The Religion (Cape, £18.99) by Tim Willocks was published this week.

Book critics in the UK are greeting The Religion rather as the arrival of the British navy would have been welcomed in colonial times. All flags are waving. One whole sheet of the three-page press release that accompanies The Religion is full of quotations not from critics but from Jonathan Cape staff. Behind the hype, the reason for their near-hysteria is easily diagnosed.

The Religion is a novel for our times, dealing as it does with the clash between the Christian West and the Islamic East. Only in this case, it all takes place not in Beirut or Baghdad but in the 1560s.

The setting is the siege of Malta, defended for the Pope by the Knights of St John the Baptist and attacked by the Ottoman emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent and his navy.

“I used to run a fringe theatre company in London,” the multi-tasking Willocks told the UK newspaper The Independent, “and one of the plays we did was The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe. It is loosely and inaccurately set against the siege of Malta. At the time I read into the background and thought it would be a great setting for a novel but never got round to working on it. What has attracted me back to the subject now is that it gave me an opportunity not to be shackled by modern concerns, although there are all sorts of modern concerns sublimated in the story.

It was very freeing to work in a different time, to work with language in a different way. Modern dialogue is a bit stunted – it has to be. It’s nice with historical fiction to be a little more flowery.”

If the seed of the idea was planted before the most recent standoff between the West and much of the Islamic world, then the writing of The Religion was, Willocks acknowledges, influenced by it. “It would have been hard to ignore the insanity roaring out of TV while I was writing, but I wouldn’t want people to think I am coming along with a message. I didn’t want my book to be polemical. Instead, I wanted to stand in the shoes of the characters in the story and let any parallels that arose do so naturally in the world I am describing.”

The principal character of Willocks’s book, Mattias Tannhauser, a soldier of fortune, experiences both Islam and Christianity who has been brutalised by and is cynical of both. The opening sections of The Religion’s 600-odd pages suggest that, seen through Tannhauser’s battle-hardened gaze, all forms of organised religion are going to get a pasting. But Willocks is subtler than that. “It’s very hard to have a measured conversation about Islam or the right to belief in the current climate. As soon as you start talking about religion, I hear perfectly intelligent people saying: ‘I hate religion. It is the cause of all the world’s troubles.’ To my mind that is just prejudice against religion.”

The new book starts with 12-year-old Mattias watching his beloved mother raped and butchered by mercenaries. “I suppose it would be true to say I’m fascinated by violence,” Willocks agrees with a cherubic smile. “I always have been. It’s so present in the life of the human race... I suspect the base line for the human race is to be suspicious, paranoid and untrusting and therefore all of us are potentially violent. Religion can be one of the things that holds us back.”

Tim Willocks hit the big time, and then Hollywood, with his second novel Green River Rising.

This 1994 book, a violent, merciless account of convicts sweltering in the Texas heat, was hailed as one of the best prison novels ever written and quickly achieved cult status. Its success saw him sought out by Hollywood where he went to work with some of the biggest names in the film industry, first as a screenwriter and later a producer. He was even romantically linked, by the gossip columns, with Madonna.