What makes books so magical? In his first polemical work, Times columnist James Marriott somehow neglects to answer this fundamental question, despite building an entire defence of reading around it.
Marriott's childhood was steeped in literature. While peers watched television, he spent school holidays absorbed in books—"a mammoth effort of attention, perhaps the greatest I ever made"—guided by his father, a teacher who cultivated in him a literary passion "not exactly common in the north of England in the early 2000s". Two and a half decades later, Marriott has become convinced that smartphones have devastated reading habits across society. He abandoned his own device, noting that "George Eliot is no match" for its pull, and now observes the scrolling masses with alarm. His concern extends beyond lost appreciation for classics like Middlemarch; he fears that without reading, people become vulnerable to manipulation by tyrants and anti-vaxxers, creating "a world very different to the one we have known … mystical, tribal and autocratic".
Published on 03 September 2026, The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society is Marriott's attempt to sound this alarm. The 208-page book traces print culture from Montaigne to contemporary influencers, and has been described as a certified bestseller. Its central thesis is straightforward—scroll less, —yet the execution is grandiose in tone. Marriott argues that reading has turbocharged humanity's capacity for complex reasoning, though he concedes that "conversation is very far from useless". He adds that "literate civilisation … has never produced a work of art with quite the same quality of heroic starkness as the Iliad or Beowulf".
Does the argument hold up under scrutiny?
Marriott's rhetorical muscle rarely proves as strong as it appears. When he writes that "the important things Leo Tolstoy [has] to say about life will only be understood if you can pay attention," he never specifies what those insights are. His case for literature relies on hyperbolic browbeating:
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 does point to a concrete example, it lacks depth—he tells us that Elena Ferrante's novels taught him "what it is like to be a teenage girl", a reductive summary of complex literary achievement.
How does Marriott connect reading to democracy?
Beyond fiction, Marriott extends his argument to journalism and civic life. He laments that "in the early 20th century everyone read a newspaper", and he blames social media for degrading political discourse. He imagines two accounts of a war zone conflict: one from a written news article, the other from a TikTok video.
Even the most simple written article is more likely to offer explanations for events. How did the war start? Why did the war start?By contrast, visual media works through emotion rather than explanation:
to summon your rage with an image, I only need to show you a picture of … heaped bodies. In other words, anger at footage of destruction stems not from understanding but from raw emotional impact—a journalist's explanatory work is what transforms outrage into informed judgment. This argument has resonated in recent UK discourse; a September 2026 commentary warned that democracy cannot survive the death of reading.
Where does the thesis unravel?
The book's internal contradictions become apparent as it progresses. Marriott claims that "the 21st century's much-documented epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness is at least partly rooted in the … culture of the screen," yet he offers no evidence that screens cause these conditions rather than reflecting them. Early on, he identifies smartphones as the "major culprit" in declining recreational reading, dismissing "factors like inequality" as secondary concerns. By the conclusion, however, he reverses course:
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.This admission—that economic inequality, not device addiction, determines reading access—fatally undermines his central premise.
The apocalyptic tone dissipates into equivocation. Marriott clarifies that "post-literate" does not mean "incapable of reading and writing". Though there may be "fewer Shakespeares, more Slack messages"—a curious metric, given how few Shakespeares have ever existed—literacy "still has a future". This is not, he insists, "to counsel unthinking optimism", merely to observe that "even in the worst-case scenario, reading … will be around for a while yet". The urgency evaporates.
What do the statistics show?
A September 2026 podcast discussion noted that a third of British adults who used to read for pleasure no longer do, and linked this decline to broader literacy challenges across OECD countries. The trend is real, and Marriott's concern is not baseless. Yet his book fails to grapple seriously with why people stop reading—whether from lack of time, cost, competing entertainment, educational gaps, or genuine preference. Instead, he attributes the shift almost entirely to smartphone distraction, a diagnosis that collapses when confronted with the economic realities he himself acknowledges.
The book's appeal lies in its target audience: lapsed readers who wince at their weekly screen time reports and harbour nostalgia for a literary past. For them, Marriott offers validation and a simple villain—the smartphone—rather than uncomfortable truths about inequality, education, and access. Yet a more honest book lurks beneath the polemic: a meditation on growing up convinced that the world begins and ends with literature, only to discover that all it took to shake that faith was a six-inch sliver of black glass.
What comes next?
The book has already sparked significant debate in UK literary circles. A September 2026 review in Engelsberg Ideas framed Marriott's argument as a mourning for the print age and a debate about the costs and benefits of mass literacy. The U.S. edition is scheduled for release on 6 October 2026, suggesting the conversation will expand across the Atlantic. Whether American readers will find the argument more persuasive than their British counterparts remains to be seen.
