Advocacy v. Art

9/11 pushed novelist Ian McEwan from unsettled agnosticism into atheism. Since that day, McEwan says, he has felt that “religion was distinctly unhelpful in making compassionate, reasonable judgments about people’s lives. On the whole, the secular mind seems far superior in making reasonable judgments.”

That is an odd conclusion to draw from 9/11, especially for a novelist. Novelists are supposed to trade in particularities, and it’s worth recalling that it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses or Jews who slammed the airplanes into the towers. Why condemn “religion” for the acts of members of one religion, and fanatical members at that?

Irrational as McEwan’s inference was, it turned him into a crusader for rationality. As Deborah Friedell says in a NYTBR review of his latest, The Children Act, McEwan now sees it as his mission to protect reason from the assaults of religion. McEwan’s novel centers on a legal case involving Jehovah’s Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions for their son because of religious convictions.

Friedell argues that McEwan’s art has suffered as he has turned advocate: “Although . . . faith drives the plot, it goes oddly unexplored. McEwan seems to have little interest in Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apart from their prohibition against blood transfusions we are told very little about what they believe and almost nothing about their history. This is peculiar, because McEwan is usually one of the most inquisitive of novelists. For previous books about neurosurgeons or physicists or posh girls during World War II, he so intensely studied his characters’ worlds that he was able to write about them seemingly from the inside.”

The result, she claims, is less novel than allegory, a “fable about Faith versus Science and the State.” She raises the question of whether McEwan pounces on the easy target of Jehovah’s Witnesses to avoid addressing his real subject more directly. McEwan welcomed Salman Rushdie in his home when Rushdie was hiding out, and so has said “To be really frank about Islam would cause you to look a little nervously behind you.” He has said spoken some hard truths: “I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest,” and he has told interviewers that he’s a target: “Look at the Islamist websites. They want me dead.” 

So maybe McEwan’s conclusions from 9/11 were not so irrational after all. Perhaps he simply doesn’t feel at liberty to state them openly. But if that’s the case, it seems a cheap trick to hide his opinions about Islamicism behind an attack on Jehovah’s Witnesses or religion in general. Whatever their use in polemics and advocacy, such tricks aren’t the stuff of art.