Travel: Finding it difficult to give birth to her latest novel, writer Linda Grant took herself off to Israel. She had paid a number of visits to the country, travelling there in 1998 to write about the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state. Fascinated by what she found, she was inspired to write When I Lived in Modern Times, a tale of post-war immigration to Palestine, published in 2000.
It won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She returned in April 2003 in the middle of the Iraq war, wanting, in her own words, "to watch Israel . . . to try and understand what it felt to be part of it". Several other trips followed in 2004 and 2005. Her observations of what was going on gradually cyrstallised from newspaper column to this slim volume. As Grant avers: "I did not come to witness, to make a statement, or sign a petition. I didn't meet, intentionally, any politicians, or generals or heads of NGOs or activists. I just spent a lot of time sitting in cafes, listening, drinking my cup of coffee, while the country assembled itself around me, in all its perplexing reality."
Yet in this ersatz detachment and "impartiality" lies both the strength and the weakness of this book.
Almost unwillingly drawn to Israel, by Grant's own admission her attitude to the country is as complex as that of her own identity as a Jew of the diaspora. Whilst abhorring the injustices perpetuated by the Israeli state, she cannot help but be beguiled and frustrated by the people she meets. Is it an accident that she has assembled a picaresque cast of characters - the baby-faced soldiers with their mobile phones and stuffed toys, the New Yorker settlers fierce and almost unhinged in their venom, the intellectuals in the Tel Aviv cafes? Over morning coffee she could find herself suddenly drawn into debates about "epistemology, false consciousness, Iranian theocracy, the Swedish novel and neo-colonialism". You probably don't get that kind of intellectual fare on the menu at Starbucks.
Indeed Israel or the idea of it, is intimately connected to her past and identity formation as a Jew. It shaped her rebellion against her parents' conservatism, fuelling bitter rows with her father. Before she first visited the country as a gawky teenager eager for romantic encounters, Israel had already loomed large in her consciousness. She was raised in a suburban Jewish household in Liverpool, where fundraising for Israel was part of both the norm and forging a particular aspect of Jewish identity. Partly in rebellion against this, she became highly critical of Israel. It was the contested site of filial conflict, yet another reason for her to rebel against her father and all he stood for. And as she astutely recognises, there was something more complex to her pro-Palestinian stance. It was not just founded on youthful idealism and not exactly based on in-depth political analysis.
"My anti-Zionism was a form of cruelty and abuse which had nothing at all to do with any Palestinians I had ever met. It was sound and fury: cheap, fake Sixties ideology, choosing those arguments that would hurt my father most."
Grant has a beady writer's eye, a wry sense of humour and an unerring instinct for recognising the wildly contradictory aspects of humanity. Perhaps the section on young Israeli soldiers best shows her flair in this regard to its full advantage. Horrified at the number of Palestinian children killed (646 at the date of her writing), she has to unpick the seeming indifference to this atrocity by people she meets and respects, and she wants to get up close to the young soldiers, some of whom have killed children though barely out of childhood themselves.
Nonetheless, the insightful apercus cannot fully compensate for the insubstantial, rather bitty nature of the book. Some parts of the book started off life as columns for the Guardian newspaper - and it shows. It is classy journalism and if you read it as a collection of journalistic pieces to dip in and out of, you'll be happy. Expect anything else from it, and it's a disappointment. Part of its problem appears to be that it was written out of a panicky impulse rather than a passionate conviction that here was something that desperately needed to be written. It is hard to shake off the feeling that it was a case of "I can't write my novel just at the moment, I'll do a sort of memoir/intellectual travelogue instead". With its mix of slightly angsty identity politics, reminiscence and sharp-eyed observation, there is nonetheless too much of the perfunctory about the book. It also seems wilful to confine the definition of the "people on the street" almost exclusively to Israeli Jews.
Ultimately it is impossible to escape the feeling that the book was hastily assembled from a desire to be writing something, anything, while the Muse was on sabbatical.
Katrina Goldstone is communications and membership officer of Create, the national arts support and enabling organisation. She is also a critic and has written extensively on Jewish history and culture
The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel By Linda Grant Virago,214 pp €11.99