Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
He knew the world and its absurdities as only an intelligent Irishman can; which is to say that where his knowledge or memory failed him, his imagination was always ready to fill the gap.
