Spent a fascinating evening at the wonderful Broadway Bookshop in Hackney listening to a reading and discussion by the author Hisham Matar, author of In the Country of Men and the recently released Anatomy of a Disappearance. Matar read from the latter, and then answered questions from the audience.

Matar has found himself thrown into the political in the last 12 months, commenting on the Arab Spring and the Libyan revolution. It was interesting to hear him talk of having to play this role, and the affects of this on his work as a novelist. He said he had spoken to a number of Arab writers about this, and used the wonderful phrase that they had all found themselves ‘pulling the wrong muscles’ as writers in becoming political commentators. They felt duty bound to have done so – Matar here made an interesting distinction between The Citizen and The Artist – but felt that there was an important distinction between fictional truth and the real.

This is something I’ve grappled with. How does one write a ‘political novel’, when in practice – I find – the truth of a work emerges from the work itself. One might get all Heideggarian and consider notions of how one orientates oneself towards the world (or World as MH would have it), but getting Heideggarian never seems to end well.

Matar spoke of the destructive affects of analysis on writing, something else I agree with – a work should be analysed, where possible, after the act of creation, and not during. To impose a critical framework during the writing, I always find, limits the act. The truths revealed through writing need to reveal themselves – one of the astonishing things about writing fiction is that the work you produce always tends to be wiser and deeper than you are. Otherwise, why write fiction rather than tracts?

I was interested that Matar quoted the pianist Sviatoslav Richter (‘one of my few heroes’) who said – and I’m paraphrasing, ‘There are only two things I fear – Power and Analysis’. It reminded me of a documentary I saw on Richter many years a go – it was an epic retelling of his life story, featuring interviews with the pianist towards the end of his life. A moment from the documentary stays with me – Richter is asked at the end of the documentary to sum up his life and career. He looks away, and a great sadness overcomes him. He says, very quietly, ‘I have not been a good man’.

For me, it is the exploration of these inner demons that is the province of fiction, and the political situates it and is revealed through it. On the way home I walked past the CLR James museum in Dalston, and wondered about the ways James would tear apart my argument.