The week in books: Writers should enter the mind of terror

Campaigns that bring together writers in defence of freedom have a habit of generating sound and fury, but signifying next to nothing. So, in a week of eye-popping innovations, one that passed almost unnoticed was the triumph of a big literary push that achieved its aim almost without a shot being fired. That's not strictly accurate: the Government, defeated in the Lords by 191 votes over its bill for 42-day detention without charge, threatened to come back with a modified proposal that would make six weeks without habeas corpus an emergency event.

Because of this riposte, the stories, poems, polemics and short essays created by 42 leading authors to endorse Liberty's "Charge or Release" campaign will not forfeit their fire-power. From Julian Barnes to Ian Rankin, Monica Ali to Jenny Diski, Esther Freud to David Mitchell, Ann Leslie to John Berger (strange bedfellows, indeed), their contributions stand at ease, at www.42writers.com.

Now, more than ever, the freedom of the individual against the state needs all the gifted friends it can recruit. But, reading through these heartfelt and eloquent pieces, one assumption struck me hard. Almost everyone discussed the horrors of detention without charge from the point of view of the innocent accused. Fair enough. But the privilege of literature, I always thought, was that it could try to understand – not excuse, and not justify – the guilty as well.

Mohsin Hamid writes urgently of the paranoia that descended when, as an Asian man in the US in the wake of 9/11, he became a usual suspect. That, however effective, is an argument. In his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hamid explored the motives of a young man who, in spite of Western success, might have fallen prey to vehement and even violent zealotry. That is art.

Great novelists can, and do, delve deeper into the minds of those who take to terror than any spy or scholar. Of all people, the Archbishop of Canterbury has reminded me of how this empathy without apologia works. The fruit of a sabbatical, his book Dostoevsky: language, faith and fiction (Continuum, £25) dwells on the finest work of imagination ever written on political terror and the souls that sanction it: The Devils. All the punditry that I have ever read about Bin Laden sounds like a feeble footnote to Dostoevsky's Stavrogin: the murderous extremist as cynic and opportunist, no rock of faith but a quicksilver shape-shifter. Every hot-headed student jihadi who ends up in court or (heavens forbid) in a suicide bomber's waistcoat footnotes the torments of Kirillov, Stepan and Shatov. "Part of Dostoevsky's purpose," writes Rowan Williams, "is to demonstrate that to bring about evil you do not have to have evil intentions."

But how will the Archbishop handle that famous dictum from Brothers Karamazov, about everything being permitted if humans reject a belief in immortality? After all, today's zealots may claim that everything is permitted because their faith demands it. Of course, an orthodox believer (as Williams is) will maintain that the "God" of the terrorist or fanatic is no more than a misspelling of "ego" or "will". He glosses the Karamazov formula by saying that the absence of divinity would mean "we are no longer able to see violence against others as somehow blasphemous, an offence against an eternal order". Not good enough, in a world full of Dostoevsky-style militants for whom divine order dictates lawless violence.

Still, we should salute the Primate for pushing Dostoevsky's killers – of themselves, of others, of love itself – into the spotlight again. He reminds us of the undimmed force and fire of novels that stare into the abyss, and then decline to flinch when the abyss stares back. All honour to the anti-42 days literati for their dramas of victimised virtue. Dostoevsky, I imagine, would insist that they take all these fine ideals, meet the gaze of contemporary terror – and then refuse to turn away.

You-Nobel-who?

As night follows day, so a clutch of "who he?" media moans greeted the choice of JMG Le Clézio as this year's Nobel laureate. One, sadly behind the beat, also asked why Arts Council England did nothing to broaden our exposure to foreign literature. Aside from its support to publishers who major in translation, ACE has for a decade backed The Independent's Foreign Fiction Prize. A new set of judges is now searching for a successor to this year's winner, Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor. They include Man Booker shortlistee Linda Grant, poet and Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson, leading blogger Mark Thwaite (of ReadySteadyBook), Kate Griffin of ACE and myself. Meanwhile, the online marketplace abebooks.co.uk reports strong sales of its partners' stock of Le Clézio translations. Many British readers don't agree that ignorance is bliss.