The New Dark Ages by James Marriott review – a grandiose but superficial defence of reading

While other kids watched cartoons, Times columnist James Marriott would spend his school holidays in bed with piles of books – “a mammoth effort of attention, perhaps the greatest I ever made” – under the spell of his father, a teacher who inculcated in him a literary zeal “not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s”.

Twenty-five years on, Marriott fears smartphones have all but killed reading for everyone. He had to get rid of his own – “George Eliot is no match” – and now, watching the rest of us scroll, he worries not only that we will lose the ability to appreciate Middlemarch, but that we risk falling prey to tyrants and anti-vaxxers forging “a world very different to the one we have known … mystical, tribal and autocratic”.

Such is the gist of Marriott’s first book, The New Dark Ages, a polemical elegy tracing the rise and fall of print from Montaigne to Mr Beast. The point is modest – scroll less, read more – but the tone is grandiose. Literacy turbocharged our capacity for complex argument, he argues, but adds that “conversation is very far from useless”, and says “literate civilisation … has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf”.

The readerly bicep Marriott likes flashing is rarely as firm as it looks. “The important things Leo Tolstoy [has] to say about life will only be understood if you can pay attention,” he writes, never saying what they are. His advocacy for books relies on browbeating hyperbole: “I believe there is a kind of truth about life which is only accessible through prose fiction with its capacity to show us the inside of other minds … It is the reason that no actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.” When he actually articulates a novel’s impact, it’s to tell us that Elena Ferrante taught him “what it is like to be a teenage girl”.

Literature isn’t his only focus. “In the early 20th century everyone read a newspaper,” he says, lamenting social media’s impact on politics. He imagines a print report and a TikTok clip from the same war zone: “Even the most simple written article is more likely to offer explanations for events. How did the war start? Why did the war start?” Alternatively, to summon “your rage with an image, I only need to show you a picture of … heaped bodies”; in other words, if you’re angry when “a missile destroys an apartment block in the Middle East” – the clip he envisages – it’s because a journalist hasn’t explained it.

The sense grows that lofty proclamations and punchy quips aren’t enough to keep the book afloat in deep waters. “The 21st century’s much-documented epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness is at least partly rooted in the … culture of the screen,” says Marriott, leaving us to wonder if he’s muddled symptom and cause. When the book begins, he calls smartphones the “major culprit” of the drop in reading for pleasure – “factors like inequality” are less to blame – but it ends by warning that “very rich” people have the resources “to keep their children away from addictive screens. Poorer parents who have to work multiple jobs and who lack the money for childcare do not.”

It’s the last gasp for a thesis whose apocalyptic urgency fizzles out in equivocating caveats. “Post-literate”, Marriott clarifies, doesn’t mean “incapable of reading and writing”: although there may be “fewer Shakespeares, more Slack messages” – how many Shakespeares does he think there have been? – literacy “still has a future”. Which isn’t “to counsel unthinking optimism”, just to say that “even in the worst-case scenario, reading … will be around for a while yet”. Phew!

The New Dark Ages is neatly positioned to appeal to lapsed readers who wince at their weekly screen time report. But there’s a less opportunistic book buried deep between its lines: one about growing up convinced the world begins and ends with literature, only to find that all it took to make you doubt it was a six-inch sliver of black glass.