AFTER READING JOHN BANVILLE’S Man Booker prize-winning The Sea, a slim volume trumpeted as fiction, I was startled to discover, upon perusing my hefty atlas, that this supposedly fantastical place named Ireland was an actual island. While reading, I thought it sounded familiar, yet I let it slide, not wanting niggling particulars to ruin the experience.

Stunned by my discovery, I was unsettled by other suspicions: What if the main character, this Max Morden, was an actual person. I explored the phone book and came up with four individuals bearing the name Maxwell Morden. Feeling more greatly duped, I telephoned the first three and demanded to know on what ground each stood. Yet despite repeated harassment, none would concede to being fictional.

I managed to receive answers at only three. The line was not picked up at the fourth. Aha, now I might be getting somewhere. Perhaps this was the fictional character. I kept ringing. Two days later, the line was disconnected. Perhaps Mr Banville had been writing fiction after all.

But as a page-by-page analysis of The Sea turned up a plethora of verifiable facts, I believe a comprehensive investigation is in order. If the sanctioned percentage of fact (to be determined by James Frey) exceeds the appropriate percentage of fiction, I suggest that it would be prudent for the Booker committee to strip Banville of his award.

This eye-opening revelation hurled me into further thought. Before Banville’s volume, I had read J. M. Coetzee’s Youth. It was clearly labelled fiction yet, according to information from hired investigators who specialise in these literary inquests, most of these events actually happened to Mr Coetzee. Here he was shamelessly pawning it off as fiction. The nerve.

Even works of more wild imagination, ones that should be entitled to the stamp of fiction, ones by Ray Bradbury or J. R. R. Tolkien, say, have actual people in them, humans with teeth and hair (are fictional characters permitted teeth, or is that too concrete an attribute). Should not fictional characters be complete inventions, speaking a language no one might understand, existing in nonsensical realms — in fact, not exist in book form at all?

How can a book be fiction if it is in book form? Shouldn’t the form be something else entirely — a car or a piece of bologna? “Here is my new book,” a fictional author might say, handing a reader a piece of bologna. “It’s my new work of fiction.”

In keeping with these principles, should not an author of fiction be fictional himself? Why should a writer who spends his life claiming that what he creates is entirely invented, be allowed to use his own name or live in a real house? Doesn’t that cast a shadow of doubt over the entire undertaking? Shouldn’t the author of a novel choose the name of his dog, or the name of a rock, to put on the cover?

This feeling of being cheated and of violation to my very soul led me to contact a lawyer who is at present engaged in writing a class action against authors who have mis-stated fact for fiction.

Of course, I have not undertaken such an action for the money, but to segregate black and white from corrupting shades of grey. I will be contacting the appropriate government agencies in the hope of initiating a committee to investigate the proliferation of fact in fiction. The goal is to have every reference to fact excised from any work labelled fiction. A laborious undertaking, yet one that some brave soul must endure in the hope of returning the spirit of complete fabrication to the untruthful name of what we once believed to be fiction.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s latest work of 68 per cent fiction is The Town that Forgot How to Breathe (Vintage).

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