I have been to dinners at which the host, having gone to considerable expense, could not resist telling the table in advance what each course would be, where the fish had come from, and how remarkable we were all shortly going to find it. The food was invariably excellent. The evening was invariably ruined, because a man who explains his own dinner has told you, without meaning to, that he does not trust it to arrive on its own merits.

This is a prophecy. This is the entire mechanism, and I do not understand why we go on tolerating it.

Here is the arrangement I have now read four hundred times. A child is born. Somebody very old, or very blind, or both, announces in a verse form nobody has employed since the Bronze Age that this child will end an age. Nine hundred pages later, at considerable length, the child ends an age.

We are invited to receive this as inevitability. What we in fact receive is a spoiler with superior lighting.

A prophecy converts every choice a character makes into a formality. The plot is no longer happening. It is being confirmed.

The defence, offered patiently and in good faith by people who love these books, is that the pleasure lies in the how rather than the whether. Very well. Except that precisely the same defence is available to a novel containing no prophecy whatsoever, and that novel is handed the whether as well, at no charge. The prophecy costs something and purchases nothing, which is the definition of a bad acquisition.

What it displaces

The graver objection is what the device does to everyone standing near it.

Secondary characters cease to have plans and acquire, instead, positions relative to the chosen one. Institutions that might have been genuinely interesting, the guilds and the navies and the revenue offices, are demoted to weather. A book that could have concerned a society under pressure becomes a book about one young person’s schedule, and there is nothing in literature less absorbing than somebody else’s diary.

Consider the fantasy of the last decade that readers actually press upon one another. Almost none of it runs on prophecy. It runs on debt, on inheritance, on somebody wanting a position they cannot have. Those engines manufacture uncertainty, which is the only commodity a plot genuinely deals in.

A question of confidence

I want to name the real fault, because it is not a fault of plotting at all. It is a fault of nerve.

A great house does not inform you that it is a great house. It permits you to walk through it and reach the conclusion yourself, and it is entirely willing to risk your failing to. The moment a building starts labelling its own proportions it has confessed that it doubts them. Prophecy is that placard, in hexameter. It is an author standing at the door of his own novel, anxious that you may not grasp the scale of what he has built, pressing a programme into your hand.

The books that endure rarely do this. They set the thing down and withdraw, and they accept the risk that some readers will walk past. On the rare occasions where prophecy is done tolerably, it is because it resolves in a truly unexpected way: the boy who lived actually survived avada-kedavra twice, or a clever play on words is revealed that reverses the prohecy’s meaning or contorts it sufficiently, and so on.

I am not calling for the abolition of fate, which would be barbarous. Tragedy requires it. So does the finest fantasy of doom, the sort in which a character perceives the shape of the ending and walks into it regardless, and that is genuinely unbearable in the correct way.

But let’s observe the distinction between a character believing in a prophecy and the book believing in one. The first is a portrait of a human being under pressure. The second is an author declining to gamble.

I will admit to one prejudice here, and then I shall say no more about it. I was raised in a household where a great deal about my future had been settled before I was consulted, and I can report that being told the ending in advance does not produce serenity. It produces a peculiar impatience with the intervening chapters. One stops attending. One assumes the thing will arrive whether one participates or not.

It did not, as it happens. But that is another matter entirely. And my glass is empty.