Howard Jacobsen’s J has been shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize today:
At first sight, J 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 Prize 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.
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