Come inside, lock the doors, watch TV

WH Auden once wrote that a writer's politics are of more danger to him than his cupidity or greed. If a story is formed by ideas exterior to it, if there is some sort of socially-engaged intention, the work produced is not art, but polemics. Unlike our magazines, and our radio, even our television news, we want our novels, our plays, our paintings to be pure. We don't want to be lectured on history. We don't need another lesson on social activism. We don't need somebody else telling us how to live. Yet another politician is more than we can stomach. And yet, what is art without at least a small thorn?

While I don't know enough about theatre or the arts, I would venture to say that we live in a time when politics and fiction – short stories and novels in particular – are acutely disengaged. Contemporary fiction suffers from a reduced power, certainly in the minds and hearts of its readers. But what is even more acutely damning is that fiction also seems to be suffering a reduced moral muscle in the minds of its practitioners also – the writers themselves. There seems to be a general disposition – if you walk along any number of bookshop shelves, be they in New York or London or Dublin – to come inside, draw the blinds, lock the doors, turn on the teevee. Even the so-called "chick-lit" that forms the bulk of new fiction, seems braver than many of the talked-about literary novels of recent times.

How wonderful, then, to see Roddy Doyle return with his heroine, or anti-heroine, Paula Spencer, this week (Johnathan Cape, €18.99) in a novel of stunning, and lasting, importance. Paula was the central character in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, possibly Doyle's best book, written 10 years ago. Now she's back. She's 48. She's four months off the booze. Her kids are grown. Her sister's buying an apartment in Bulgaria. She is able to find the pulse of what's going on around her, including "the sentimental shite that addicts love".

One of the reasons we write is because the world is beautiful and strange and furious. Often we tend to forget this. Another compelling argument for believing that there is a value in literature is that it constantly reminds us that life is not already written. It is there to be lived. It is ongoing. It doesn't stop. It has all the elements of a story. We write in order to show that there are other places to go. Not all wickedness, nor hope, is already known.

And yet despite the Doyles and some other significant exceptions in writing today, it seems that in these times we writers are largely cowed. We lack some rage. The social novel, or even the politically-engaged novel, is distrusted by the critics and writers alike.

"We have a rich literature," says Don deLillo, another writer who has been prepared, for decades, to stand outside the systems and structures that so many writers inhabit. "But sometimes it's a literature too ready to be neutralised, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation." Otherwise, warns deLillo, we're all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

In recent weeks, I performed a number of interviews in relation to a novel I have written that uses, as its central character, a Romani poet. Most of the interviewers knew what they were talking about but in Britain, in particular, the questions were quick sharp stakes. I quote: "Why a Gypsy novel?" "What ties do you have to Travellers?" "What's the point of a Gypsy book when they can't even read?" Small wonder the British are perplexed that their "foreigners" are unhappy.

An smidgin of empathy is worth a ton of judgements. I'm hardly going to reel off the long list of grievances and state-sponsored persecutions that are possible when one talks about the Romani experience in Europe. One quick story alone might illustrate. There are currently 10 to 12 million Roma in the world. That's analogous to the number of Jewish people scattered across the globe. While one culture rightly stakes its claim to memory, territory and value, the other is largely relegated to the footnotes of history. The Roma holocaust, known in their language as the Porrajmos ("the devouring"), is given little impact in most of our history books and, up until recent years, all the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC had as an exhibit was a paltry little caravan and a fiddle propped alongside it.

These sorts of clichés occupy disporportionate amounts of space in our minds.

If we don't dilate our nostrils and take a whiff of the foul air around us, it is quite possible that the large part of what ends up on our bookshelves will smell of cheap perfume. Maybe better that than the dirt, some people say, but there are certain picket lines we have to cross.

Extracts from Colum McCann's new novel, Zoli, will be published in Village next week