Bookplanet: The job of the novelist

Rushdie should swap his crusading for novel writing -- by Giles Fraser

The vocation of the novelist is to pluralism, but now it seems that one of our greatest writers has become a true believer

'In lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered a mere appendage to his actions, to his declarations, to his statements of a position." So argued the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, picking up the Jerusalem Prize for Literature in 1985. It's a piece of advice that another great novelist, Salman Rushdie, ought to ponder when he shifts into the writing voice of the columnist.

Over the last weeks, Rushdie the columnist has accelerated a debate that diagnoses Islam as morally sick and asks what medicine is needed to heal its ills. In his first attempt he offered the Reformation as the answer to what he calls "mosque-based, faith-determined, radical Islam" (though I scratch my head as to why faith-determined is deemed a suitable criticism of a religion). In these pages I had a go at Rushdie's appeal to the Reformation as simplistic, arguing that reforming zeal often leads to the sort of bad religion of which he rightly complains. Taking the point, he has now changed tack: "Not so much a reformation, as several people said in response to my first piece, as an Enlightenment. Very well then: let there be light."

But this won't do either. Certainly Enlightenment thought offers a challenge to the moral poison that often oozes from superstition. Even so, secular rationality is no fail-safe prophylactic against murderous ideology. The 20th century offered up enough genocidal "isms" to make that point. Hatred has the capacity to nestle within the most enlightened breast. So far, so obvious. But what's apparently not so obvious to Rushdie is that the most effective answer to bad religion is under his very nose: the novel itself.

The genius of the novel, according to Kundera, is that it is able to accommodate multiple moral universes, each interacting with the other, without the need to subjugate any one of them to some all-encompassing conclusion. The novel is pluralism in action. As Kundera puts it: the novel is "the imaginary paradise ... where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin".

Admittedly, Kundera's advice was uttered pre-9/11. But these dangerous times require the moral imagination of the novel as much as ever. And this in two specific respects: first, in the capacity of the novel to be more humble than the pamphleteer with regard to ideology; and second, in its capacity to listen to and be affected by moral worlds very different from one's own.

Picking up an old Jewish proverb, "Man thinks, God laughs", Kundera proposes that the novel was born out of the laughter of God. What's God laughing at? At the hubris of human attempts to deliver a single knockdown answer to the problems of the world. The novel can never be a cheerleader for Islam or Christianity or Modernist or Enlightenment. Those who believe that the exclusive truth of any of these is obvious and self-evident can never have heard the laughter of God.

But more important still, the novel has the rare capacity to nudge us out of our ideological trenches into a more sympathetic engagement with the moral universe of those we consider the enemy. "When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of this novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would call the wisdom of the novel."

Columnists are often too busy attacking their opponents to make the time to inhabit their space. Mea culpa. It's a failing in a priest, but even more so in a novelist. Back in 1990, in that famous lecture that had to be ventriloquised by Harold Pinter, Rushdie laid out the vocation of the novelist as resisting the "true believer ... who knows that he is simply right and you are wrong". The novel is a sacred space where all voices need to be heard. Which is why he proposed that even "the most secular of authors ought to be capable of presenting a sympathetic portrait of a devout believer". This is something Rushdie now seems increasingly incapable of achieving. He has become a true believer himself.

The tragedy is that Rushdie the novelist has increasingly been overtaken by his public crusading. The vocation of the novelist is to pluralism. That's why the novel is sacred. Unfortunately, it's a sanctity in which Rushdie now seems to have lost his faith.

(Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. giles.fraser@btinternet.com)