For me, this chimes with Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? Left wing, against compromising the freedom of readers by trespassing on their own responsibility and freedom, but also avoiding the trap of writing for posterity. He said that writing was an act done in such inner freedom and that’s why it’s impossible to imagine a great anti-Semitic novel.

Is it possible to write the great liberal novel now? The very feted liberal modern writers like Ian McEwan or Julian Barnes, the lions of litfic, not to single any one of them out, but there’s a certain sclerosis to soi-disant literary fiction not unrelated to its status as an iteration of liberalism in a state of crisis.
Right now I’m obsessed with McEwan’s novel Saturday. It’s a self-conscious attempt to wrest territory back to liberal litfic, all set around a political milieu. It’s an attempt to re-domesticate the themes that have exploded beyond the drawing room. I don’t like the novel, but I do respect it as an adversary.
I think Amis is slightly different. His trajectory is more militantly contrarian than McEwan. With Amis much less interpretation is necessary in terms of his political agenda; he is actively intervening in debates. I find his pronouncements on Islam reprehensible and sinister. I could go on at great length. He’s a very sophisticated writer and the deliberate crudeness of the attacks: the line that ‘there is a definite urge - don’t you have it? To say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ It’s a rhetorical masquerade posing as bluff common sense. But that really is a subject for a whole different interview.

OK. We began to talk about how The City and the City was written in a different style from your earlier work? It reads differently.

Definitely. When I go back to Perdido and The Scar, I find what can read to me now as infelicities. Perdido was unmediated baroque. I like that lush writing. To my eyes The Scar is more measured, Iron Council is a more mannered riffing off certain antecedents. The City and the City is a very different thing, I wanted to give it a sense of a book translated from another language. With a first-person narrator you can’t indulge in the same way as with third-person. I wanted someone identifiable, which means someone from a modern European city writing in a different language from ours.
In some fantastic genres there’s a tendency to think that the job of the prose is to be an invisible window to the world, the equivalent of photorealism. Of course some of the greatest prose in the world is minimal and invisible as a formal methodology; the words are just there to tell story. But after decades of modernism, I wonder if that’s really where we are at, that that’s the only option. What about, not just the high modernists, but also modernists in the genre such as Samuel Delany? Even if you don’t love all the experiments you have to honour and respect the attempts to use form and language in new ways. I have a lot of time for Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head, for that reason. Also John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. I’m really surprised that mainstream literary critics haven’t got their hands on that as a precursor to post-modernism. It’s incredibly prescient.

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