Three Answers: Jonathan Freedland

by Dick Donahue, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 8/28/2006

Three Answers from Jonathan Freedland, whose debut novel, The Righteous Men, was published last week by HarperCollins.

PW: You’re a well-known journalist in England. Why did you write your novel under the pseudonym of Sam Bourne?

JF: My publisher believed there was value in separating my “day job” from this new venture. The thinking probably was that the kind of journalism I’m involved in at the paper I write for is in some ways up-market and does not reach a mass audience. This could have been a barrier to some readers, who may have felt that the book would be in a similar vein to that, whereas it was very pointedly meant to have a wider appeal. You should be able to know that when you’re reading Jonathan Freedland it is thorough, accurate journalism and when you’re reading Sam Bourne he’s having a bit of fun. I think also that it was liberating to me, in a way: readers tend to hold columnists to this position or that position and I think if I had that in the back of my mind it could be a constraint. This way it would free me up to have a whole new perspective.

PW: Why did you choose this particular niche for your novel, religious mysticism?

JF: The book turns on a fundamental idea quite deep in Jewish religion teaching, an idea that I was introduced to very young by my mother, who herself was raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish background—I mean a Hasidic background—so not a million miles away from the Hasidic life that’s depicted in this book. And the idea she told me stayed with me as a very powerful legend for really a long time—to the point that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think that it would one day have the makings of a novel. Then when I was a reporter in the States I was working on a story in Crown Heights in Brooklyn about the Hasidim there. And I thought that this would be the setting for the story, but the two didn’t completely gel until a few years later. So it’s not as if I made the decision, I’m going to do a thriller, now what can I do? It was more that I had this story rattling around in my mind, and I mentioned it to my agent the day I delivered my last nonfiction book.

PW: A lot of these kinds of novels, centering on religious mysticism, seem to be covering the same ground. What sets yours apart?

JF: The literal answer is that I think that mine is the first to explore Jewish mysticism rather than Christian mysticism—you enter a world that I belive so far in this genre has not been explored. The feedback from some of the early readers has been that one of the things they like most about the book is the insight it gives them into a previously closed world, Hasidic Judaism—they weren’t expecting to learn that along with the ride of a thriller. The other thing is that rather than The Da Vinci Code—which I have tremendous respect for—what I’ve tried to do is rather than deal with religion in terms of religious institutions and the actions historically of certain religious institutions, is to get quite directly into the ideas of religion and spirituality. The core idea, which I don’t want to try and explain, is itself quite a radical and stimulating spiritual idea. In other words this isn’t just about the conduct and misdeeds of churches and churchmen, this is actually about an idea that I think is theologically and religiously quite interesting. So that’s my hope for it, that it’s different in that sense, too.