And after that I heard someone say that Nigel Pargetter had been locked up half the night in a phone box during his stag party, none of which has anything to do with the state of modern literature. Nevertheless, you often hear people on the radio say that people are turning more and more to biography than the novel. The reasoning seems to be that modern novels don't give us a gripping story any more, or big characters, and that to find them you have to turn to biographies, where the sinister figure of Lord Mountbatten or the baffling figure of Graham Greene loom larger than the heroes of any Booker hopeful.Nobody is writing books like Greene's any more, but at least they are still writing lives like Greene's, that's the feeling. And indeed, if you look at the current issue of the estimable Literary Review, you can't help noticing that there are more reviews in the biography section than the fiction section, as if demand and supply are keeping pace with each other.(It's odd that novels are being dismissed at a time when any tennis player, fashion model or stand-up comedian worth their salt is trying their hand at their first novel Or maybe it's not. Maybe people are feeling now that novels are things you write, not read. That if Naomi Campbell thinks it is worth writing a novel, it can't be worth reading, and that if Baddiel and Newman write novels, it's only so that Newman and Baddiel will have something by their chums to read. The way things are going, footballers will be writing novels Maybe Terry Venables will be the first to burst into print No, hold on, Terry Venables has already burst into print. Was not the Hazell series of crime thrillers co-written by him and Gordon Williams many years ago? Yes, it was He was way before his time.

.)What surprises me is that nobody has applied Darwinian theory to all this. If you believe in the theory of evolution, you must believe that things evolve and adapt in self-protection. Therefore, you would expect the novel to change to meet the threat from the biography. Therefore, you might expect the novel, in self-defence, to start becoming more like the art of biography.And if you look around, this is precisely what you find.I was listening to Christopher Bigsby interviewing Joseph Heller about the latter's new, and last, novel, Closing Time.There is a lot of autobiographical detail in your novel, said Bigsby.Yes, said the great man. I made a deliberate decision to include a lot of autobiographical stuff about my youth in Coney Island.Another example? Ray Davies, leader of the Kinks, has just brought out the story of his life. It is, by and large, a chronological tale of his youth and career in the music industry.