The Word and the Bomb
by Hanif Kureishi
Faber £5.99, pp96

Religious fanatics are not good company. Hanif Kureishi has met some in his time and created some in his fiction and by all accounts they are no fun at all. That may sound flippant, but we take fun too much for granted in our society. We claim it as a right from childhood and pursue it decadently in adulthood.

The idea of deferring all pleasure until death seems to most of us like madness. It certainly seems that way to Kureishi, whose writing is full of the sensual joy of living. He loves awakenings - sexual, aesthetic, religious. He knows the balance of power between appetite and restraint; between adherence to the teachings of the Koran and enjoyment of a bacon sandwich. He describes, in an essay written after the 7 July bombings, how he fled the preaching of imams in a mosque to seek refuge in the nearest pub. He wanted reassurance that he was still in England.

Kureishi has a particular appreciation for the complexity of modern British Muslim identity that comes from having a mixed-race family. He describes his ambivalence when first visiting his father's relatives in Karachi. He measures up the competing claims of England and Pakistan to his allegiance, and the hypocrisies in both societies that mean neither can win outright.

After the bombings, much outrage was reserved for the fact that the perpetrators were British nationals. Murder was made more infamous by the touch of treason. Here, Kureishi's experience turns to insight. He knows the humiliation Britain inflicted on the first generation of Asian immigrants and the disorientation of the second generation. His stories are an antidote to white conservatism that demands gratitude for having tolerated a few years of multiculturalism. But while Kureishi understands how bitterness and confusion might lead a young Muslim to seek existential solace in fundamentalism, he does not forgive it. Fear of life's complexity is no excuse for embracing a cult of death.