THERE'S more truth in a good novel than in a sackful of treaties. Robinson Crusoe wasn't simply a shipwreck but the embodiment of bourgeois man who had dropped, as it were, from the womb of the old feudal order. Crusoe was an individual facing his Maker and no papal or high anglican sacraments or adornments were obstructing his view. Here was man in a fight for his own salvation. Pitted against nature. Struggling to master his fears and be master of his own destiny. The bourgeois man/hero.

Marooned on a near-desert island he built his own country estate, his island economy, his little bit of Western capitalism nestling in a vast foreign ocean. He encounters and suborns a black native whom he names Friday. His man Friday became a synonym for lackey. Friday was a savage whom he had to make, insofar as the genetic material would allow, into a civilised, obedient, Black Anglo Saxon Protestant (BASP) lackey.

Daniel Defoe wrote hundreds of political pamphlets. Reckoned to be the best pamphleteer of his day. Yet in two of his novels, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, he told more truths about the society in which he lived than in all his pamphlets. Robinson Crusoe was arguably the first novel, a literary art form only possible when there were cost-effective printing presses and a big enough market of literate people with money to spend on books. Caxton and Commerce were its progenitors. The novel is capitalism's finest cultural achievement.

The best novelists were inclined to subversion. Balzac in his personal life seemed to be very pro-establishment. Yet as a novelist he exposed the hypocrisies of French society during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and did so more effectively than anyone else. His novels portrayed a society in which all human relations were shaped or mis-shaped by money.

I'm a Jane Austen fan since before the bodice-heaving serialisation of her novels on TV turned her into a literary pop star. Her books inform us about the goings on among the English upper classes in the early 19th century. Jane was a subversive, a satirist working within the bosom of the English establishment. The buffoons, fools, grasping mercenaries, innocent victims, the role of women, playthings of unworthy men, are all there in the drawing rooms, stripped bare, so to say, for our titillation. She wrote of her class as Goya painted the Spanish nobility. Superficially handsome but pock-marked with dissolute weaknesses. Resplendent, in their ignorance and hauteur. Their hands, as painted by Goya, were clawlike.

If we products of urban society want to know about a peasant, seek not enlightenment in the tomes of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, or in the diatribes of Lenin, nor by listening to The Archers. Go and read Emile Zola's Earth. Read of the peasant, sexually virile and attractive, so addicted to land, the ownership of land, even a small back-breaking portion of land, that he will kill for it. If you want to know about workers in the throes of an industrial revolution, read Zola's Germinal.

Charles Dickens was the chronicler of 19th century England. Dickensian is the term used to invoke those times, particularly the sweat shops, the workhouse, the dark satanic mills. His novels usually ended happily ever after. But his books contributed as much if not more to the clamour for reform than any other writer of those times.

All these writers are read because they are good story tellers. They could develop plots, show how characters are shaped in their relationship with others. Their characters lived in specific times and places. They lived in a society. We all live in a society, even the recluse. You cannot tell the story of people without telling of the society in which they live and love and die. The best novelists do this very well. Almost imperceptibly. It goes with the territory.

This century the novel has declined. This may have something to do with radio, movies, television. Alan Sharp wrote a very fine first novel located in Greenock, his home town, moved to Hollywood where he has worked ever since as a top-rated screen writer. Peter McDougall, also from Greenock, is a top-rated writer of television drama. If born earlier they might well have concentrated on writing novels.

But there has to be something more to it than that. This century many writers have sought refuge in introspection. Safer to explore the internal recesses of their own minds than the external excesses of society at large. Fascism, communism, the rape of the Third World, obesity and starvation living cheek by jowl in a shrinking world. There are heroes and heroines to write about but you can't hear or see them for the Spice Girls and their male equivalents.

One living British writer I think will be read 100 years from now is John Le Carre. Just as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in the world of the private eye shed more light on American society than Hemingway ever did, Le Carre in the preposterous world of espionage says more about the global order in the post-1945 world than all the po-faced so-called serious scribes put together.

For him the Secret Service is a metaphor for the British establishment: Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge. The smell of a good cigar and vintage port in an exclusive West End Club. From the suits come casual words - about murder and mayhem. Barking madmen wearing MCC ties. In years to come people will read Le Carre for a good read and insights into our times. He was right about the Soviet Union without being psycopathically anti-Soviet. He is right about the corrupt power structures and elites that now rule the Western World.

His latest novel, The Tailor of Panama, has been inspired by Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. A Jewish tailor from London's East End has got it made as a suit-maker to Panama's polyglot rich and famous. The tailor is a pragmatist dreamer as many Jews are. He is blackmailed into spying for British Intelligence which is a misnomer if ever there was one. He has nothing to tell so he makes it up. His imagination runs riot and the mad men of the secret world lap it up. Just what they want it to be. The Yanks get involved, invade Panama, and save the Western World from a fate worse than death. At the end only the little people get hurt. Dead hurt. Beneath the humour there is a smouldering anger. Le Carre cares.