan wrote afterwards in the Guardian, “the novel will be dead.” This instinct largely guides the publishing industry.

“We’ve no data to confirm that, but it’s generally seen as true,” says McLoughlin. “You’ve only to go into the bookshops and look at the book jackets to see that they’re being aimed at women. So fiction tends to be targeted at women, though with literary fiction it is more balanced between men and women.”

This supposed gender gap may shape marketing strategies, but it is hardly crucial to the wider health of the novel, as long as the books are being read. Of more significance is the tectonic shift that has challenged the written word’s primacy as a conduit for information, in particular of the imaginative variety.

“The great threat to reading has been the visual culture of the late 20th century, especially television,” says the critic and academic John Carey.

It is not just that watching television and, lately, browsing the internet (see panel) have supplanted reading books as a leisure activity in most households. The recent wave of US television drama features the kind of rounded characters, subtle narratives, thematic richness and popular entertainment associated with the great Victorian novels, which were, after all, originally episodic in nature. It is no coincidence that the panoramic police drama The Wire has frequently been compared to Dickens.

IN IRELAND, MEANWHILE,the novel has faced other challenges. Fiction's ability to subvert and question, one of its greatest assets during years of pious conformity, has gradually waned as Irish society has grown more open. Titles such as John McGahern's 1965 novel The Dark have been hailed (retrospectively) for intuiting repression and abuse that were otherwise glossed over, but it is hard to imagine a novel doing the same thing today.

In recent years, fiction seems to have fallen behind when it comes to tackling hot topics. Factual accounts such as The Bankersby Shane Ross and Ship of Foolsby Fintan O'Toole have had more immediate resonance with the public than any contemporary Irish novel, with promotional events such as 2009's Four Angry Men,featuring Ross, O'Toole and fellow current-affairs chroniclers Matt Cooper and Pat Leahy, filling large venues.

This is not just the case with the recession,which has yet to feature centrally in the work of a major Irish novelist, but also with the realm of personal experience, formerly the fiction writer's bailiwick. Starting with Paddy Doyle's 1988 autobiography The God Squad,which lifted the lid on institutional abuse, a raft of harrowing memoirs followed in the 1990s, leaving the public in little doubt (if slightly numbed) about the pervasiveness of abuse in Irish society.

Those Irish novelists who have dealt with the subject of abuse, such as Anne Enright in her Booker-winning title The Gathering, seem to have been playing catch-up in comparison, bestowing a patina of significance but offering little new insight on the issue.

But to frame fiction in such purely didactic terms is, perhaps, reductive.

"I entirely share Banville's enthusiasm for nonfiction," says John Carey, whose 2005 book What Good Are the Arts?took an iconoclastic view of creative work. "It's true that after reading 100 or so novels when on the judging panel for a literary prize, as I have done a couple of times, I am thirsty for facts. But that does not mean I want to stop reading fiction."

The function and impact of fiction may be nebulous, but this intangible quality is also one of its greatest strengths. “Fiction is the space where imagination reigns,” say Carey. “The only other realm where imagination is so vital is science, at the highly theoretical end, but that shuts out most people, as popular science can only give a diluted version. But when real imagination takes place in a novel, it can take the culture in new imaginative directions. I don’t think nonfiction can do this; it has to stick to the facts.”

This ability of stories to transcend specifics and subtly shift our perceptions still holds true in Ireland. There is the work of Patrick McCabe, whose black comedies have reshaped the old narrative of Border counties as a dull backwater, and Sebastian Barry, whose novel A Long Long Wayhelped reclaim the previously airbrushed tales of Irishmen fighting in the trenches during the first World War. Such fictional works can offer a new way of seeing. Viewed in this light, the topicality of nonfiction looks limiting.

And the novelist still plays an important role in popular culture. When the American author Jonathan Franzen published his sprawling saga, Freedom, last year he commanded more coverage than any nonfiction writer could hope for, even appearing on the cover of Time. Emma Donoghue's book Room, meanwhile, may initially have attracted attention for its story's parallels with the Josef Fritzl case, but its continued prominence in the public sphere – being nominated for the Man Booker Prize, for example – is down to its artistic merits.

Of course, the relevance of fiction to a seasoned practitioner such as Banville is a different matter. When it comes to his work, the Irish writer apparently finds his own dream life a more fruitful source for “vivid material” than fiction. But Carey, who as the biographer of the novelist William Golding read the late Nobel laureate’s private “dream journal” only to find it extremely boring, cites a cautionary note, even for a writer as accomplished as Banville.

“I would say that the novel has never been richer,” he says. “Your own dream life is never going to produce anything as good or imaginative as the work of novelists like JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood or Milan Kundera.”

Fiction still occupies a vital space, telling the stories that shape our cultural experience and our inner lives. The notion that Paul Scholes or Colin Montgomerie might replace novelists in that role is a pipe dream, or a nightmare.

Slipping through the net: can the book survive?

A man who experienced totalitarianism under both Nazi and communist regimes, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz drew strength from the immutable nature of literature: “Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born / Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.” If only it were so simple.

The book, for centuries humanity’s main vehicle for thought, is arguably facing its greatest ever threat, not from warfare or natural catastrophe but from digital technology. The internet, with its instant (and mainly free) access to information, has already shown its ability to muscle out the printed word, driving down newspaper sales across the world. Now books are apparently in retreat too.

Most obviously, there is the controversy over Google Books (something of a misnomer), which proposes to make available millions of volumes, scanned without permission. Although the plan has been delayed with a US court’s rejection of a settlement between Google and a body representing copyright holders, it is an ominous portent if book readers migrate online in significant numbers.

Meanwhile, the news that Amazon is now selling more Kindle e-books in the US than all printed titles proves how habits have changed, in that country at least: the notion of digital readers supplanting traditional volumes is no longer the stuff of sci-fi.

The reflective rituals of reading have been disrupted by the net’s immediacy and interactivity. Blogs, once symbols of shorter attention spans, now seem positively Dostoyevskian beside the aptly named Twitter. With schools starting to look to e-books as an educational tool – a Mayo school recently announced it was ditching books for iPads – it will soon be possible for future generations to go through school without opening a book.

True, the notion that the book will disappear entirely is unduly apocalyptic. Umberto Eco and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac have just published a volume on this theme, helpfully titled This Is Not the End of the Book. The printed word is durable: after all, it does not require an energy supply to read it, ensuring books will remain on the shelves for a long time yet. But reading books may become a rarified pastime for a small minority, like music fans who buy vinyl. Either way, the internet ensures that many more words will never make it on to the page.

For more on the future of fiction listen to this week’s Culture Podcast at irishtimes.com or iTunes