So The Submission is a novel that explores entrenched positions but also digs down to expose the dangers and doubts that often lie beneath uncompromising public posturing. Moreover, as Sonia Baelo-Allué has observed, focalization that shifts between the main protagonists sheds deliberately uneven light on the debates, producing a “constant crisscrossing of perspectives.”

XREF: Relates to narrative theory techniques—focalization as a means of creating moral complexity, echoing Nabokov criticism or Genette's work.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 293