Salman Rushdie is right: the best telly is marvellous. But HBO will never kill off the novel

Rushdie, who has been writing a science fiction TV series, has said that telly is “the best of both worlds”. Unlike in feature films, he says, you get absolute control as a TV writer over character and story, as you do in a novel. As a result, the best telly is high-class stuff – like The West Wing, Mad Men and The Wire.
He’s quite right. The best telly these days is pretty marvellous. He might have thrown in Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office – comedy that is as good as anything on telly over the last half century.
It’s also a lot funnier than most comic novels of the last half century. But that doesn’t mean that telly has conquered the novel. Television can do certain things better than books – visual comedy and natural history, say; archive footage and live news coverage of huge visual events like the Twin Towers attacks, cannot be matched on the page.
But, then again, novels trump telly when it comes to interior thoughts. You can’t act out embarrassment, sadness, amusement, pain – and a million other human emotions – in the way that the best novelists can describe them, because they are all essentially mental, internal functions.
Of course, telly can always replicate writing, by just having a narrator reading out a book. That’s why the TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited – as opposed to the second-rate film version – was so good; much of the book was read out by Jeremy Irons, helped along by the lush music and the grand settings.
But television usually fights shy of straightforward reading out of texts – that seems like only using a small amount of telly’s firepower. And hearing someone else read a great novel aloud is not the same as reading it to yourself, at a far greater speed, and using your own imagination to fill the visual gaps, rather than letting an actor and director do it for you. When it comes to activating the imagination, novels will always have the edge over telly.