We live in a time of “accelerating world crisis”, says Hugh Hewitt in The Washington Post. China is threatening Taiwan, Vladimir Putin is waging war in Europe, Iran has joined the “anti-Western bloc”. This litany of dangers makes many of us turn to novels. For there are good reasons to read fiction “in a time of urgent facts”. First, it can “keep anxious minds from chewing themselves to bits”. During the most perilous years of the Second World War, Winston Churchill escaped into books like Moll Flanders and Pride and Prejudice. When American troops rode to the rescue, they were led by a general, Dwight D Eisenhower, who “treated his nerves with an endless supply of Westerns”.
Reading provides a sense of proportion: in an age where “algorithms and attention seekers conspire to inflate every shooting star of a story into an event of historical significance”, it teaches us “that dogs have barked and carnivals passed from time immemorial”. Novels also give us wisdom. In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, for example, we meet one of the great scoundrels of all literature, the one-legged thief Cyrus Trask. The book teaches us that life is “defined by our moral choices. To have considered those choices via fiction is to prepare for making them in life.” So “even as terrible times loom and circuses explode every day across the media”, we must go on reading.