Why good principles often result in bad art

For those of us who get by with a touch of compromise in our daily existence, encountering someone who lives a life of purity can be slightly scary.

Saintliness is fine in films - the Amélie types are always fun to watch - but, in reality, few people like too much morality in one person. It makes the rest of us feel faintly grubby. So sceptical groans will have been heard within the fiction-writing community - a surprisingly beady and rivalrous bunch - at the news that one of their number, Matthew Branton, will be giving away his fifth novel free of charge to any reader who wishes to download it from the internet. The move, he says, is a protest against the corrupt state of Britain's culture industry.

Yeah right, the reaction will be, so where's the scam? Some kind of publicity dodge, is it? A sneaky link-up with a publisher, ensuring a boost to sales of Branton's other novels? Most likely, the guy was unable to get a deal and is now huffily trying to make the best of a bad situation. Apparently not.

Branton's previous four novels have been well reviewed in all the right places, we are told. Each was optioned for film. On average, he has earned a healthy £50,000 per book. Since 2000, he has lived in Hawaii, surfing, growing vegetables and fishing, accompanied by his wife, an academic who is doing unfunded research into something or other and who helps the family budget by sewing pyjamas.

The Brantons are "living off air", Matthew has said in a recent interview, so refusing to accept money from his publisher Bloomsbury for his latest work The Tie and the Crest was a genuine act of sacrifice, the equivalent of someone refusing to accept a year's salary because he disapproves of the way his employer behaves.

It appears it was Sophie Dahl, the model turned novelist, who had particularly pissed our man off - or, rather, the fact that Bloomsbury agreed to publish her novella. "I don't want their stupid money until the industry is less stupid," he says. "The publishing industry is a joke that has gone too far."

Developing his theme, Branton argues that libraries, once a source of seriousness and power, are now "full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell's novels, along with Tony Parson's drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious, pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days".

Few would disagree with any of that, although one worries for Branton's future if it depends upon publishers becoming less stupid. Ever since the publishing industry abandoned retail price maintenance on books, thereby handing editorial power to vast, greedy bookselling chains, the drift towards the populist and the promotable has been irreversible.

But, interesting as it is, Branton's position has problems. For a start, he believes that living the simple life in Hawaii is, in itself, morally commendable. Consumer capitalist propaganda over the past decade, he argues, has been aimed at persuading young people that all there is to life is "a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China". The solution - to have none of it - is already being pursued by people like him and his wife.

This, of course, is hippy nonsense from a bygone age. If Branton is right in saying that we live in a degrading, money-obsessed culture - and you have to admit that he has a point - the idea that a life of surfing and pyjama-sewing in Hawaii is a valid, useful protest is not only deluded, but also a touch smug.

More importantly, he may be about to take a wrong turn as a novelist, becoming part of a great tradition of artists and writers who believe that art is an organic, inner thing, that any dealing with the market-place is a form of prostitution. The daddy of all literary purists was Gustave Flaubert - "We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois" was the way he saw the publishing process - but the sad truth is that most authors are not Flaubert.

If a writer manages to maintain a tension between his own intrinsic vision and the demands of his potential public, between what he wants to write and what publishers are prepared to pay for, the result, mysteriously, is not compromise, a halfway house between purity and corruption, but something more outward-looking, less fat and self-indulgent, than would have been written if he were writing purely according to the dictates of his soul. The market here can be a force for good.

Coming on like a contemporary, surfing version of Gauguin, moaning about capitalism and giving away his words for free, may make Matthew Branton and others like him feel virtuous and happy, but the result will be worse, not better, art.