What would you do if you were given a sabbatical? Rowan Williams faced that question last year and decided to write a book on Dostoevsky. That may not sound particularly restful, but compared with trying to hold the Anglican Communion together it must have seemed like a piece of cake.

The result, however, is not a piece of cake. All Williams’s writing it is hardgoing, rewarding and frustrating in equal measure, while difficulty, openness and uncertainty pervade Dostoevsky’s novels. Williams remarks of them, ‘There is nothing sayable that cannot be answered or continued or qualified in some way or another.’ The observation applies equally to himself. You will hunt in vain for the trite or shallow in Williams’s writings; you will also labour over what precisely he means and never feel sure that you have fully grasped his message.

In so far as the book has a ‘message’ – itself a problematic idea – it is that Dostoevsky’s fiction offers no easy or final answers to the big question in life. That question, Williams stresses, is not whether God exists but rather ‘what [is] the nature…of God’s relation with the world, and most of all with the human world’? Within this cluster a variety of related questions, relating to freedom, the ethical life – ‘What is it that human beings owe to each other?’ – and, of course, suffering: ‘How do we continue to live intelligently and without despair in a world that so deeply pulls against our ideals? How are we to be reconciled – if at all – to meaninglessness, not only as the neutral processes of a material environment but as the moral nightmare of a history of irreversible evil and sadism?’

It is for his engagement with these latter questions that Dostoevsky is probably best known. His fiction seems able to stare unflinchingly into the abyss of suffering and yet, somehow, maintain Christian conviction. It is fiction that, in Williams’ words, ‘oblige[es] itself to confront the most extreme cases to which belief can be exposed.’

How it does that – how the novels manage to hold together human freedom, the reality of immense and irreversible suffering, and faith in the Christian God – is rather less clear, for a number of reasons.

First, Dostoevsky’s novels are not manifestos but exercises in what Williams, after an earlier critic, calls ‘polyphony’: ‘the coexistence of profoundly diverse voices, making the novel itself a constant and unfinished interplay of perspectives.’ It is not clear that Dostoevsky advocates any particular ‘perspective’, not least because he often ‘puts his own experience and thought in the person of another so as to subject it to criticism’.

Second, the novels are wary of all-encompassing, systematic philosophical answers. Writing of one of the would-be revolutionaries in Devils, who is deeply affected by experiencing the birth of his wife’s (though not his) child, Williams remarks, ‘the practical needs of a human birth relativize the generalities of the various revolutionary philosophies so passionately and ineffectually discussing in the [revolutionary] group’. Similarly, and more famously, Jesus’ response to the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov is not to argue against him or to justify himself but to remain silent before kissing him on his ‘bloodless lips’. What precisely Christ’s silence and kiss signify are not (by definition) apparent. What is apparent what they don’t signify. As Williams said in an interview with the Guardian, ‘there is absolutely no form of words that can give a solution to suffering…. What you look for in faith is not solutions but a certain relationship’.

Lastly, and most importantly, there is no clear answer because, within Dostoevsky’s novels, there is no closure, no authoritative authorial voice declaring final judgment on life. ‘Dostoevsky leaves us with the necessary non-resolution of statements and behaviours within the interaction of the narrative.’ In doing so, his art is imitating life. ‘Whether or not we say, as earlier believers in eschatology would have done, that God is in possession of the future, the one thing we can agree on is that we are not. The open, ambiguous, unresolved narrative insists on this.’

Dostoevsky’s fiction is thus an imitation of God’s creation, a theme to which Williams frequently returns. Dostoevsky ‘works on the basis that the novelist is able to show in some degree what divine creation might be like: that is, by creating a world in which the unexpected and unscripted is continually unfolding, in which there is no imposed last word’.

There are, thus, no easy answers in Dostoevsky’s fiction and perhaps no answers at all, or at least none framed in the clear, decisive language and logic that we crave.

Much the same might be said of this book. Permeated by Williams’s distinctive vocabulary – ‘imaginative possibilities’, ‘divine abundance’, ‘moral landscape’ – and his habit of piling clause on clause, it is hard work: simultaneously challenging, inspiring and exasperating. It, like its subject, does offer us answers. But they are not the ones we expect or, necessarily, want.

Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction by Rowan Williams is published by Continuum (2008)

This review first appeared in Third Way Magazine.