A “big-bellied Lutheran God” within the young Updike looked on in contempt as he struggled to give up cigarettes. Many years later the older Updike, now giving up alcohol, coffee and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers – “Dogs, would you live for ever?” But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike’s “sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality.” In the mornings, he could write “breezily” of what he could not contemplate in the dark without “turning in panic to God”. The plain facts of life were “unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light – in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it – approaches blasphemy.”

And now this masterly blasphemer, whose literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean, is gone, and American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer, is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth. We are coming to the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century’s second half. Henry Bech, Updike’s remote Jewish other, never immune to an attack of status anxiety, mused on the teeming hordes of his gifted and despised contemporaries – “Those that didn’t appear, like John Irving and John Fowles, garrulously, Dickensianly reactionary in method seemed like John Hawkes and John Barth, smugly, hermetically experimental. O’Hara, Hersey, Cheever, Updike – suburbanites all living safe while art’s inner city disintegrated. And that was just the Johns.”

This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to “make the leap of unfaith”. The “weight” of personal death did not allow it, and much seriousness and dark humour derives from this tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.

In a short story from 1984, “The Wallet”, Mr Fulham (who, we are told in the first line, “had assembled a nice life”) experiences death terrors when he takes his grandchildren to a local cinema. While “starships did special-effects battle”, Fulham’s “true situation in time and space” was revealed: “a speck of consciousness now into its seventh decade, a mortal body poised to rejoin the minerals, a member of a lost civilization that once existed on a sliding continent”. This “lonely possession” of his own existence, he concludes, is “sickeningly serious”.

God makes no appearance in this story, but it is unlikely that an atheist could have conjured so much from the minor domestic disturbance that follows. First, a large cheque “in the low six figures”, a return on canny investments, fails to show up in the post. Fulham makes many phone calls to the company in Houston, the matter begins to loom too large – “He slept poorly, agitated by the injustice of it.” He suspects a thief, a “perpetrator”, or there is a flaw in the mindless system. He is tormented by “outrageous cosmic unanswerableness”.

Then, the “perpetrator” strikes again. His wallet – “a friendly adjunct to his person” – vanishes. This being Updike, its contents are minutely, satirically listed, the credit, membership and hospital cards, the priceless clippings, photographs of family and one of a long-ago lover, the obsolete receipts. Who has not searched in vain, like Fulham, returning superstitiously to the same places, trying to recreate the careless self of yesterday? But “the wallet’s non-existence rang out through the rooms like a pistol shot which leaves deafness in its wake”. In despair, Fulham exclaims to his wife: “‘Without that wallet, I’m nothing.’ His tongue had outraced his brain, but once he said it, he realized this to be true: without the wallet, he was a phantom, flitting about in a house without walls.”

At last, the cheque shows up, only after it has been cancelled, the granddaughter finds the wallet, but only after the accounts have been frozen. The nights are cooler now and something has shifted in Fulham. He has had a near-death experience, a rehearsal, and now is reconciled to his end.

Like much that appears secular in Updike, this story is suffused with his religious seriousness – the very spirit that Larkin, an atheist, famously acknowledged in his description of a church as being “A serious house on serious earth . . .” It is no accident that Fulham’s moments of dread come upon him in a movie house. In the opening of the major novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, a movie is being made and, at the same time, a clergyman is losing his faith and confronts “the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem”. For Updike, cinema and its brattish child, television, “became our religion”. This was not a disapproving observation – in his youth, “it was the movies that moved me, and gave me something to live for, to live toward”.

And cinema was above all, for the young Updike, an exploration of sexual encounters. It was there from the very beginning, in his writing, that celebrated or infamous capacity for fastidious, clinical, visually intense, painfully and hilariously honest descriptions of men and women making love. However fleeting or disastrous the coupling, the metaphysical shadows are always on the wall – the same seriousness is in play. “Nature dangles sex to keep us walking toward the cliff,” Piet reflects in Couples. When he makes love outdoors to Georgene – “A lip of resistance, then an easeful deepness, a slipping by steps” – he is troubled that he is “under the eye of God”.

The ruthless recording eye made Updike unpopular with some women readers, especially back in the salad days of Theory, when talk of the “male gaze” was the fashion. Piet notes in Foxy’s nakedness “the goosebumped roughness of her buttocks, the gray unpleasantness of her shaved armpits . . .” But in Updike as in life, bodies are rarely perfect, unlike in the movies; this is fictional realism and goosebumps do not stand in the way of the lovers’ transcendent pleasure. While she fellates him “lazily”, he combs her lovely hair and reflects on her “coral cunt, coral into burgundy, with its pansy-shaped M, or W, of fur”. Then it comes to him that mouths are noble. “They move in the brain’s court. We set our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry.”

In his last novel, The Widows of Eastwick, Updike engaged playfully with his female critics through his character Sukie, the romantic novelist. She erases from a work in progress a passage about carefully buffed fingernails digging deep “into Hercule’s broad, heaving back”. She reminds herself that a proper romance never dwells on sexual details, for it might lose its “targeted demographic of dreamy, dissatisfied women . . . Women know the facts but don’t want them spelled out.”

In fact, Updike’s level unblinking gaze is not only on women, and is not confined to the physical. In Roger’s Version, when Lambert lies to his wife to conceal an infidelity, he does so “trusting my face, that thin-skinned traitor, to back me up”. And there was never a more fallible and exposed character in modern fiction than Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The tetralogy not only describes from the inside a modern man’s major and minor dishonesties, self-deceptions, special pleadings and lumpish passivity; it also charts over more than 30 years a slow physical and mental deterioration accelerated by laziness, junk food and American prosperity.

The Rabbit tetralogy is Updike’s masterpiece and will surely be his monument. In all its detail, homely or hard-edged, and all its arenas – work, politics, retirement and above all sex – the metaphysical is always there, sometimes a mere gleam buried in the fold of a sentence, at other times overtly, comically. In the first of the novels, Rabbit Run, when youngish Harry, the typesetter, ex-basketball player, makes love to Ruth, a small-town prostitute, their sessions are interrupted by a gut-level theological dispute about God’s existence, prompted by Sunday churchgoers in the street below. Harry, naturally, is on the side of God – “The idea of making it while the churches are full excites him.”

Many years later, he is on the slab, watching his own insides on a screen (“the Rabbit Angstrom Show”), surrounded by machines and technocratic doctors and their satellites who “murmurously crouch over Harry’s sheeted, strategically exposed body” conducting a three-and-a-half-hour angioplasty following his heart attack. The scene is rich in Updike’s strengths. “The mechanically precise dark ghost of the catheter is the worm of death within him. Godless technology is fucking the pulsing wet tubes we inherited from the squid, the boneless sea-cunts.” The experience is intensely unpleasant – “like his chest is being cooked in a microwave. Jesus.” He closes his eyes a few times and attempts to pray – “but it feels like a wrong occasion, there is too much crowding in, of the actual material world. No old wispy Biblical God would dare interfere.” The one consolation is that his doctor is Jewish, for Harry has a “gentile prejudice that Jews do everything a little better than other people, something about all those generations crouched over the Talmud and watch-repair tables, they aren’t as distracted as other persuasions, they don’t expect to have as much fun. They stay off the booze and dope and have a weakness only . . . for broads.”

Like Bellow, his only equal in this, Updike is a master of effortless motion – between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God’s-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike.

This is at the heart of the tetralogy’s achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry’s education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, “and not chop them down to what you think is the right size”. He was clear, too, that we all sense more than we can ever put into words, and was mindful of the example of Joyce and his “great attempt to capture the way we move through life”.

The three Bech books, which Updike always listed with his short stories, have alliterative titles, like the tetralogy, and read now like a trilogy of a distinctive comic genius. Henry Bech is a Jewish American writer whose career rises, fades horribly, and rises again to embrace the Nobel prize denied his creator. In one of the final episodes, “Bech Noir”, Henry takes, rather implausibly, to murdering the critics who have offended him over a lifetime. A poisoned self-addressed envelope and a discreet shove on a crowded subway platform dispose of two with little bother. To reach another, Bech, done up in cape and mask, armed with gun and silencer, climbs a fire escape with an accomplice, his current lover in a catsuit, to take the life of Orlando Cohen, an old man with emphysema, whose chaste ambition was to be “the ultimate adjudicator” of American literature and who had “refused to grant Bech a place, even a minor place, in the canon”.

They find an emaciated, enfeebled Cohen breathing oxygen through a mask with a volume of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings on his lap. This is comedy, high and dark, but it does not prevent the critic, minutes before his death, delivering a sharp dismissal of Bech’s work for its failure to understand America. Its core, Bech had failed to understand, was essentially Protestant. The first settlers thought the Holy Ghost had led them to a Promised Land. Fighting for air, Cohen pronounces: “The Holy Ghost . . . who the hell is that? Some pigeon, that’s all … but that God-awful faith … Bech … when it burns out … it leaves a dead spot. Love it or leave it … a dead spot. That’s where America is … in that dead spot.”

Bech failed to find that spot, but his creator had long ago made it his subject. That dead spot was the ruined inner city of Roger’s Version, a spoiled landscape through which a divinity professor takes a 30-page stroll – one of the great set pieces of the entire body of work; the dead spot was the shadowy centre of scores of novels and stories, in the freeways, malls, TV-addicted children, junk food, the boundless suburbs and their heartless intrigues and pursuit of ecstasy in restless, hopeful couplings, the messy divorces and their wounded children, the racial divide, the rackety politics filtered through TV screens, the national bafflement as manufacturing industries declined and the Japanese moved in with their cheaper cars.

That dead spot is probed and palpated in the ever-present metaphysics, the thwarted religious sense, or in moments when a denatured suburbanite glances up beyond the telegraph poles and wires and notices that spring is coming on and experiences a jolt of indistinct excitement that is quickly smothered; or when Harry Angstrom, waiting to receive a serve in a game of social tennis, thinks of the mounting numbers of dead in his life, and feels camaraderie for his friends and loves the treetops around him – but cannot name a single tree, never reads a book, knows nothing and feels his life to be threadbare.

There is, in Updike, always comedy or mischief in these moments of frustrated entitlement. A great writer cannot help showing us that there is something strangely comic, or antic, about the perfectly turned phrase; the precise insight into a human moment carries with it generosity and warmth, and prompts a smile of recognition. A baby “corkscrews” in its father’s arms; a newly married couple look “self-cherished, like gladioli”; when gales of 60s social mayhem sweep through Harry’s marital home, and the house has unwanted visitors and, in the dead of night, he must make love quietly to his new mistress, Updike notes that “the rooms are quadrants of one rustling heart” – a sweetly pitched observation that finds expression in an iambic pentameter.

The Updike opus is so vast, so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more. He was intensely private, learned, generous, courtly, the kind of man who could apologise for replying to one’s letter by return of post because it was the only way he could keep his desk clear.

Contrary to what his work might suggest, Updike was in actual life devoted to his large family that sprawled across the generations, so why not let one of his youngest characters take the parting bow on his behalf. When Henry Bech goes up on stage in Stockholm to make his Nobel acceptance speech, he takes with him on his hip his one-year-old daughter. She wriggles impatiently through his lecture and when at last he has finished, she reaches out for the microphone “with the curly, beslobbered fingers of one hand as if to pluck the fat metallic bud”. Bech feels the warmth of her skull, he inhales “her scalp’s powdery scent … Then she lifted her right hand, where all could see, and made the gentle clasping and unclasping that signifies bye-bye.”

• © Ian McEwan 2009

Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England
by Steve Jones
320pp, Little, Brown, £20

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins
by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
512pp, Allen Lane, £25

Over the past 150 years Darwin has become many people and many opinions. On the Origin of Species has been used to justify ideologies quite at odds with each other, including socialism and fascism; he has been claimed as an atheist yet also represented as an empiricist hardly aware of the implications of his own theory. His determined silence in the Origin on the effects of his ideas for humankind may have been intended – as he said – to be “diplomatic”, but instead shook the foundations of human pride in our separate status. His reluctance to apply evolutionary principles directly to social reform, as his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace did, has led some to view him as unconcerned with social justice. Darwin takes it for granted that we are part of the animal kingdom. And he takes that understanding further: we are kin to all organic life forms, extant and extinct.

In the telling of Darwin’s story, emphasis is often put on his presence as a family man, the devoted husband and father of 10 children who had the free run of the house and even his study. Darwin certainly lived in the midst of his own family and among those of his immediate kin, present and for several generations back. But in the Origin Darwin also expanded the idea of family, away from the human only, away from what he called the exclusiveness of “pedigrees and armorial bearings”, to embrace all “the past and present inhabitants of the world” – and by “inhabitant” he did not mean simply the human. Instead of being “special creations”, all organic beings are, as an outcome of his theory, “lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch”. We are all “the offspring of common parents”, and for Darwin this inclusiveness is the “grand fact” he has uncovered.

In the conclusion to the Origin, Darwin seeks to hearten and reassure the reader: “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendents of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.” We are part of the grandest of all families, he suggests, because we are part of the oldest family (that criterion by which the grandeur of aristocratic families is judged). His theory challenges apartheid in all its forms, including that between the living and the dead.

Two important new books consider Darwin’s achievement and the radical changes brought about by his thinking. In Darwin’s Island, Steve Jones places his work in a continuum that reaches into the present of scientific research, as well as emphasising its extraordinary prescience; in Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore investigate the social and personal forces that formed his thinking. Jones looks forward, and laterally across all the areas to which Darwin’s work contributed; Desmond and Moore plumb the past and seek a central explanation for Darwin’s drive. Both books enhance our understanding of Darwin’s significance. They are exhilarating in the freedom and precision with which they track ideas. Though both treat Darwin as a “great man”, they are not at the mercy of the great-man view of history. They recognise that the powerful individual is shaped and conditioned by – as well as breaking free from – the times in which he or she lives. There is a difference between them, though: Jones has no truck with the idea that Darwin’s theories are inherently social, though their effects are colossally so. Desmond and Moore emphasise the inspiration that political ideas provided, and see them as intrinsic to Darwin’s theories.

Both books draw on Darwin’s insistence that all organisms are kin and from common stock. They set out to rescue him from some false assumptions and to demonstrate the range and impassioned foresight of his work, as well as its relation to his own life experience. And both engage with the whole corpus of his writing, not just the Origin. That in itself is a great gain: Darwin was an indefatigable writer as well as a scrupulous observer throughout his adult life, from the 1830s to the early 1880s. In that time, he published a continuous stream of books, many of them founding documents of a range of different disciplines. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Animal Kingdom (1876), for example, was about hermaphrodite plants and was, Jones argues, “a first step in the scientific study of sex”.

As Jones demonstrates, Darwin’s concern with sexed and unsexed species and with their inventive means of exchanging genes had its bearing on his anxieties about first-cousin marriages – such as his own. But the outcome of his investigation was not controlled by these concerns. Jones also goes on to show where later research has reinforced or corrected Darwin’s views: “He denied the importance of selfing in animals and was again mistaken – I myself once worked on hermaphrodite slugs, who manage quite well with sex within their own skins.”

Jones shows how Darwin, living a family life in the English countryside, was able to attain radical insights and experimental results from the materials of his garden and greenhouses and from the fields that surrounded his house. These insights and results, he argues, are as vital to evolutionary theory and its future as those Darwin gleaned from his visit to the Galápagos islands. He shows, too, that despite the illness that hampered much of his adult life, Darwin travelled quite widely within Britain (often accompanied by subjects of study such as “pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants . . . at considerable inconvenience”).

The delight in reading Jones’s book is the zest with which he explores facts and sets them together to yield more than anyone could have expected, in true Darwinian style. This is a copious, branching book. Although he insists on the crucial experimental presence of the British Isles in Darwin’s researches, he does not confine himself to these shores. Jones demonstrates the coherence of Darwin’s output, showing how much of his thinking radiates out from his studies of barnacles and climbing plants, insects and worms. The finches and the tortoises of the Galápagos are part of the throng of life-forms, not the sole topic of his investigations.

Darwin himself had geology as his founding imagination and, writing to his friend and cousin William Darwin Fox, just before he arrived at the Galápagos, he was excited mostly at the prospect of finding rock strata there. Jones’s own predominant interest is in biology, but he doesn’t neglect that past lived world impacted or crumbled in the strata of the earth because, as he sees, those lost aeons and once-living forms were essential for Darwin’s theories to work.

To Darwin, nothing was trivial, since his entire theory depended on transmission of slight variations which over time produce huge consequences. On the contrary, as Jones makes clear, he saw how things small and large in scale relate intimately to each other and how organisms remote in time and place share processes with others close at hand. Jones relishes Darwin’s own puzzlement, even occasional exasperation, at the sheer inventiveness of forms in nature. Of orchids, Darwin writes: “Hardly any fact has struck me so much as the endless diversities of structure, the prodigality of resources, for gaining the very same end, namely, the fertilisation of one flower by the pollen from another plant.”

Jones comments that “he glimpsed but a small part of the game played by all plants as they fulfil their sexual identity” and goes on to ruminate on cheats, stupidity, reproductive dishonesty and identity fraud in plants, with some side-glances at human parallels. (He notes with some glee Darwin’s assumption that females are monogamous, which led him to refuse the idea of reproductive fraud in mammals.)

Jones is still startled by the investigations he records and by the potentialities of science. He demurs at anything that too closely identifies the scientist with the science, yet he emphasises the “magic” of connection: “There is something magical in the way that scientific rationalism connects raindrops with heartbeats, and battered trees with depressed infants.”

Occasionally, I found his insistence on the language of competition and struggle misleading: the “biological war between flower and insect” might be seen as biological collaboration. He insists that “the whole of evolution involves an endless set of tactics, but no strategy”. That is, Darwinian theory isn’t predictive. The intricacy of connections and deviations certainly makes it impossible to foresee the future. Nor, Jones asserts, does natural selection have any “inbuilt tendency to improve matters”. Here he differs from Darwin who, whether we like it or not, frequently links the idea of selection with that of improvement.

That difference cannot be glossed over. Jones seems to assume Darwin’s assent, but in the Origin we read: “old forms will be supplanted by new and improved forms”; “the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved organic beings in the struggle for life”. And in his autobiography Darwin writes of his dismay at the distant fate of Earth’s organic life as the planet cools: “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he is now, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.”

Natural selection does not produce perfection (indeed, imperfection, as of the eye, is evidence of natural selection in process) but Darwin does draw the idea of improvement tightly into his understanding of its outcome. Looking back, we may see this insistence as tinctured with the Victorian belief in progress and the hierarchical views of race-theorists, which colour Darwin’s efforts even as he tries to think himself free of those assumptions. That’s not to his discredit, but it is important to acknowledge the degree to which he both worked within and struggled against the assumptions of his time, especially when they are not our assumptions.

Desmond and Moore concentrate on the human implications of Darwin’s argument that all life-forms are kin. Their theme is the appalling practice of slavery and the history of the anti-slavery movement. They explore the Darwin family’s place in that movement and show the ways in which scientific debate was fundamental to the struggle between those who tolerated or supported slavery and those, such as Darwin, who had both a visceral and an intellectual loathing of it. They go further, to suggest that the initial drive behind Darwin’s investigation of species formation was his personal loathing of slavery.

To this end, they marshal an admirable and exciting mass of research into Darwin family history and Darwin’s early life, bringing out the importance of his mother’s Unitarianism and his Wedgwood relatives’ activism. Their account of Darwin’s rather unhappy year at Edinburgh University struggling to study as a doctor is particularly illuminating. This episode is usually written off as a fruitless period in Darwin’s young life and intellectual formation. Certainly, he found the experience of watching operations before the coming of anaesthetics quite intolerable. The authors explain his reaction in terms of him being “a polished young gentleman”, one who had a particular “horror of bleeding”. But given that one of these operations was on a child, it’s not hard to share his horror at pain. His capacity for empathy was a quality that was to stand him in good stead in his scientific practice later, so that their vague summary sentence is disappointing: “It was clearly the aura as much as the anatomy that he hated.”

But much else in these early chapters is revelatory, in part because Desmond and Moore bring so many strands together – though their characterisation of Walter Scott’s novels as emphasising continuity and medievalism misses a trick. In fact, novels such as Waverley and Old Mortality confronted what was then quite recent upheaval, resistance and change: the forces of discontinuity and of struggle for territory.

Desmond and Moore explore the opinions and histories of Darwin’s teachers and fellow-students, their relations to phrenology, philanthropy, taxonomy and taxidermy. The last proved especially fruitful for Darwin: one winter he bought 40 hours of instruction in stuffing birds from a black freedman, “John”, and late in life recalled that “I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man”. Desmond and Moore’s point is that Darwin, from quite early on, had learned to appreciate the capacities of people who elsewhere would be subject to slavery. Moreover, since “John” had travelled with his master, Waterton, through jungle country, Darwin would have had access to a different view of the communities they had explored from that to be found in travel books. In Edinburgh, when Darwin was studying there, “issues of environmental versus anatomical determinism, and a self-animated versus a Creatively animated nature, were being thrashed out all around him”.

“Already the shadow of slavery as a dark corollary was emerging,” Desmond and Moore write, “never stated, but looming larger as explanations of subjugation came to the fore.” Slavery features everywhere in their account: from Darwin’s immediate family circle, to his later testy relations with his early mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell, who failed fully to acknowledge the evils of slavery.

Although there are times where Desmond and Moore’s assiduity in finding side-references to slavery becomes somewhat oppressive, the authors do succeed in demonstrating the degree to which current events merged into Victorian scientific inquiry and inflected its findings. Moreover, they highlight Darwin’s ability to treat equally people of many backgrounds, including the impressive Richard Hill – naturalist and anti-slavery activist and “the first gentleman ‘of colour’ in the Jamaican magistracy, assigned to adjudicate between former slave-holders and slaves”. Such ties were personal but also always in the service of experimental investigation and scientific theory.

The authors set out to establish not only the centrality of race relations, and specifically slavery, in Darwin’s investigations, but to demonstrate that he formed the concept of sexual selection much earlier than is often thought and that it owes much to these racial controversies. The Descent of Man thus becomes all about sexual selection rather than this idea being loosely added at the end.

There may be more unevenness in Darwin’s attitudes than this book can quite tolerate, particularly in relation to hierarchy among human races. And absences, like that of humankind from the Origin, can be filled with many meanings: perhaps Darwin was not as preoccupied with the human as are his commentators. But in the main they are justified in their claims: Darwin never forgot the cries he heard from an anonymous house while on a land journey from the Beagle, and this haunting first-hand experience of liberal impotence in the face of cruel and degrading suffering fuelled his thinking.

• On the Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer, is published by OUP. You can buy Darwin’s Island and Darwin’s Sacred Cause at the Guardian bookshop

Barack Obama’s inauguration teemed with details evoking the other Illinois upstart he has often claimed as his model: Obama, we were told, would be swearing in on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, eating his favourite dishes off replicas of chinaware Mary Todd Lincoln selected in 1861. Fewer noted, however, that the woman Obama chose as his inaugural poet reinforced the comparison. Throughout her career, Elizabeth Alexander has sought to position herself as an heir to Walt Whitman, Lincoln’s fervent devotee.

Whitman only ever saw Lincoln from afar. Yet, having arrived in Washington on the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, he remained there for years, drifting from one job to another, out of his “profound conviction of [. . .] affinity” with the 16th president. “Lincoln,” Whitman wrote, “is particularly my man: particularly belongs to me; and by the same token, I am Lincoln’s man: I guess I particularly belong to him.” Throughout the American civil war, Whitman elevated Lincoln’s political commitment to preserving the union to a kind of aesthetic ideal. He strived to develop a lyric form that could encompass the diverse panorama of the “United States” that were for him “essentially the greatest poem”.

For some time, Alexander, who holds a steady day job as a professor of African American studies at Yale University, has been meditating publicly on what she has termed “Obamapoetics” – her own ideal of an American discourse able to “contain multitudes”. In an interview with the Poetry Foundation of America recorded last November, she gave some idea of how poetry and politics might best merge in the Obama era: “Personally, in my head, I’ve been hearing lines from Walt Whitman’s ‘I hear America singing’.” The Whitman poem in question begins: “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.”

In the weeks before the inauguration, commentators rushed to remind their readers that there have been only three inaugural poets in US history and that each trafficked in sanctimonious platitudes. Invited by John F Kennedy in 1961 to initiate the tradition, Robert Frost scripted clunky tercets of astonishing banality: “Summoning artists to participate / In august occasions of the state / Seems something for us all to celebrate.” (In an incident that has become legendary, on the day Frost found himself blinded by light and wind, and, so recited “The Gift Outright”, a fine lyric that he had published some 20 years earlier.) Reading at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, in 1991, Maya Angelou rattled off a litany of PC clichés. Supplanting Angelou at Clinton’s side in 1997, Arkansas-born Miller Williams did little better, imparting, at best, the assonance of a mystic to what boiled down to bloated truism: “How do we fashion the future? Who can say how / except in the minds of those who will call it Now?”

On 20 January Alexander predictably succumbed to this Curse of the Inaugural Poet – though not quite as pitiably as had the 86-year-old Frost. Her “Praise Song for the Day” strikes an intelligent conceit in crossing an African panegyric form with Whitman-inflected invocation. Yet its language, repeated for rhetorical effect, remains largely unsurprising; its few arresting words and images incoherent. Writing in The New Republic, Adam Kirsch dismissed Alexander’s efforts as “public in the worst sense – inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical,” an empty performance of “circumambient solemnity”. While many of the criticisms are fair, it is unfortunate that so many will judge Alexander by this poem alone. Her other work offers an encouraging archetype of the poet that Whitman referred to: the “joiner”, bringing together both diverse voices and multiple historical moments. Reread at the conjunction of two presidencies, Alexander’s richly embodied work raises questions about individual and national identity that are pressing for Obama, as they were for Lincoln.

Like Obama, throughout her life Alexander has stood inside and outside centres of black culture; inside and outside Washington. She was born in New York in 1962. “Harlem is my Valhalla,” she has said. “What am I always listening for in Harlem?” one of her poems muses. “A voice that says ‘This is your place, too?’ The accents are all unfamiliar; all my New York kin are dead.” The Alexanders moved to Washington when Elizabeth was just one and she grew up as a Washington insider. Her father was tapped by President Lyndon Johnson for the first of a series of posts that would culminate in his becoming the first African American secretary of the army. Alexander’s mother taught history at Georgetown University; her brother served as a senior adviser to the Obama campaign. Yet Alexander describes being dogged by a sense of outsidership in the capital, as in New York, because of her race. In one poem of childhood, classmates at her private school ask the young Alexander to entertain them by pulling her “nappy” hair out of its plaits. She received a BA from Yale and an MA from Boston University, where she studied with the West Indian poet Derek Walcott, shortly before he received the 1992 Nobel prize. Ironically, it was by eschewing politics in favour of academia that Alexander hit on the path that would lead her to the limelight of 20 January. Teaching as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, she befriended a young colleague at the law school, who would eventually invite her back to read on her hometown main stage.

Particularly in her early poems, Alexander focuses on fissures, or in-between spaces, as points of origin. “In the great earthquake the ground split / clean, and great-grandfather fell / in the fault with his goat,” she writes in one short family history. “I don’t know / how I got this tale and do not ask.” As a lonely graduate student in Boston, Alexander wistfully concludes: “A sidewalk crack in Washington DC / will feed my city dirt roots.” Alexander’s image – life sustaining itself on grit – not only provides a strong metaphor for her poetic project, it also returns us to Whitman’s magnum opus, Leaves of Grass

Alexander has often joked that she feels like the child of Whitman and Gwendolyn Brooks, the woman who became the first black Pulitzer prize-winner in 1950. Alexander’s “city dirt roots” translate the grass that Whitman sanctified as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” to the urban setting where Brooks would magpie for a new idiom, picking up slang to jangle against “higher” words. As both a writer and scholar, Alexander has spent her career grappling with what you might call the Whitman vs Brooks conundrum. Whitman thought big. After dabbling in doggerel as a teenager, he developed a mode of free verse intended to liberate American speech from the tyranny of abstract meter. His “omnivorous lines” sought to incorporate all the “long dumb voices” that prior poets had omitted – a democratic project that he sometimes gave a nativist bent. In a note of 25 February 1857, Whitman jotted to himself: “Put in my poems: American things, idioms, materials, persons, groups, minerals, vegetables, animals, etc.” Successors ranging from Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens to William Carlos Williams would carry this project into the 20th century in faith that, as Stevens once put it, “his soil is man’s intelligence”.

Whitman’s first-person speaker imagines a utopia where “the Asiatic and the African are hand in hand, the European and the American are hand in hand, / Learn’d and unlearn’d are hand in hand, and male and female are hand and hand”. In a way, Brooks’s work follows logically from Whitman’s desire to include and represent everything; from A Street in Bronzeville onward, her books assemble galleries of neglected subjects, speaking in the first person. However, Brooks commits herself to a more specific group. “The black poet should only write about the black experience,” she said. Seeking to calibrate a voice between Whitman and Brooks, Alexander evokes the dilemmas that shadowed Obama’s rise as a national politician. Is he too black? Not black enough? Put crudely, an Obamapoetics has to negotiate the president’s attempt to represent everyone with the reality of his being intractably particular, both an ideal “American” and a(n) __ American (black-, white-, hispanic-, Asian-, other: circle one).

Several of Alexander’s techniques are inherited directly from Whitman – particularly the use of cumulative lists and her attention to the body. The formal resource that Alexander has developed most fully, however, from her first book onward, is the persona poem, spoken by a specific character, usually black.

Written while studying with Walcott, himself a celebrated ventriloquist, the title poem of Venus Hottentot (1990) portrays Saartje Bartman, a Xhosa woman who was brought in 1810 to London, and then Paris, to be exhibited. Bartman’s attraction lay in her buttocks and sinus pudoris, or “fold of shame” (in fact, extended labia) that had fascinated Europeans studying “Cape women” since the 17th century. Bartman died of an infection; a scientist named Georges Cuvier conducted a public autopsy before putting her private parts on display in the Museum de l’Homme in Paris, where they remained until 1974.

This is Alexander’s most frequently discussed poem; it hits on a powerful figure for the predicament of its black female author trying to write within an academy, where, in the 1980s, black women were suddenly fashionable. But that’s not all the poem does. (Alexander reports that Walcott admonished her: “Never try to charm with your identity. It’s not enough that you’re a cute, black girl.”) Demonstrating her skill at manipulating multiple verse forms, it reveals Alexander’s ambition to write multiple, distinct voices and to contain them, in tension, within literary form. She has said in interviews that the poem came to her with the line: “I am called ‘Venus Hottentot’.” But in its finished version it is split into two sections, the first spoken by Cuvier:

Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful

Blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.

A drop of water swirls
like marble.

Over the course of Venus Hottentot, Alexander employs a gallery of ancestors and interlocutors, conjuring Paul Robeson, John Coltrane, Nat Love, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo and Nelson Mandela among her own relatives, so that the book as a whole comes to effect what she terms “creole montage”.

In subsequent work, Alexander has continued to develop as a master of characters. The Body of Life (1997) contains a poem spoken by Josephine Baker; rising to mimic her virtuosity as a performer, Alexander trills out five different forms for five sections. She further refined her technique in The Antebellum Dream Book (2001). A “twelve-round” poem spoken by Muhammad Ali manages to cram enraging memories of racist violence, as well as poignant self-reflections, into four- and five-syllable lines that read all the more explosively for having been so condensed.

Alexander’s most recent collection, the Pulitzer prize-shortlisted American Sublime (2005), probably contains her most accomplished work to date. A section entitled “Amistad”, after the slave ship, gathers spare “list poems” into a deeply moving act of commemoration. Alexander further introduces a new genre that enriches our perspective on her persona poems and anticipates her turn at Obama’s inauguration. An ars poetica, the Latin term used by Horace to designate his treatise on poetics, is generally assumed to state authorial intention, plain and programmatic. Consider an excerpt from the widely reprinted “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe”:

Poetry is what you find
In the dirt in the corner,

Overhear on the bus, God
In the details, the only way

To get from here to there.

“Dirt in the corner” is appropriate insofar as Alexander, like Whitman, writes “poems of materials”, describing objects typically thought of as too low for art. Her historical poems, too, attempt to rescue what has been lost for lack of notice.

In the same section, Alexander seems uncannily to anticipate her turn as inaugural poet. “Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally” relates the contents of a dream:

I said through the megaphone

“People do violence
Unto each other

And unto the earth
And unto its creature. [. . .]

“Poetry

Changes none of that
By what it says

Or how it says, none.
But a poem is a living thing

Made by living creatures
(live voice in a small box)

And as life
It is all that can stand

Up to violence.”

The claim that “poetry // changes none of that” inevitably, ironically evokes WH Auden’s famous line: “poetry makes nothing happen”. Still, by insisting on the “living thing” inside her stanzas, the existence of its “voice in a small box” as an affirmation of life, Alexander defends the work that art can do without making too grand a claim for its political effectiveness.

Despite having offered bland and distractable universalism on the day that the world was watching, Alexander has developed a strongly polyvocal poetics over the course of her career. Her Obamapoetics aspires to create the space for multiple voices, a poem whose landscape is an imagined “America singing, the varied carols”.

Towards the end of last year the Review published a touching letter from a reader recalling her childhood engagement with Little Women, Louisa M Alcott’s classic family story. Generations of girls, she said, have “seared in their memory” the episode where Jo, the second of the genteelly impoverished March girls, sells her long hair to help fund her mother’s visit to the bedside of her wounded father, who is an army chaplain. It’s the time of the American civil war, and Jo wishes she could enlist. That’s all very well, I used to sneer; nobody’s going to hand her a rifle and pack, and tell her “Off you go, girl”. Jo is generally held to be a role model for the budding writer; why, then, did I hate her like poison? She’s a tomboy, who outrages her sisters by whistling. She uses schoolboy slang, and says she wishes she’d been born male. So did I, once; but by the age of four I’d worked out that you weren’t going to make the swap. Jo’s 15 when Little Women begins, and she hasn’t worked it out yet. How I despised her, with her preposterous literary aspirations! She writes plays for the family to perform – toe-curling melodramas. And when she first presents a manuscript to an editor, she ties it up with a red ribbon. Somehow, even at the age of eight, I knew that was a ludicrous thing to do. And, given her general mindset, shouldn’t she have been glad to get her head cropped? Mr March’s misfortune is Jo’s opportunity; that’s what I thought, anyway, in my first acid efforts at literary criticism.

My preferred model for the life to come was What Katy Did. Katy is the eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters; her mother is dead, her kind papa is a family doctor. I don’t know what, when I was eight, I wanted more – a benign masculine presence, or Katy’s facility in making up stories, verses and riddles. I read Susan Coolidge’s book many times. She and the author of Little Women were rough contemporaries, born in 1835 and 1832 respectively. Neither married, and they both used their younger selves as models for their sparky heroines. Little Women has never lost popularity, but I was surprised to find Katy and her family on the shelves of a local bookshop. The cover of one recent edition pictures a young girl on a swing, foregrounding an episode in the story that, as a child, I didn’t think was central. Rereading it, I have to admit it is. Katy, against adult advice, uses a swing that has not been properly secured. She falls, is paralysed, and becomes an invalid for many months. She plunges into depression till visited by her saintly cousin Helen, a long-time invalid, who teaches her how to be saintly too: not to complain, never to show her pain, to enact cheerfulness and make an asset of immobility.

It’s sickening stuff, and for reasons of my own I wish now I had never read it. As a small Catholic child, I had already taken on board the recommended attitude to suffering. You didn’t avoid it, but “offered it up”. It seems likely I also internalised Cousin Helen’s message. It went underground, and surfaced when I myself became ill in my early teens. At that time in my life I didn’t squeal and kick enough. If I had regarded pain as an insult and an outrage, I might have made such a nuisance of myself that I got help; my medical history and my life would have been different. You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart.

Perhaps if I’d had more books, newer books, they would have diluted the noxious message and made my own imagination less collusive. The portrait of the Carr family enthralled me; what was important was not the accident on the swing, but the shared imaginative life of these brothers and sisters. In What Katy Did at School, the western girl (who has got back the use of her legs) goes to an eastern boarding school, sees other customs and manners, but finds another congenial society of witty young women who can all turn a verse. I didn’t find out What Katy Did Next until I was grown-up and bought a second-hand copy. What she does is go on a European tour, and meet the dashing young naval lieutenant she will marry. It’s a less amusing book than the earlier ones, a travelogue with a perfunctory storyline. But there is one heightened, hallucinogenic moment: while seeing the sights in London, Katy spots George Eliot getting out of a cab. “She stood for a moment while she gave her fare to the cabman, and Katy looked as one who might not look again, and carried away a distinct picture of the un-beautiful, interesting, remarkable face.”

When I encountered this I blinked and read it again. It was an intersection of two imaginary planes; as much a breach of the rules as if, nowadays, I woke up to find one of my own invented characters in the kitchen making tea. Who is more real, Katy or George Eliot? I vote for Katy. I am surprised, returning to them, to find Coolidge’s books so relentless in their piety, though no more queasily moralising than Little Women. As a child I must have thought all books were like that: vehicles of moral improvement, edification; books talked like adults, served adult interests. It was not until I was 10, and began Jane Eyre, that I encountered a story which seemed designed not to improve me, but describe me: “a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand”. Jane is required by her guardian to simulate childlike qualities, but can’t manage it. I understood that pressure. I recognised Jane’s perpetual, fretful anxiety; the world around her is jostling with hostile forces, with mean and malign intentions that the March girls and Katy had never glimpsed. “Let me be a little girl as long as I can,” wheedles Jo March. Oh, you double-dyed fool! I had never read a book that did not idealise childhood until Charlotte Brontë presented me with one. Jane Eyre will not thrive unless she grows up fast, and perhaps not even then. For the first time an author was trusting me with the truth; it was there, for me, that the writing life began.

Latin America is the region that Britain and the US have touched least. Why have so many good anglophone books been written about it? From William Prescott’s histories of the Spanish conquest, written in addictive Miltonic prose, to Conrad’s Nostromo (perhaps his greatest novel), to Greene’s The Power and the Glory (very likely his best), to Lowry’s Under the Volcano (certainly his best) and even Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (not his best), the masterpieces make one wonder why the land has proved so disproportionately fertile for the English language. More recently there’s been Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiessen, Nicholas Shakespeare and now James Scudamore, whose first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, set in Ecuador, won the Somerset Maugham award in 2007.

In his second novel, set in contemporary São Paulo, Scudamore does not embed a transplant from his own culture in foreign soil, as Lawrence and Lowry did. Instead he takes the plunge and boldly invests himself in a first-person narrator, Ludo, a kind of foundling from an urban favela brought up by a plutocrat. Ludo’s character, history and current entanglements form the heart of the book, holding it together as his hold on his own life becomes ever more tenuous.

Ludo links the two worlds of São Paulo – the gated, guarded communities of its super-wealthy, the favelas of its poor – having been plucked from the favela by supermarket millionaire Ze Generoso as a young child. A larger-than-life national figure, Ze moves Ludo and his mother to his weekend farm, where she becomes the cook, in what will ostensibly be a Trading Places-style experiment. Ludo’s narrative neatly straddles two story lines, delivered in alternating chapters. The first, in flashback, relates his youth on the farm, where he becomes ever more involved in his wealthy patron’s family; taken back to the city as an adopted teenage son, he gets embroiled in a quasi-incestuous affair with their well-groomed daughter. The other details his present-day life as a 27-year-old executive in an ad agency in the city.

Ludo is clever, good at talking himself out of tight corners, and astute at divining the motivations of the wealthy and powerful. He also takes after his mother in being an excellent cook: every chapter is named after a dish, a gesture towards the book being a kind of Brazilian Chocolat. It’s in the kitchen, among other places, that Scudamore’s considerable descriptive strengths are displayed: “I took a slice of the liver and draped it across the base of the pan, watching it crawl and shrink in the hot oil.” He’s equally adept at conjuring the great modern city: “A beautiful pollution sunset bathes the city in pinks and reds and oranges that glint in shards off the skyscraper glass. Helicopters take to the air like fat flies, shuttling the rich to their weekend homes.”

The novel is cleverly pitched to explore the two socioeconomic poles of modern urban Brazil. And the writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work, one whose command of tone is strong, and who has an instinctive feel for handling a story. The plotting is neat and satisfying, as the circles of Ludo’s life and history tighten around him. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing. When Ludo gets kidnapped by a drug gang and suffers an ordeal of degradation while tied up in a musty sack, the scene didn’t activate as much pity, concern or suspense as it might have. Perhaps the plot is just a little too strategically and carefully deployed, too deliberate. The final denouement about Ludo’s true paternity arrives as the right move in the right place, yet left a faint suspicion of an author painting by numbers.

This may sound harsh, but the talent manifest in the descriptive writing, in the deft characterisations, in the cool-handed plotting, suggests an author capable of deploying his skills to a greater purpose. And there’s a further question: however well it’s portrayed, how reliable is this version of Brazil? Of course, there’s no such thing as a reliable fictional (or non-fictional) version of anything; yet there is such a thing as a palpable depth of authenticity. Scudamore’s international upbringing included time in Brazil, and the strongest passages of the book are those capturing the kind of sensory delights on the farm and in the city that would have impressed themselves on a child’s mind. You can sense movies such as City of God, Central Station and Black Orpheus hovering in the background; yet, unlike them, the book in the end gives a sense of shuttling just above the city’s surface like one of those glinting helicopters: not as weighty as it might be, but beautiful to watch.

• Henry Shukman’s novel The Lost City is published by Abacus

The Booker prize-winning trio of John Banville, Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright along with an army of the biggest names in Irish literature are protesting the termination of funding to the Irish Writers’ Centre, a hub for Dublin’s literary community which hosts regular readings from the likes of Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín.

The authors have put their names to a petition calling for the Irish Arts Council’s decision to cut the Centre’s €200,000 funding to be reversed, and for support to be “reinstated urgently”. Other signatories include Sebastian Barry, fresh from winning this week’s Costa prize, John Boyne, Ciarán Carson, Maeve Binchy, Paul Muldoon and Joseph O’Connor, as well as a host of international supporters, from Richard Ford to Will Self and the Forward prize-winning poet Sean O’Brien.

“It’s very difficult for writing to have a permanent presence and it does need one for events, discussions, conferences and to hold archives,” said O’Brien today. “Economic times are hard and everyone is being hit one way or other, but it isn’t a huge amount of money – €200,000 wouldn’t buy you a third division player.”

The Irish Writers’ Centre, which Seamus Heaney has called “a part of the literary culture” and Boyne “a part of the fabric of literature in Ireland”, works to develop and foster new Irish writing, providing a space for literary events, festivals and courses, as well as a home for a host of writers’ groups. It said that the decision to terminate its funding meant that access to these resources would be lost, “leaving the next generation of Irish authors in a vacuum and having to look elsewhere for guidance and development”.

“In terms of Irish literature, whose contribution to world culture has been so immense, it makes sense to have an Irish Writers’ Centre – and I’m speaking as an English person,” said O’Brien. “Poets are quite familiar with the idea of leaping from pillar to post, from lecture to phone box – it’s important to have somewhere.”

Although the Centre is attempting to raise money through creative writing courses and benefit nights to ensure its survival, its lack of funds means it is being forced to make two members of its staff of four redundant. “The plan is to keep the centre going as best we can, but obviously in the current climate it is difficult,” said Ian Oliver, who despite losing his job will continue to work for the Centre on a voluntary basis.

The Arts Council said it would not comment on individual cases.