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‘The special fate of the novel,’ Frank Kermode has written, ‘is always to be dying’ In Britain, the terminal state seems indigenous to the culture Beating our chests about the lassitude of novel writing appears to be a critical tradition in its own right Our last literary season has long passed, it’s generally agreed Whatever happened to the British novel? Well, according to folklore it  succumbed to the inclement weather of later consumer culture, or the New Philistinism, or the dumbing down of a compromised welfare consensus, or the paralysing legacies of modernism or a post-imperial loss of status These days, we might lay the blame for the troubled fate of the British novel with the publishers, the prize culture and, latterly, what is being euphemised as the ‘Amazon problem’ But we somehow suspect that these are only the tokens of a more intractable and elusive national malady That there’s something rotten about British culture that somehow fails to nourish the writing and reading of new fiction   See, for example, the response of one writer, currently fêted in academic Europhile circles, who we voxpopped about new British fiction for this piece: ‘I’m not sure I have anything to say I didn’t know there was any’ Disingenuous hauteur or self-possessed national self-dispossession? Is this now ritualised disavowal of the new in British fiction merely an empty but unexamined myth ripe for explosion, or are there real but more obstinate problems in nurturing innovative fictional writing in Britain? If so, do the problems lie with the writing, the perception of the writing, or with the national culture that frames production and reception of the writing? Or do the problems begin somewhere else altogether? Our refusenik jabbed his index finger at the problem and then shrugged his shoulders and walked away Did he wish to deny his own status as an innovator, or his identity as British, or is he the self-styled exception that proves the rule?   In a culture where all too often literary ‘innovation’ is read as ‘degeneration’, where the experimental novelist is viewed as a case of narcissistic personality disorder, and where