At the beginning of 2006, the scandal of the moment in literary circles involved James Frey, accused of fictionalizing details in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and subsequently raked over the coals by Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen the book for her book club. (Oprah, who had previously stood behind Frey, turned on the author when people started accusing her of not caring about the truth.) Five years later, William Skidelsky claims that one of the problems with literature (and film and theatre) is not so much fictionalized truth, of which there is no shortage, but the lack of truly imaginative works.

Writing in the Guardian, Skidelsky points to recent books such as Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Room by Emma Donoghue, and Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, as well as forthcoming novels by David Lodge, Monica Ali, and Jay Parini, to make the case that much of today’s highly touted fiction finds inspiration in historical characters and events. The problem, Skidelsky says, is that by eschewing fiction that is entirely imaginative, writers are providing only “meagre offerings that cannot escape the confines of their reality-bound aspirations.”

Skidelsky writes:

It may seem odd to begrudge artists any new outlet for expression that helps them pay the bills. Yet we would do well to be aware of the limitations of fact-based storytelling and recognise the confusions it can produce.

For one thing, if interest in a work of art is triggered by a desire to learn about real events, that represents a radical shift in our understanding of art’s purpose. Throughout history, people have turned to art for various reasons, but two consistent ones have been a desire to be entertained or transported and a desire to learn more about what might be called (for want of a better term) the human condition. Yet in a world of docudramas and biopics, another factor enters the picture. Storytelling becomes a kind of lightweight pedagogical aid “ almost a branch of investigative journalism. The risk here is that, by being placed at the service of factual knowledge, creativity loses its justification and becomes devalued as a result.

Indeed, Skidelsky suggests that The King’s Speech and The Social Network, two frontrunners for this year’s Academy Awards, pale in comparison to completely fictional historical films of the recent past, such as There Will Be Blood or White Ribbon, or a novel like Colm Tóbín’s Brooklyn.

Here in Canada, Kate Pullinger’s Governor General’s Literary Award winner The Mistress of Nothing told the story of Lady Duff Gordon and her mistress, Sally. One of the big books of last fall was Michael Winter’s “documentary fiction,” The Death of Donna Whalen. This spring sees the arrival of Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul, a new novel by David Adams Richards based on a true-life murder in New Brunswick and Quiver, the debut novel by Holly Luhning, which is in part about the history of the 16th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory.

These books may only add weight to Skidelsky’s argument, unless one assumes that all art is the result of an artist interrogating the world around her and offering a creative response, at which point the distinction between “fact-based storytelling” and its purely imaginative counterpart begins to recede.