Nathan Hobby is an award-winning novelist. His blog is about the literary life of a writer in Perth. Expect reflections on reading and writing and feature posts on whatever’s caught my attention, from historical curiosities to autobiographical reflections. In his quest for the “Christian Novel” or “kingdom novel”, Nathan puts my book THE NEW MONASTIC in some exalted company!…

N.T.Wright writes: “It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story”

The kingdom novel is an elusive, mythical creature…One of the problems is that most evangelicals who write novels write inferior popular fiction, romance, science fiction or thriller, usually promulgating popular piety. It’s rare to find any fiction on the shelves of Koorong with profound spirituality or reflecting a thoughtful theology…

There are some good literary novelists who have Christian faith, but they are usually much better writers than Christians. We might think of Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose work often reflected Christian concerns, but who struggled to even believe in God’s existence…

Adultery was a preoccupation of the other great 20th century Christian novelist, John Updike (1932-2009)…He is one of the greatest postwar American novelists, but he never wrote the sort of novel Wright was imagining.

Closer to home, we have Tim Winton (1960-), one of Australia’s most important novelists. He was brought up a fundamentalist in the Church of Christ, but as a teenager read John Yoder and Jim Wallis, who influenced him to a social justice faith…But if Yoder has shaped Winton’s writing, I struggle to find it in anything he’s published since 1992 whenCloudstreet came out.

Some theologians have used the novel form to get their message across, and we do at least get better theology from them.Brian McLaren wrote A New Kind of Christian and its two sequels; the theology is good, or at least I generally like it, but as a novel it’s appalling. It is dominated by slabs of dialogue which put ideas in characters’ mouths; the descriptive interruptions feel like filler. The plot, characterisation and prose are all uncompelling. It seems to work for a lot of people, at least for getting across some ideas in an accessible way, but it’s not the novel N.T.Wright is describing. Paul Wallis, has done a better job in his recent publication, The New Monastic, which I’m reading at the moment…

Find more of Nathan’s bloggings at http://nathanhobby.wordpress.com