Robert Harris, who wrote Pompeii, Engima and Fatherland, said slick television programmes are so easily available that they shove novels out of the limelight
Netflix and DVD box sets are killing off the novel, according to best-selling author Robert Harris.
Mr Harris, who wrote Pompeii, Engima and Fatherland, said slick television programmes are so easily available that they shove novels out of the limelight.
The author said the novel had ‘moved away from a central position in the culture’.
He told the BBC’s Today Programme: ‘The box set – which takes 10 or 12 hours to view a series – is in a way about the same length of time it takes to read a novel.
‘My impression is that these series are pretty sophisticated and it seems that they are in many ways our modern novel.
‘They’re more central in our culture, you hear more people talking about Breaking Bad than you do about a novel.’
But he stopped short of committing the novel to the graveyard, saying ‘no other medium’ could provide the immersive experience of a book.
He claimed the ‘mid-market’ of books had been squeezed out, leaving either ‘airport thrillers’ or highly-sophisticated novels.
He explained: ‘The rise of the supermarkets has had the effect of making winners and losers.
The author said the novel had ‘moved away from a central position in the culture’, with Netflix taking the main stage
‘I think the statistic is that the top 1 per cent of authors account for a third of all sales, so there’s a lot of people in the middle there that find it very hard to scrape a living these days.’
The former BBC presenter, 60, turned on his former employer in 2015, accusing it of ‘disgraceful’ book coverage.
He said that in the 1970s, the BBC had two dedicated book programmes – now it has none.
The author, who has just published his 12th book, demanded books were put back on the television schedule.
He said: ‘It’s an absolute disgrace that the BBC, a publicly-funded organisation shouldn’t do a bit more to help our books business.
‘Come on, Tony Hall, if you’re watching this on BBC News: do a little bit more for the book trade, please.
‘If I remember rightly, The Book Programme was on BBC Two and Read All About It with Melvyn Bragg was on BBC One. Imagine that: a books programme on BBC One.’