A London Guide to the Future of the Novel

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London is my city and my home, a place I left and returned to in trying (and failing) to write my first novel. I write about this journey in The Future of the Novel, tracing in the process a possible future trajectory for the form itself – through its settings, characters, plots and increasingly high-tech apparatus. London does not have the visible fire hydrants of Paris or New York but my experience, on returning to the city, of finally finding my fictional voice had something at least of what Saul Bellow describes when witnessing, one post-war morning in the French capital, the municipal workers letting water run from the hydrants along the kerbs as he walked to his writing room. He can’t say precisely how it happened, but he was ‘suddenly enriched with words and phrases’. The gloom went out of him and he found myself ‘with magical suddenness writing a first paragraph’. Bellow’s description of the experience reflected its inspiration: he’d been ‘turned on like a hydrant in summer’. The novel – and its future – is similarly inscribed for me on London’s streets, and in this guide and commentary I identify just a handful of its signposts, sights and milestones.

Future’s Past: London’s first handwritten texts

The future of the novel is inevitably rooted in the past, so I start this guide with what are not only London’s first handwritten texts, but the oldest handwritten texts ever found in Britain, from 43-53 CE, during the earliest years of Roman rule in Britain. The Bloomberg Writing Tablets were found in the City (London’s financial district), on the site of an unprepossessing 1950s office building that had been demolished to make way for a new building. London Mithraeum, where some of these finds can be viewed, is very corporate – it is on the site of Bloomberg’s European headquarters – and the visit to the Roman ruins beneath has been turned into a sound and light ‘temple experience’. Despite that, it is fascinating, and provides important insights not only into the early history of the city but also into its first discovered writings. It is from the ruins of these trading posts and sites of colonial conquest that the novel emerges.

Shakespeare’s Globe

A short walk down to the River Thames and across Southwark Bridge will take you from Roman to Elizabethan London in the form of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Yet I use this as a mere staging post towards Shakespeare’s contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes, a writer of central importance to the history and future of the novel. Recorded as both having died on the same date (April 23, 1616 – although the truth is a little more complicated than that), Cervantes’ impact on the novel is commensurate with the Bard’s enduring influence on the theatre. Widely recognised as the first modern novel, Don Quixote was voted the ‘most meaningful book of all time’ in a 2002 survey of around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries. From the moment Don Quixote loses his mind from reading too many tales of chivalry, adopting their plots, characters and style for his own adventures, the modern novel has been grounded in a relationship with other texts – a process that generative AI now seems to be accelerating. And despite the perennial debates about its decline – or even demise – there is still nothing better suited than the novel to project life onto the imagination (to paraphrase the great Henry James’ essay ‘The Future of the Novel’, from 1899).

From Kilburn to Coldharbour Lane

London Bridge station takes us on the Jubilee line to Kilburn and to Zadie Smith’s old stomping ground (and mine), and the setting for some of her novels, including parts of The Fraud, her most recent. Instead of the fiction, though, I want to highlight her essay: ‘Two Directions for the Novel’ (originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2008 as ‘Two Paths for the Novel’). This is part of a long line of essays by fiction writers on the future of the novel, starting with Henry James, and I have enjoyed analysing what these say about the contemporary period within which they were written (with the possible effects of generative AI on long-form fiction being one of the main themes of my own book).

Conventional novels will, of course, continue to be written and read.

The two directions of Smith’s title relate to what she calls the ‘Balzac-Flaubert model’ of ‘lyrical realism’ on the one hand and the ‘avant-garde challenges’ to it on the other. She illustrates her thesis by exploring two novels from that time: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthey’s Remainder. The latter takes us to South London, initially to a flat just off Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton, and towards an intention (in Smith’s analysis) ‘to shake the novel out of its present complacency’, to offer ‘a glimpse of an alternative road down which the novel might, with difficulty travel forward’. Rather than convincing us that it is down one or the other of these paths that the true future of the novel lies, Smith argues that in ‘healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene’.

The Novel of the Future: The World’s End in Camden

We arrive at our terminus after a short walk to West Hampstead, and a train on what’s now called the Mildmay Line to Camden Road. The City Changes Its Face, Eimear McBride’s new novel, is partly set, like its predecessor, The Lesser Bohemians, in the World’s End pub in Camden – a fitting place  to conclude. Conventional novels will, of course, continue to be written and read: there’s still plenty of good music to be composed in the key of C Major (as the composer Schönberg is reported to have said). The future of the novel will remain, though, with those like McBride who choose to experiment, to push boundaries, to break the mould.

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Author image: © Royal Literary Fund / Adïam Yemane.

Simon Okotie is a fiction writer and essayist whose novels Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon?, In the Absence of Absalon and After Absalon are published by Salt. ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life,’ The London Review of Books. The Future of the Novel, a book-length essay, is published by Melville House.

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