Anyone proposing to publish a polemic between hard covers about the decline of literacy and reading will, of course, find themselves preaching to the choir. If you read books, you will agree with this one; if you don’t, your negligence will not be touched by its fervour. I won’t say that it is a useless object; merely how unhelpful it would be simply to agree with its main point.
The decline of reading practices is quite convincingly demonstrated in surveys. Fewer and fewer people in the US and Britain read habitually, by their own admission. In one celebrated case, an entire cohort of English literature academics in America was unable to make anything at all of the first page of Bleak House. The trend seems to correspond with a decline in general intellectual ability, as reported in IQ tests. The explanation for this is given as the rise of smartphones and online distractions, which may have accelerated a process already observable since the introduction of screens of all sorts. In a fascinating, puckish study cited by James Marriott, the slow roll-out of cable TV across Norway’s challenging terrain is shown to correspond exactly to a small but measurable fall in IQ in each location.
The impact has been marked, not just on consumers but on many forms of entertainment and information. In brief: even the junk is getting worse. Netflix movies oblige their characters repeatedly to explain what’s happening. Pop music is becoming more rudimentary. I think I first noticed this when Beyoncé’s colossal hit ‘Single Ladies’ attained its global triumph on the back of a tune sung by eight-year-old girls playing a clapping game. Studies have laboriously demonstrated that both melodies and lyrics have grown simpler over the past 50 years. But if you go into a cool-ish bar or coffee shop, the music playing is more likely to come from the 1970s than the 2020s. And the most challenging music of the time seems to be holding up pretty well. Never mind Joni Mitchell; you can sell out a concert hall with an all-Ligeti programme. The enthusiasm for the dumbed-down may not be as universal as we worry it is. People long for complexity, in parts.
But even if this book doesn’t quite convince in its tone of catastrophe, there is no doubt that a decline in reading in large parts of the population is happening, and it brings some terrible implications. Marriott emphasises the threat to truth and the flourishing of mad fantasies. A public that won’t go near books or print newspapers and gets everything from online sources will erode standards. You only have to look at the opprobrium heaped on those trying to find objective truth in the history of a questionable academic appointment, who were told that they must only believe and respect individual feelings, to see what that will do in the end.
Marriott is a Times columnist, and this is his debut book. He has a proposal to sell, and the style throughout is journalistic. The Iliad is ‘Homer’s famous epic poem about the Trojan War’, and no name appears without its defining adjectival cluster. You may find this newspaper habit annoying or merely otiose and inelegant, giving off the impression of nervousness. ‘The novelist H.G. Wells’, ‘the novelist Victor Hugo’ and ‘the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’ follow hot on each other’s trail. Even the most banal observation needs backing up with a named authority and a quote: when near universal literacy was achieved in society, ‘as the historian Robert Darnton puts it, this was a “turning point”’.
Montaigne, early astronomy, correspondence between philosophers, Dr Johnson’s reading habits, the Industrial Revolution and revolutionary feminism are swept through in six not entirely coherent pages. Marriott is excellent, however, on the forces which he thinks are affecting our habits of reading. If classic fiction is only referred to briefly, loving attention is paid to the evolution of the smartphone; and some pages dwell on the online output of someone called Mr Beast, and even stranger algorithmic entertainments:
AI-generated animated characters with fruit for heads enact brief soap-operatic (and sometimes faintly pornographic) emotional dramas. The curvaceous Mrs Strawberry-head has an affair with the handsome and expensively suited Mr Banana-head.
‘This junk content is so irresistible,’ Marriott says. Well, I don’t know about that. It seems fairly resistible to me. I quite enjoyed ‘Single Ladies’ when it came out, for about ten days. On the other hand, the Eroica Symphony’s pleasures were appreciated, after a little effort, 50 years ago, and are still going strong. If you think that sounds snobbish, then you’re part of the problem. The issue which Marriott doesn’t quite address is that the habit of reading is becoming a class-based one. Fifty years ago, a child like me at a state school had access to excellent libraries, an ambitious curriculum and a literary culture of bold tendencies and a willingness to entertain. (I well remember the eruption of Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers.) All those public resources have receded somewhat. No one at a Sheffield comprehensive has been told to read Madame Bovary in French for decades. In recent years, the bookish child is much more likely to emerge from private education and a professional family background. If the habit of reading is going to be something largely ensured by social status, then social standing is going to harden, and life for all of us is going to grow worse. There is, however, no real prospect that reading is going to disappear from the most successful parts of society.
The New Dark Ages is a usefully cautionary contribution to the argument – though I did feel that it had a slight seat-of-the-pants feel to it, and my recurrent response was: ‘Oh, come off it.’ Maybe this was a book that should have been written by someone with a large store of experience at the end of a long intellectual career. That said, there is value in hearing from someone who has, as Marriott says, a foot in both camps – who has been affected by screens and games and streaming and social media in ways that will always remain somewhat mysterious to the older generation. If ‘Charlie bit me’ is a more widely recognised phrase than ‘Reader, I married him’, then we are going to have consequences to face which can’t only be analysed from outside.
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