James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: A lucid, well-written antidote for the distracted public
Consider for a moment if you will the words “long read.” How long is a long read? Google’s artificial intelligence, which now inserts itself autocratically between you and any websites that you might click through and read for yourself, asserts that a long read is “between 2,000 and 6,000 words.” It is, in other words, a piece of writing that asks for somewhere between eight and 24 minutes of your attention: twenty-four minutes – an eternity of phone time. Too long; didn’t read (TL;DR). And consider a related phenomenon, observable by those of us who still think of a long read as something long enough to be bound between hard covers. I mean the increasing overexplicitness of mainstream fiction. Novels now just tell you what they’re doing, and they do it in big dumb strokes repeatedly, in case you get confused and your attention drifts back to your phone. This is visible in mainstream literary fiction (Maggie O’Farrell, Douglas Stuart, Barbara Kingsolver), middlebrow best-sellers (Florence Knapp, Rebecca Kuang), and in popular fiction (Andy Weir, Freida McFadden). Mainstream fiction is becoming a form of “second-screen” entertainment, like streaming TV shows that keep stating the plot because they know you’re also looking at your phone. Obliquity, irony, the long sentence: these things are becoming the business of a dwindling caste of artisans, some of them still celebrated, all of them, it seems, endangered, like red wolves or Siberian tigers. This sounds declinist, I know. But I can’t help but nurse the suspicion that to be a reader of good books in the 21 st century is to be, whether you like it or not, a conservative. A conservative in the strict sense, of course, meaning someone who wants to preserve what’s good about the past and not in the contemporary sense of someone who wants to wreck what’s good about the present. It’s in the strict sense, I think, that the journalist James Marriott is a conservative, although certain aspects of his public persona are, as Gen Z might put it, giving Tory Boy vibes. Marriott went to Oxford and is a columnist for The Times. But let’s not hold these things against him. He writes well. He’s funny. And he’s on the side of the angels – or of the Siberian tigers. The New Dark Ages is the book version of a long read. (That is to say, it is an actual long read, though in printed-book terms it is admirably concise.) In September 2025 Marriott wrote a Substack essay called “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society”. The essay went viral, or, as we used to say in the enlightened past, lots of people read it. The TL;DR of Marriott’s long read was as follows: “Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy. As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves [in] a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.” This is a big thesis and it isn’t wholly original to Marriott. The US journalist Jeff Jarvis told an injudiciously uplifting version of the same story in The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023), and both Jarvis and Marriott draw on the same thinkers: the theorist of oral culture Walter Ong, the 1960s media prophet Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman (author of the classic anti-TV polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death) and the academic Elizabeth Eisenstein, who in 1980 published The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. But the point isn’t that Marriott is cribbing. It’s that he articulates something useful about the terrible age of flux in which we find ourselves. This is an age in which “the ability to read long and complex texts” once “a widespread skill” now “risks becoming a rare, even esoteric accomplishment”. It was, Marriott contends, print culture, with its capacity to store facts, present logical arguments, and its borderless reach, that undermined feudal hierarchies and superstition and brought about the rise of liberal democracy – which is, for all its faults, history’s greatest political achievement. Now the screen in your pocket, full of degraded and degrading “content” brings back amnesia, illogic, and tribalism. Marriott’s book – lucid, disarmingly well-written, and impassioned – itself constitutes a brisk, bracing antidote to this degradation. It’s difficult not to feel that Marriott is too sanguine about the age of print (which gave us Mein Kampf and Auschwitz as well as Madame Bovary and the NHS, after all). But in the age of Elon Musk and Mr Beast – this age of ours in which the best and most honourable human qualities are hourly forgotten and traduced – the habit of reading good books needs all the talented defenders it can find. Kevin Power is an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin