Something has happened in the 40 odd years of my life that only struck me this evening as I was trying to come up with something for this blog.

In that time I have seen a revolution in the popularity of non-fiction in two waves. The first was the rise of the self-help book and the second was the rise of the Internet.

Self help books have been around since the earliest days of written wisdom (probably the Greeks, but I’m no classical historian). However until the 20th Century they were pretty much exclusively for the elite i.e. those who could read.

The 1980s saw a massive increase in the focus on material wealth and the need for self-improvement. What then followed was a succession of self professed experts claiming to hold the key to everything from health and wealth to spiritual awakening and sexual prowess. Tony Robbins and his contemporaries became the new spiritual leaders in Western society.

In contrast, when I was a boy, we watched in awe as the full set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica was delivered to our home, which my dad then read cover to cover. That was his self-help. Wisdom came not through the opinion of a guru, but through the collection of knowledge and personal experience.

Then, when I was at university in the early ’90s, I saw the birth of the internet. It was amazing how we gravitated towards Bulletin Board Systems to share information or, more often, flame each other.

The rise of the internet that followed these early days saw people start to rely on Usenet, then Internet forums, then Excite and Alta Vista and finally Yahoo and the all conquering Google, for all the information they needed; people stopped reading books.

The problem with the rise of the self-help book and its gurus and the “all-knowing” interweb is that they present themselves as authorities of knowledge. While not necessarily claiming explicitly, they imply complete objectivity. We get sucked in to believing the information to be objectively and self-evidently true.

Fiction on the other hand claims nothing of the sort; it isn’t pretending to be anything other than subjective.

A novelist writes from personal experience, but not as themselves and never claiming expertise.

The truth is many are more expert than the most prolific self-help guru or Internet wiki-hero.

Take for example Hilary Mantel’s historical novels of Thomas Cromwell; pure fiction but ridiculously well researched giving insights in to a time and people that triggered earth-shattering changes in Western society. Mantel doesn’t pretend to be anything other than subjective but helps us understand some of how we came to be where we are now not through a profession of factual expertise, but through pure fantasy.

Extensive historical research aside, novelists also use allegory through their fiction to impart more compelling lessons than non-fiction writers. The Bible is an early example and more recently consider the novels of Mitch Albom and Paulo Coehlo.

When a friend in London, Donna Wright, told me about the impact Coelho’s The Alchemist had on her and a friend of hers I took notice. Donna is an intelligent, generous, hilarious woman, who doesn’t suffer fools and is not readily impressionable. It was a novel she described as something that could change your life, not through expert opinion but though a fable and pure allegory.

Albom has the same gift. If you can put aside the “preachy” nature of the parables, his books are infinitely more powerful than any non-fiction book or Google search result.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading well informed research and commentary. But I read with a skeptical eye aware it is a reflection of the author’s bias (unconscious or not) and will always avoid popular non-fiction pretending to be something it’s not.

Give me a little fantasy any day for an insight in to the truth.