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Writing fiction allows you a certain grace that writing opinion doesn’t. Since Pepsi Bears was published this month I’ve been compared to Jonathan Swift, Roald Dahl and Peter Carey. Critics and bloggers have said a great many nice things.

But I also write opinion pieces and articles for newspapers and websites. In the comment trails the audience splits into warring factions and I am either lauded as a child of The Enlightenment or, just as frequently, cited as an ally of the devil, a dimwit of the first water, a smartarse desk-jockey, a pinko, commo mongrel and/or a right-wing Tory hack.

It was shocking for me to learn that a goodly percentage of the readers of major broadsheets cannot read satire at all. They don’t have the critical facility, or the sense of humour or, perhaps, they don’t even recognise what it is. Or maybe they just like being angry. And it is, of course, easy to be strident, brave, and furiously righteous while sitting anonymously in your bedroom. I suspect many haunt the comment trails because they aren’t the type of people who could voice an opinion in public. Which shows these online Speakers Corners do have some value.

But, anyway, let me tell you the readers of fiction are, by and large, better readers than the readers of newspapers or their online equivalents. Jorge Luis Borges once said, “A good reader is a rarer and blacker swan than a good writer.” Presumably the swans in Argentina, as in fairytales, are white. But the man has a valid point. Not everyone reads with the same degree of acuity, clarity or precision. Not everyone brings a powerful and informed imagination to bear. This, presumably, explains the popularity of Dan Brown and his brethren.