I asked the handsome young librarian last week to choose a book for me. He went straight to the non-fiction. “Fiction is rubbish,” he said dismissively. “Reality is all anyone should read.” And so I went home with a book on how to succeed as a professional actor, a book of card tricks, and the life story of a zoo keeper.
The first made me glad I gave up professional acting thirty years ago, the second taught me that all the best card tricks require an accomplice, and the third increased my pity for animal prisoners.
During my 2 kilometre walk to the library the following week, I decided that non-fiction is no different from good fiction – just less interesting. Both are based on reality, but both leave out everything that doesn’t suit the author.
Fiction, I assured my astonished young librarian, has much more influence on the world than non-fiction. It was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Emil Zola’s Germinal and Dickens’ tales of urban misery rather than philosophical treatises that resulted in a groundswell of opinion supporting compassionate socialism right across Europe and Australasia. Then in the 1970’s, after her philosophical works produced little effect, Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and suddenly the whole world demanded laissez-faire capitalism, the results of which are now making the rich richer and the poor poorer and more miserable.