Professor Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff is an extraordinarily versatile writer, both in terms of the kind of writing he does well and the subjects he writes about.

But he is also utterly consistent, bringing the same liberal and compassionate intellectual conscience to all his work, whether it be his philosophical writings, his journalism, his biographical work or his fiction.

Asya (1991) was Ignatieff's striking first novel. It begins with a young girl in Russia in 1905, and traces her long life with its travels, its wars and its love affairs, coming to rest back in Russia eighty-five years later. It is a touching and highly readable story of a strong woman and her troubled century.

Bolder than this book, however, was Ignatieff's second novel, Scar Tissue (1993), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993. It is a moving and difficult novel, dealing with the disintegration and death of the narrator's mother from a debilitating neurological disease. It is quiet and thoughtful, packed full of ideas, and one often feels that it is driven almost entirely by the development of a character's ideas, and only by plot insofar as plot events help to influence that development. Although at its most ambitious it can be a little idea-heavy, Scar Tissue does manage to be affective and distressing, and not just intellectually stimulating. It certainly does deal (and rather thoroughly) with big themes, life and death and identity and selflessness, really giving them a good working through ('I began to think of my mother as a philosophical problem...'). But only occasionally does a seam show through several long quotations from idea-laden speeches the main character gives, or papers he has written, that sort of thing, as if Ignatieff just couldn't manage to get all the ideas he wanted into the body of the writing and yet had to have them in somehow, hence the contrivance; but it is a small price to pay for the overall ambition, which is largely realised with great success.

Ignatieff has written philosophy, most notably The Needs of Strangers (1984), which examines our need for a sense of community, for the compassion and practical welfare it brings, a need that is often not met. But it may be that his greatest contribution to the field of philosophy is in fact his magnificent biography of Isaiah Berlin, Isaiah Berlin (1998), which brilliantly recreates the life of this extraordinary man, but also the equally extraordinary times he experienced and the remarkable people he met. Ignatieff clearly relished both his subject's ideas and the biographical material itself. Ignatieff's work on Berlin began with a single interview Ignatieff carried out with him in the summer of 1987, and grew to a full ten years of talking; Berlin was quite a talker, and Ignatieff's vivid presentation of him as such is one of the triumphs of the book. Ignatieff clearly comes to be a great admirer of Berlin, but a clear-thinking one with a balanced, questioning view. The result is a compelling exploration of a uniquely rich individual. Berlin had a fascinating life and a fascinating mind, and Ignatieff rose to the challenge of capturing both in a book which is as strong on ideas (sophisticated, but presented with great lucidity) as it on narrative (enthralling).

Other non-fiction includes Blood and Belonging (1993), a deeply important study of modern nationalism. The investigation takes Ignatieff through the former Yugoslavia and Eastern European republics, coming to rest in Great Britain's own trouble-spot, ravaged by decades of nationalistic conflict, Northern Ireland. The picture Ignatieff paints is at once inspiring and terrifying, the two sides of the coin are equally familiar. His conclusions are more than a little alarming: 'What's wrong with the world is not nationalism itself ... What's wrong is the kind of nation, the kind of home that nationalists want to create and the means they use to seek their ends. ... It's the battle between the civic and the ethnic nation. I know which side I'm on. I also know which side, right now, happens to be winning.'

Blood and Belonging is the first part of a trilogy of books looking at different aspects of conflict today. The second is The Warrior's Honour (1998). Dealing with ethnically-motivated conflicts (he is especially good, for instance, on recently-Taliban-controlled Kabul) this book picks up from the alarm sounded at the end of the previous book, and takes it further, showing the carnage that can result when such warnings are not heeded. Besides Yugoslavia and Afghanistan he travels to Africa (Rwanda, Angola, Zaire, Burundi) with United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and brings back an account of his visits which combines intellectually ambitious analysis with excellent reportage, the journalistic writing is brilliant as ever. The state of international and intra-national relations he witnesses is frightening and messy.

The final book in the trilogy, Virtual War (2000), offers no more reassurance than its predecessors. In typically lucid prose Ignatieff describes Kosovo as a 'virtual war' that the NATO forces fought from at a distance, one in which we were able to kill our enemies without having to 'get our hands dirty'. The sense of 'self-righteous invulnerability' this kind of war breeds comes at a cost: an over-eagerness to see war as an easy solution rather than only one 'of last resort', and a dangerous complacency. The events of recent months have proved these warnings all too well founded.

Ignatieff has written extensively as a journalist and has also published a history of prisons during the Industrial Revolution (A Just Measure of Pain) and a family memoir, The Russian Album (1987).

Daniel Hahn, 2002