Comfort Food or Bitter Pill

Something my editor said to me yesterday has been bothering me, and I‘d like to hear your thoughts on it. She said that when the real world is in a mess and the future looks bleak, (i.e. now) people read fiction to feel better. Her theory is that most people turn to non-fiction to understand current events and the more depressing these current events, the more uplifting fiction needs to be.

Now, I don’t see this as being a particularly earth-shattering idea – we talk about certain books or films as being ‘escapist’ all the time. But my editor seems to think that the desire for escapist fiction has exploded alongside the explosion in political non-fiction sales. I argued that any fiction can be an escape from grim reality as long as it sucks the reader right into the story. That’s all fine and good, she said, but at the end of the book, the reader has to return to the world and if the story has left them more depressed than when they started reading, they won’t thank you for it.

Now this is not really an issue with my work in progress, fortunately, but I’m wondering about it in relation to the reactions I’ve had to my recently released novel. The book deals with an illegal and morally repungant relationship, but does so in a way that leaves it up to the reader to make judgements about the characters’ behaviour. I realised that the driving force behind the book was the way that desire overrules sense, and I wanted the reader to feel that. I wanted to create a constant tension between feeling repelled and seduced, outraged and sympathetic. What’s fascinating is that for every reader who appreciates the lack of overt moralising and, I suppose ‘justice,’ in the novel there is one who sees this as the book’s greatest flaw.

Since many of you write and read fiction dealing with murder, brutality and other nasties, I wonder if you can articulate why you enjoy this fiction. Is it simply an escape into a fictional world that grips you sufficiently to hold you there, or do you want something more? Since the real world is shitty and unfair, do you want this to be reflected in the ‘realist’ novels you read, or is the knowledge the world is shitty, unfair etc. the very thing that drives you to seek out worlds where life is actually pretty just? My feeling is that it’s largely a matter of taste, and that the same reader may even switch back and forth depending on mood, sometimes wanting fiction to reassure that all is right with the world, and sometimes wanting fiction to force an examination of assumptions. Thoughts?