She has been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, a conference on the age-old problem of evil: why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it.

She can make a shrewd guess why the organizers picked on her: because of a talk she gave last year at a college in the United States, a talk for which she was attacked in the pages of Commentary (belittling the Holocaust, that was the charge) and defended by people whose support for the most part embarrassed her: covert anti-Semites, animal-rights sentimentalists.

She had spoken on that occasion on what she saw and still sees as the enslavement of whole animal populations. A slave: a being whose life and death are in the hands of another. What else are cattle, sheep, poultry? The death camps would not have been dreamed up without the example of the meat-processing plants before them.

That and more she had said: it had seemed to her obvious, barely worth pausing over. But she had gone a step further, a step too far. The massacre of the defenceless is being repeated all around us, day after day, she had said, a slaughter no different in scale or horror or moral import from what we call the holocaust; yet we choose not to see it.

Of equal moral import: that they had baulked at. There had been a protest by students from the Hillel Centre. Appleton College should as an institution distance itself from her utterances, they demanded. In fact, the college should go further and apologize for having offered her a platform.

Back home the newspapers had picked up the story with glee. The Age ran a report under the headline PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST ACCUSED OF anti-Semitism and reprinted the offending paragraphs from her talk, riddled with faulty punctuation. The phone started to ring at all hours: journalists, for the most part, but strangers too, including a nameless woman who shouted down the line, 'You Fascist bitch!' After that she stopped answering the phone. It was she, all at once, who was on trial.

It was an entanglement she might have foreseen and should have avoided. So what is she doing on the lecture platform again? If she had any sense she would keep out of the limelight. She is old, she feels tired all the time, she has lost what appetite she ever had for disputation, and anyhow what hope is there that the problem of evil, if problem is indeed the right word for evil, big enough to contain it, will be solved by more talk?

But at the time the invitation came she was under the malign spell of a novel she was reading. The novel was about depravity of the worst kind, and it had sucked her into a mood of bottomless dejection. Why are you doing this to me? she wanted to cry out as she read, to God knows whom. The same day there arrived the letter of invitation. Would Elizabeth Costello, the esteemed writer, grace a gathering of theologians and philosophers with her presence, speaking, if she so pleases, under the general rubric 'Silence, Complicity and Guilt'?

The book she was reading that day was by Paul West, an Englishman, but one who seemed to have freed himself of the more petty concerns of the English novel. His book was about Hitler and Hitler's would-be assassins in the Wehrmacht, and all was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters. Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them, exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher with last week's blood caked under his fingernails, taunt them, telling them what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run down their spindly old-man's legs, how their limp old-man's penises would quiver one last time? One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a nondescript space that could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights so that back in his lair in the forest Adolf Hitler, commander-in-chief, would be able to watch on film their sobbings and then their writhings and then their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfied he had had his revenge.

That is what Paul West, novelist, had written about, page after page after page, leaving nothing out; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands. Obscene! she wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes. Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one's sanity.

The letter of invitation came while the obscene touch of West's book was still rank upon her. And that, in short, is why she is here in Amsterdam, with the word obscene still welling up in her throat. Obscene: not just the deeds of Hitler's executioners, not just the deeds of the blockman, but the pages of Paul West's black book too. Scenes that do not belong in the light of day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from.

How will Amsterdam react to Elizabeth Costello in her present state? Does the sturdy Calvinist word evil still have any power among these sensible, pragmatic, well-adjusted citizens of the New Europe? Over half a century since the devil last swaggered brazenly through their streets, yet surely they cannot have forgotten. Adolf and his cohorts still grip the popular imagination. A curious fact, considering that Koba the Bear, his older brother and mentor, by any measure more murderous, more vile, more appalling to the soul, has almost dwindled away. A measuring of vileness against vileness in which the very act of measuring leaves a vile taste in the mouth. Twenty million, six million, three million, a hundred thousand: at a certain point the mind breaks down before quanta; and the older you get – this at any rate is what has happened to her – the sooner comes the breakdown. A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air: who dare say which is the worse? Evil, all of it, an evil universe invented by an evil god. Dare she say that to her kind Dutch hosts, her kind, intelligent, sensible auditors in this enlightened, rationally organized, well-run city? Best to keep her peace, best not to cry out too much. She can imagine the next headline in the Age: universe

EVIL, OPINES COSTELLO.

From her hotel she wanders out along the canal, an old woman in a raincoat, still slightly light-headed, slightly wobbly on her feet, after the long flight from the Antipodes. Disoriented: is it simply because she has lost her bearings that she is thinking these black thoughts? If so, perhaps she ought to travel less. Or more.

The topic she is to speak on, the topic negotiated between her and her hosts, is 'Witness, Silence, and Censorship'. The paper itself, or most of it, was not difficult to write. After her years on the executive of PEN Australia she can discourse on censorship in her sleep. If she wanted to make things easy for herself, she could read them her routine censorship paper, spend a few hours in the Rijksmuseum, then catch the train to Nice, where, conveniently, her daughter is staying as the guest of a foundation.

The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus that has marked her thinking of late: the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour, it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing.

That, in any event, is what she plans to say here in Amsterdam. As her principal example she plans to set before the conference The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, which came to her in a packet of books, some of them new, some reissues, sent for her consideration by an editor friend in Sydney. The Very Rich Hours was the only one that had really engaged her; her response was set out in a review that she withdrew at the last minute and has never published.

When she arrived at her hotel there had been an envelope waiting for her: a letter of welcome from the organizers, a conference programme, maps. Now, sitting on a bench on the Prinsengracht in the tentative warmth of the northern sun, she glances over the programme. She is scheduled to speak the next morning, the first day of the conference. She flips to the notes at the end of the programme.'Elizabeth Costello, noted Australian novelist and essayist, author of The House on Eccles Street and many other books.' Not the way she would have billed herself, but they did not ask her. Frozen in the past, as usual; frozen in the achievements of her youth.

Her eye drifts down the list. Most of her fellow conferees she has not heard of. Then her eye is caught by the last name on the list, and her heart misses a beat. 'Paul West, novelist and critic.' Paul West: the stranger on the state of whose soul she spends so many pages. Can anyone, she asks in her lecture, wander as deep as Paul West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed? Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How can she give the talk, how can she ask such a question, with Paul West himself sitting in the audience? It will seem like an attack, a presumptuous, unprovoked, and above all personal attack on a fellow writer. Who will believe the truth: that she has never had any dealings with Paul West, has never met him, has read only this one book of his? What is to be done?