Attending theatre and browsing the shelves of bookshops I find depressing these days. All the products on offer are marketed through their capacity to hit a buzzword or an issue of the day. When I saw a production of Henry V they seemed to want to convince me that colonialism and climate were the two main themes of this play. No, colonialism and climate are two of the main themes of our day. You will only have a book read by an agent or a publisher if it hits contemporary issues right in the bull’s eye.. Everything aims to comfort you in your certainty. Of course, an important point about literature is that it reaches into the cracks between the slabs of conviction; those ill-defined places that (if this is an interesting product) even the author cannot explain any other way than her or his ambiguous, uncertain text. Fiction is a fumbling investigation; a turning over of soil, not the laying of a foundation. That is why it is a novel and not a treatise.

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