Amos oz once gave a lecture in which he suggested that fanaticism begins at home. It starts, he argues, as the "desire to make other people change." He believes it is important, instead, to try to "imagine the other."
It is typical of Oz to try and domesticate the idea of fanaticism, to put us on familiar terms with it. He knows how to bring uneasy truths home. He is a plain speaker and "imagining the other" is what he has always done best, not only in his fiction. He has been a steady, humane, liberal voice in Israel, critical-in work such as The Slopes of Lebanon (1987) and Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays (1994)-of both Israelis and Palestinians. In the wake of the elections, he blames Arafat for Sharon's victory. "Imagining the other" is not the same as forgiving all.
His new novel The Same Sea, published in Hebrew last year, has been a critical success in Israel. On the face of it, this is surprising because it is a hybrid work, written in loose poetic slabs and sporadic verse. And novel-poems, in Britain at least, tend to be enjoyed only by an enthusiastic minority (think of Craig Raine's History: The Home Movie or Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate).
Before I embarked on it, I supposed this to be a perilous departure for a writer who has always seemed to revel in prose. Oz once said he had two pens: one for fiction, the other for non-fiction. Now he appears to have acquired a third. He last wrote poetry as a teenager (he is said to have composed verse, inspired by the Old Testament, about taking vengeance on all enemies of the Jews). His first novel, My Michael, was published in 1968. Its narrator was a woman one critic described as a "Jewish Madame Bovary." It was a portrait of a disintegrating marriage and it revealed an understanding of women, and an interest in marriage that Oz has never lost. (In 1991, he even wrote a novel called To Know a Woman.) His most recent novels (Panther in the Basement and Don't Call it Night) have been domestic too-but inching towards poetry. Noa, in Don't Call it Night quotes from poems written by a friend. I even remember the unpromising line: "And where are we meant to be shining and by whom is our shining required?" Oz's own poems do shine and he has described The Same Sea, in a recent interview, as "a book close to myself, the closest I have ever got." By the time I had finished the book, all traces of surprise at its success had vanished. It is a small miracle.
It is not that there is anything exceptional about its subject: the plot is perfunctory, the cast ordinary. It is about a middle-aged man, Albert, a tax accountant. He is in mourning for his wife, Nadia, who has died of cancer. Their grown-up son, Enrico, has fled to Tibet, to find himself-or to escape the loss of his mother. Enrico's girlfriend, Dita, comes to stay with Albert-and disturbs him with her youth and sexuality. Albert's elderly woman friend, Bettine, disapproves.
The book is a meditation on loss. It examines the ways in which we are all trying to make up for something missing, or someone lost. The poems usually belong to a particular character and Oz is such a practised storyteller that he effortlessly threads them onto a single string to keep narrative curiosity alive. The verse form is no constraint, allowing Oz to liberate himself from conventional narrative time-fitting for a novel pitched between elegy and celebration.
He writes about mortality in an unportentous but persistent way. Clocks and bells tick and toll their way through his verses. There are doomed orchards full of orange trees and passing birds mark Nadia's last days. Albert misses his wife so sorely that he is persuaded by Bettine to visit an old Greek who claims to bring back, if only for a moment, the dead. Albert hands over 400 shekels; nothing happens.
But Oz can pull off what the old quack cannot. He can play with time so that Nadia does reappear. The sequence of the book is not consistently chronological; it moves like thought, forwards and back at will, defying death as memory can. Nicholas de Lange's translation from the Hebrew is elegance itself. The rhymes come and go in a footloose and fancy way (like Albert's son).
It was strange to finish reading The Same Sea on the same day that headlines announced Sharon's victory. Whatever Israel is, it is not a quiet country. But Oz likes to think that the louder you shout, the less likely it is that you will be heard. He pleads for a lowering of the volume: "There are still some people in this country who maintain that the emperor is usually neither naked nor fully dressed, but, for example wearing clothes that do not suit him..."
He does not, however, want to have his fiction translated into allegory: he is fervently realistic. He reminds me of Nadine Gordimer, who favours a subtle palette in a country where it is (or was) more common to see everything in black and white. Gordimer is unpopular with some South African readers, who disapprove of her resistance to polemic. Oz is the same: he will not see humanity subsumed by politics.
Unlike Gordimer, Oz cannot help but be benign. His characters are so nice, you wish you knew them-even the duds. Take Dubi Dombrov, an obvious loser: corrupt, unattractive and untalented. It is impossible to dislike him. Oz is always on the look out for redeeming features. "Only what is truly a matter of life and death should not be negotiable," he observes
He has a religious respect, if only in a secular sense, for life-but a pantheistic longing to disappear into the Israeli landscape. He writes about mountains, trees, rocks and the sea (witness the title) with longing-because they are immune to human feeling and seem to speak another language. He loves the Ngev desert where he walks every day: "As for the Narrator, In these late September days he gets up each morning/before five and writes for an hour or so until the paper arrives Then/he goes outside to check if there is anything new in the desert. To date/There is nothing. The mountains to the East are stamped out against the sky. Every slope in its proper place. Like yesterday. And the day before." He aspires to a desert pastoral.
Oz's heroes tend to be modest, shambolic, unsuccessful. Theo in Don't Call it Night is a man of silences. Fima, in the novel with the same name, is more garrulous but ineffective (like some of Saul Bellow's narrators). He trips over his shoelaces and is unlikely to tie up an argument. But in this book, Oz takes the unusual step of involving himself, rising to the surface of his own narrative, describing himself as the "narrator," giving himself a voice. There is a question here about how far an author is in charge of his own material. His own involvement is not always comfortable but it gives the book its friction.
At his best, Oz is like an Israeli genre painter, capturing the moments when people seem part of a still life. He keeps returning to the humble thought that we are all alone. Albert is observed tying up sweet peas, switching off his computer, watching the sea. Oz exults in the sensual and the simple. He reminds us that life is too short and there is much to be enjoyed: sex, food, landscape. Why make it more complicated?
One last thing. I note that, curiously, his novels almost always contain men chopping salad. Oz is just like one of these men bringing us refreshment. He produces the Feta, the tomatoes, the water... And he never forgets that we need the olives-as well as the olive branches.
