Believe it or not, Paul William Roberts is looking ahead, almost wistfully, to a lighter, brighter future – his own. “I would really like to be a bit more entertaining,” Roberts said near the end of our interview on a patio in a west-end Toronto neighbourhood that was, at that time, flush with World Cup fever.

A desire to be more entertaining may seem unusual in someone who has spent much of the past 15 years writing about the grim circumstances in Iraq, covering both U.S.-led invasions of the country – including the initial “shock and awe” aerial assault in 2003 as one of the few Western journalists in Baghdad. Roberts’ writing, especially A War Against Truth (Raincoast Books), his book about the current war in Iraq, and his shorter non-fiction, has been intense, challenging, and provocative.

Before the latest Iraq war, though, Roberts was also known for writing rollicking – entertaining, even – history-laced travelogues of the Middle East and India. It’s the sort of work that inspired younger Canadian non-fiction writers like J.B. MacKinnon and Charles Montgomery – both winners of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. And it’s the sort of thing he hopes to return to with his next non-fiction title for Raincoast, a book about the Kabbalah.

But first, this month, Roberts is publishing his second novel, Homeland, with Key Porter Books. Homeland is presented as the diary of a conservative American bureaucrat, and it spans from the Carter administration onward, all the way to the year 2049. With this framework, Roberts explores American foreign and domestic policy in the past, present, and fictional future.

As with most of Roberts’ recent non-fiction, the very idea of Homeland will likely polarize people before they even begin to assess the merits of the writing. Those who already see the U.S. as an oppressive, warmongering imperial power will no doubt find themselves nodding along as they read. Those with a more sympathetic or even simply conflicted view of the U.S. and its foreign policy might find Roberts’ fictional scenarios to be quite over the top, no matter how closely they are intended to reflect today’s reality.

For his part, Roberts makes no bones about the fact that his imagined future is a comment on current American policy. He believes the U.S.’s current pro-Israel position in the Middle East is a case where “American foreign policy acts against American interests.” For that, he blames the likes of former Bush administration official Paul Wolfowitz (who is one of a couple of real-life people to appear as thinly veiled and renamed incarnations in the book – many other public figures simply appear as themselves), and the supporters of Israel who have come to be called the Israel Lobby. In recent years, Roberts’ journalism and essays on world affairs have been both published and attacked in major newspapers. “If you can’t say these things, then something terrible has happened to our society,” Roberts says.

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Interestingly enough, writing a new novel wasn’t even Roberts’ idea. He’s published only one before – The Palace of Fears in 1994 – and the other six books he’s published since the early 1990s have been some form of travel reportage. (Roberts, who declines to reveal his age, was born in Wales but settled in Canada in 1980.)

The spark for Homeland actually came from Key Porter editor Janie Yoon, who met Roberts at a mutual friend’s birthday party and pitched him about writing something, probably non-fiction, for Key Porter. After the two traded some e-mails, Yoon asked him whether he’d write a novel that touched on current affairs if she commissioned it. “He wrote, ‘Probably,’” she remembers.

Roberts spent the first half of this year working on the book almost every day, and the result was a lengthy manuscript that he didn’t even print out until he was done. “It flowed, and it felt great to write fiction,” he says. “This was the first time I’d ever written straight onto a computer. I normally write by hand.” The first draft of the book was considerably longer than what Key Porter had planned for, and it got a significant edit. In early drafts, the book opened with a section set in 2049 before moving into the main character’s fictional memoir. Now, the book leads off with a brief introduction that sets the scene and gets right into the memoir, which forms the remainder of the book. “To me, as a reader, that’s where the real magic was happening,” says Yoon.

Yoon and Roberts also removed some elements of the memoir, such as fake academic papers and lectures. “We’ve cut out almost everything extraneous,” Roberts says. “Her grasp of the book was quite eerie, better than mine.” Roberts says he enjoyed the now-deleted early parts of the first draft, but is extremely pleased with the changes Yoon suggested. “The voice in the memoir is a much truer voice.”

For her part, Yoon says Homeland represents an important move toward growing Key Porter’s fiction list – and moving it in a distinctly international direction. “We are moving away from what is considered classic CanLit,” she says. “This, in a way, is establishing the direction we want to go in.” Yoon says the book has received more advance attention from media and booksellers than any recent Key Porter fiction title. Which is no surprise – its author has a knack for attracting controversy.


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Roberts’ run as a chronicler of Iraq’s decade and a half of destruction began with a Hunter S. Thompsonesque flourish. Before conducting a rare interview with Saddam Hussein in 1990 – in which the dictator apparently revealed his appreciation for The Godfather – Roberts took ecstasy.

A few months later, at the outset of the first Gulf War in 1991, Roberts was perched in Jordan, and he sent a fax to most of Canada’s top news outlets. He offered to write a story from Iraq, where few Western reporters were on the ground, if they would provide him with the money to pay Bedouin guides who had agreed to lead him into the besieged country.

Anne Collins, now the publisher of Random House Canada but then a senior editor at Saturday Night, says the fax contained more capital letters than she had ever seen before. “I think the caps scared a lot of people off,” she says, noting that there was a lot of debate at Saturday Night. But eventually she got clearance to provide Roberts with the money, even though she knew very little about him and had never worked with him before. His article came in long, characteristically, at 30,000 words, but Collins scaled it back to 7,500 words and found a place for it in the magazine. It went on to win a National Magazine Award and led to more work for both Saturday Night and, later, Harper’s. Over the 1990s, Roberts went on to publish several books with Random House Canada and Stoddart Publishing, including 1997’s The Demonic Comedy: Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein.

After Stoddart went belly-up in 2002, Roberts was looking for a new publisher – he has no agent – and Raincoast Books came calling. Former Raincoast editor Scott Steedman (who’s now a senior editor at Douglas & McIntyre) contacted Roberts after reading one of his articles about Iraq in The Globe and Mail, and made an offer that he calls “pretty generous by Raincoast standards.” A War Against Truth, published in fall 2004, was and still is the only Canadian book that offers a firsthand account of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the book, as in his newspaper op-ed essays, Roberts’ point of view is by no means unbiased. “He wears his politics on his sleeve,” says Steedman. “I kind of enjoy that.” Steedman also compares Roberts to three contrarian Brits: journalists Robert Fisk and Christopher Hitchens, and independent MP George Galloway.

In the supercharged partisan debate that still surrounds every aspect of the U.S. and U.K. adventure in Iraq, Roberts found himself sharing something else with those three men: intense criticism. It’s not as though Roberts is unaccustomed to eliciting hostility: in 1994, he was stabbed at the front door of his Toronto home by an unknown assailant. He believes the attack, which left him with wounds on his arms and a punctured lung, was provoked by his use of quotes from the Koran in The Palace of Fears, or perhaps related to his public support of the then-fatwah-beleaguered Salman Rushdie.

These days, Roberts’ critics have used more traditional forums to voice their disapproval. At the National Post, columnist and editor Jonathan Kay has written three articles criticizing essays by Roberts that appeared in the Focus section of The Globe and Mail. And last fall, when PEN Canada named Roberts the inaugural winner of its Paul Kidd Courage Award for bravery in journalism, the Globe itself weighed in with an editorial slamming PEN’s decision (“it takes little courage to peddle anti-Americanism in Canada”) and ripping a Roberts article that had appeared a month earlier – in the Globe.

The essay in question, “The Flagging Empire,” appeared on September 10, 2005, when the floodwaters were still receding from New Orleans. The wide-ranging, occasionally rambling piece began with the devastation of the Gulf Coast and proceeded to touch on China, Hugo Chavez, the alleged U.S. plan to build a pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Pakistan, al-Qaeda, and the U.S. Constitution. It ended with this: “Either you have an extraordinary jamboree of stupidity here, or you have the deliberate creation of a national demon to replace the defeated Soviet Red Peril…. It has to be one or the other.”

Neither Marcus Gee, the Globe’s editorial page editor, nor Jerry Johnson, the editor of the Focus section, will discuss any internal controversy at the paper over the piece and the subsequent editorial, though Gee – who is also a right-wing columnist for the paper – sighed, groaned, and laughed before offering his no comment. Gee also concedes that it’s unusual for the editorial board to comment on other views that have been published in the paper. Since then, Roberts has continued to contribute op-ed pieces and politically themed book reviews to the Globe.

To be fair, the Globe’s second-thoughts editorial had a point. However intense, challenging, and provocative Roberts’ writing is – the opening of A War Against Truth is especially scintillating – his journalism is also sometimes uneven and undersourced. It may be that Roberts’ fondness for unproven theories, usually about the U.S. and its foreign policy, are better suited to fiction. Homeland is to Roberts what JFK was to Oliver Stone: it allows him to tackle his favourite topics – neo-conservatives, the Israel Lobby, the media – and not have to worry about whether the facts align perfectly with his own view of how and why events unfolded as they did. “After A War Against Truth, the book on Iraq, life suddenly seemed so weird,” Roberts says. “Fiction can help you understand it. Fiction’s sort of tidier.”

In any case, like Roberts’ other work, Homeland is bound to generate opinions from everyone who reads it, as well as many who won’t even pick it up. And the reaction, if nothing else, is sure to be entertaining.