At first sight, J — which has beenshortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — represents a significant departure for Howard Jacobson. It’s set in a future Britain where some sort of apocalypse — known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’ — has taken place several decades ago. It also contains virtually no jokes. Yet, from within this unfamiliar framework, some familiar concerns soon emerge.
In 2010, The Finkler Question was hailed as the first comic novel to win the Booker since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. But the book darkened considerably towards the end, with Jacobson unsmilingly warning his readers — and especially any fellow Jews who regard such warnings as ‘hysterical’ — about the continuing, potentially lethal dangers of anti-Semitism.
At one point, with the cultural boycott of Israel gathering pace, a woman finds herself suddenly frightened as to where the protests against her Jewish museum might lead. ‘It was hard to picture herself as a deportee in a thin floral dress, carrying a little suitcase, her eyes hollow with terror,’ she reflects, ‘as she strolled through St John’s Wood with her jewellery clinking.’ But then again wouldn’t the Jews of 1930s Europe ‘have found [their] fate hard to picture too’? After seeing a ferociously pro-Palestinian play (obviously modelled on Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children) another character goes even further, believing that ‘there’d be no settling this until there’d been another Holocaust’.
Well, in J, there has been — perhaps not on the industrial scale of the Nazis, but effective enough. And, as we slowly learn some of the details of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, it’s evident that Palestine was indeed part of the reason — or, more accurately, part of the excuse.
The main characters are Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen, a couple who’ve recently fallen in love, and whose surnames might seem to indicate their racial background.
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