Literature vs genre is a battle where both sides lose

Literary fiction is an artificial luxury brand but it doesn’t sell. So nobody benefits by fencing it off from more popular writing

It’s always a problem when one of literature’s big beasts wanders off the reservation into the badlands of genre. The latest to blunder through the electric barriers erected around the safe zone is two-time Booker prize nominee David Mitchell, whose new book Slade House is undeniably a haunted house story. Or, as the Chicago Tribune put it, his “take on a classic ghost story”. As if the thousands of genre ghost stories written every year by horror writers weren’t also one individual’s take on that classic form.

Slade House is a good ghost story, but is it quantifiably a higher form of fiction? Margaret Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale certainly has fewer gunfights than Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, but does that make it more or less realistic? I’m happy to call Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series far superior to Isaac Asimov’s stodgy Foundation novels, but thousands of sci-fi fans would disagree. And yet the literary world is determined to claim, even while it’s stealing genre’s clothes, that it somehow wears them better.

Related: David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation'

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