On a weeknight at the 2007 New Yorker Festival a fashionable young crowd has gathered to think about monsters. Or, rather, to watch Martin Amis, ageing prince of literary chic, discuss the origins of evil with Ian Buruma.
Amis slouches low inside his black leather jacket, growling provocations about the Koran in his nicotine-cured voice. Buruma sits straight-backed in suit and tie, speaking in BBC English about the alienation that led Mohammed Bouyeri, a second-generation Moroccan Dutchman, to slay journalist-provocateur Theo van Gogh in 2004. 'But Ian,' Amis breaks in, 'don't you think that it is important that it's Islam?'
'No,' Buruma replies calmly. 'I think it's incidental.' Islamic fundamentalists, he argues, could just as well have chosen a secular ideology to justify bloodshed.
Buruma has none of Amis' celebrity aura - his rumpled cool, irreverent wit or flamboyant speech. However, he matches Amis' stage presence. He provokes without polemicising, convincing with erudition rather than style. In a further paradox, Buruma is standing in for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born anti-Islam crusader who collaborated with Van Gogh on the propaganda film Submission. Buruma, who is Anglo-Dutch by birth, criticised her dogmatic view in his 2006 book Murder in Amsterdam, a meticulous account of the decline of multiculturalism in his native Netherlands.
Buruma's refusal to take extreme positions has earned him wide respect, if not exactly fame. Included last year in Foreign Policy/Prospect magazines' list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, he is a prolific author who focuses on history, reportage and cultural commentary on Asia and Europe. The China Lover (2008) is his second novel. But nuance doesn't sell and Buruma has never offered glib sound bites about the clash of civilisations or the return of history.
According to writer David Rieff, a friend: 'It's remarkable that he seems quite untouched by either the fanaticism of the left or the right in this time of duelling fanaticisms. He was able, on the one hand, not to fall victim to political correctness, but also not to be tempted by panic about either Islam or neo-conservative fantasies.'