It seems the problem for philosophical novels these days is, well, their philosophicalness. Which is a pity, for the novel and philosophy have a great deal to give one another. Indeed, one of the things the novel does best is to depict people – fictional characters but recognisably like us – dealing with morally complex situations. Novelists seek, in Wordsworth’s phrase, to “see into the life of things”. But the novel is something felt and lived, not something theoretical, and storytelling has always been the natural, essential way of making sense of the world.
The trick, I think, is to get at the ideas by way of character, not the other way around.
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