Contemplating the same sea

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Amos Oz, Israel's most loved living writer, has an awful curse upon him. It is that he is fated to be misunderstood. "If I wrote a children's story about a boy, a girl and a squabble over a cat, reviewers would earnestly decide the sister was the Jewish people, the brother the Palestinians and the cat the holy places of Jerusalem. It's a no-win game. But it's been going so long, I'm resigned to it now."

He grins wryly at a (rave) review in The Observer last Sunday for his new novel, a story of love and ghosts in suburban Tel Aviv. A sub-editor blurbed it: "Amos Oz's allegory of the Middle East crisis is a classic of quiet eloquence," and stuck on a photograph of mourners at a recent funeral in the West Bank. "I don't think he'd read the review, let alone the book."

Oz must bear some blame for a confusion about his purpose as a writer. He's not just the renowned author of a dozen novels, but also perhaps the Left-wing's most influential essayist on the war that Israel has been fighting since 1948. A tank soldier in two episodes of that war, he talks more quotable sense in one of his rare polemics than appear in a thousand of the hysterical opinion columns that dominate the Israeli press.

In a region hamstrung by its history, Oz, 62, is unusual, a man determined to leap the awful barriers of precedent and move forward. "I say to Palestinian friends and Palestinian enemies, 'You and I don't have to agree on the past: we have to agree on the future'."

He fights, too, for the rights of language; in a place where even the word "peace" seems to have half a dozen contradictory meanings. This is Oz on "Operation Peace for Galilee", the 1982 invasion of Lebanon masterminded by Ariel Sharon (who this month became Israel's prime minister). "Whenever war is called peace, where oppression and persecution are referred to as security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of language precedes and prepares for the defilement of life and dignity."

"My intention all my life," Oz said yesterday, a little wearily, "was to draw a line between my political excursions and my writing. My belief is that you can be a great gynaecologist and an excellent lover. But not at the same time. My problem is, people are always looking for the gynaecology when I'm making love."

We're in Oz's brother's house in Hampstead, a long way from the conflicts tearing up Israel, far from Arad in the desert where Oz lives. He is here to promote a new novel, an extraordinary book unlike any he has written. All Oz's novels since the first, My Michael in 1968, have sold pretty respectably in the UK; couple that with his unique ability to explain Israeli political spillikins to concerned European liberals and you get a devoted fan club. Melvyn Bragg, who has made a South Bank Show on Oz to be broadcast next month, calls him "Israel's conscience".

So interviewers were queueing at the Hampstead door yesterday, a new one with the same old questions turning up every hour, each of us prodding the man on Whither the Middle East? ("So what you're saying is that, ironically, Sharon might bring about a settlement quicker than Barak?" I heard my predecessor ask). Oz would rather talk about the novel.

Which is The Same Sea: short and exquisite, Oz (and I) think it is his best. He calls it "a novel about the peace process - my peace process with myself. It is about the intense intimacy between people who are similarly strangers - a process in which people realise how much of the other is in yourself." In the South Bank Show film he calls it - more excitingly - "an incestuous orgy ... characters all in the same bed together at the same time. Parents and children and lovers and the living and the dead."

Oz veterans will recognise a familiar theme - love and hatred, relationships between generations - all illuminated by his intensely poetic prose. What's different about this one is that the story has more of Oz himself than any other. In it he works at his own relationship with his parents, European Jews who found it hard to become Israelis, his father a Right-winger whom Oz rejected, his long-mourned mother a suicide when Oz was 12. It's a novel, he says, "of people pregnant with their parents".

The other difference is that most of this book is poetry - some pages, some chapters, are just four lines of pithy image-laden verse. It is a banquet in miniature. "The best fan letter I've had about it was from a middle-aged farmer who said - 'Mr Oz, in this book you have cheated me. I gulped it down thinking it was milk. It was only when I got to the end that I realised it was brandy'."