Skip to Content

Comment from the book world in September 2024

« Prev  

September 2024

  Next »

'If you want an audience then the place to go looks like it's TV'

23 September 2024

'Over the past 20 years, some of the best novels written, as it were, or writing that serves the function of a novel, have been on Netflix and HBO. The writing is complicated, the plotting is complicated. It has subtext, and people are really responding to it in a way that, unfortunately, is not happening with books.

It's not like Dickensian fiction, in that lots of people are really watching weekly episodes for something that is very ambitious in scale and scope. Think of the Wire or Breaking Bad, or Succession. Also, if you look at the history of writing, writers tend to shift to wherever the work is. In the 1950s everybody wanted to be a playwright but it's very hard to imagine if a writer had any choice of career now they would start with the theatre. Same with fiction, I'm afraid if you want an audience then the place to go looks like it's TV.'

Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including Just Like You, High Fidelity and About a Boy, several works of non-fiction including Fever Pitch and numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild and, most recently, State of the Union.

 

 

  • Share this

'A projection back of modern sensibilities'

9 September 2024

‘It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to write a character well in the past who is not a projection back of modern sensibilities. My defence would be that the 16th century was the time when rational, sceptical inquiry was beginning. This was the age of the humanists: we're leaving medieval thought patterns behind. I'm not saying a man like Shardlake did exist then, but he could have, when even 20 years earlier he couldn't. That's enough for me...

I find legal practice endlessly interesting. It existed then and now, so it provides a point of contact for readers. And it offers a way into any number of mysteries, and puts Shardlake in the way of an endless variety of characters.'

C J Sansom, who died in April and was the author of the seven-volume Shardlake series, Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone, Lamentation and Tombland, and Dominion and Winter in Madrid, in the Guardian.