Stranger than fiction?

Here is Rod Liddle in last week’s Sunday Times:

It is a mixed-up world where the greatest literary inventiveness, the most imaginative writing, is found in matters of fact.

And Andrew Marr a while ago in the Observer:

My conclusion, is that non-fiction writing in this country is better – stylistically better, more ambitious, more interesting, more dangerous – than fiction … The tricks of the novel, in rhythm, setting, authorial intervention and characterisation, have been better learned by new generations of historians and biographers than by novelists.

I don’t think that there is a terribly interesting debate to be had by setting fiction up against non-fiction for some spurious position of creative pre-eminence. But I do think it is time to recognise that something special has happened over the last twenty years or so. There has been a change in how non-fiction is written and in how readers experience these books. We have come to expect and demand the same qualities in narrative and voice; we welcome creative story-telling, the intrusion of the personal perspective and experience and even ambiguity.

There are writers of non-fiction whose imaginative landscapes are as unique and original as any fictional voice. Writers such as WG Sebald and Iain Sinclair have created their own very different worlds where fact and fiction collide and no one is ever quite sure where they stand. The stories that excite me are often the telling of real experience that is as imaginative and beautiful as any of the novels I have read. I am looking now at books by Patrick Wright, Luc Sante, George Plimpton, Barry Lopez and Joan Didion, writers of astonishing, beautiful works of non-fiction.

At Harper Perennial we publish some of the greatest writers of narrative non-fiction, writers who have been instrumental, famously, in creating new genres of non-fiction writing. Can you think of a novel that is as imaginatively written as Alexander Masters’ Stuart? Is there a fictional character as extraordinary as Quentin Crisp, the Naked Civil Servant? Has anyone ever written with more intensity and a more unique, tragic experience as Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Well possibly Lorna Sage or Joan Didion.

I recently sent one of our authors, a novelist, a selection of new novels. He sent them back saying, why would anyone want to read fiction these days and could he have some non-fiction books instead? For his sake, I am glad that this is not a universal response. But he is not alone in seeking his literary thrill in the stranger world of non-fiction.

So that is really why we have put these writers together in a promotion and also for our day at Foyles. Of course I want people to read these books and I want every bookshops to sell them, but most of all I want readers who have not discovered the pleasure of this kind of non-fiction before to give it a go. These are great books, books to read for the quality of the writing and the manner of the telling as well as the remarkable stories themselves.