Something is missing from the society portrayed in Howard Jacobson’s Booker-longlisted 13th novel, a seemingly placid retro-future Britain where everyone now has surnames such as Cohen, Behrens, Kroplik, Solomons and Gutkind. Music and language have been neutered by collective consent: the radio plays wall-to-wall love ballads, improvisation has “fallen out of fashion”, literature consists of “rags-to-riches memoirs, cookbooks and romances”, and conversation steers clear of jokes, insults or witticisms, whose “unpredictability unsettled people’s nerves”. Phone and letter are the main channels of communication, though distant memories remain of “a time when people wrote to one another by phone but wrote such horrid things that the practice had to be discouraged”. Citizens are barred from entering or leaving the country, and the slogans promoted by Ofnow, the “non-statutory monitor of the public mood”, include Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, The Overexamined Life is Not Worth Living and Yesterday is a Lesson We Can Learn Only by Looking to Tomorrow.
What on earth has happened here? The answer obtrudes, bit by bit, into the bleakest and most unsettling narrative of this author’s career. Jacobson may have started as a comic novelist, but he has been getting steadily more serious for years, with books such as Kalooki Nights and The Finkler Question staging their wrangling social comedies on the edge of personal and historical cataclysms. But the jet-black satire in J begins a long way down in the pit already. This is a novel of absences, elisions and missing pieces, in which the reader must sift through the many evasions of official history, willed forgetfulness, newspeak and doublethink to work out what is going on.
A picture emerges. Several decades before the events of the book – so, not many years from our own time – the Britain of Jacobson’s novel sanctioned a campaign of hysterical extermination that deprived the nation of a significant number of its citizens. No one seems to know, officially at least, who these citizens were or what became of them; the half-remembered events that led to their disappearance are referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.
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“Something terrible’s been done to everybody everywhere,” says one character. “What’s the point of hunting down the specifics?”
This tyranny of forgetting extends to language. A government campaign, Project Ishmael – which, in one of the book’s more groanworthy flourishes, takes its name from the first line of Moby-Dick – orders all citizens to take new names, going “in a single bound from Hinchcliffe to Behrens” and so on. British towns and counties have been likewise renamed: Cornwall becomes Bethesda, and Ludgvennok, the village where most of the book’s action takes place, is rechristened, if that’s the right word, Port Reuben. As a political scheme, this is obviously daft, but it has its place in Jacobson’s bitterly satirical agenda, representing a final scattering to the winds of special names and cultural signifiers.
Other words have dropped out of use altogether. The book’s title is not the letter J, exactly, but an invented character with two bars through it, denoting the superstitious gesture made by several characters to “stifle the letter J” before it leaves their lips. It crops up at the beginning of several significant words – “jazz”, “Jesus”, “joke”, “jest” – whose substance has also been removed from this sinister dystopia. When two characters visit the Necropolis – the nation’s capital, now a violent interzone – their taxi driver takes them east, to the place slangily known as “where the Cohens lived”, before painfully having to explain that the Cohens in question “went away a long time ago. Before memory.”
So much for the set-up – but what a set-up it is, so gloriously drip-fed and sinister that it often makes a sideshow of the novel’s unshapely plots and sub-plots. J revolves loosely around the romance between two characters, a middle-aged woodworker named Kevern Cohen and a 19-year-old artist, Ailínn Solomons.
Both are damaged creatures: Kevern has inherited a bundle of obsessive-compulsive self-protection behaviours from his secretive parents, while Ailínn, an orphan, is convinced that a nebulous Someone is trying to keep tabs on her. As the novel proceeds, we discover that neither of them is as paranoid as they seem. In Port Reuben, and in the England that contains it, violence and fury are never far beneath the surface. Murder and sexual violence are on the rise; people are profoundly unhappy at some half-acknowledged level; and the government, in the person of its regulator Ofnow, has a plan to do something about it that directly involves our two protagonists.
This is where things get a bit tangled up, as Jacobson’s novel is trying to do several things at once: it wants to develop plausible characters in a ridiculous world, it wants to keep the reader guessing about the dimensions and consequences of its central atrocity, but it needs to make sure we don’t miss any satirical, ethical or political points either. This results in an uneven tone that can’t simply be ascribed to the neutered language of this future society, as the author commandeers or curtails his plot lines to stage Platonic talking-shops on the book’s central ideas. One rambling subplot, about a sequence of murders in the village and the detective who investigates them, adds little to the book except an interesting discussion of denialism. Another segment involving a ghastly art historian, who spies on his students for evidence of “the alien and grotesque… for anything or anyone – how can I best put this? – left over”, provides the book’s most unvarnished treatment of the murderous racism at its heart but impinges only vaguely on the plot. Set aside the central guessing game, and J is much less fascinating as a novel of action than as a space in which its ideas can be discussed.
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Elsewhere, the novel sometimes overbalances when Jacobson’s robust sense of comedy overcomes the chilly restraint of his narrative. Sometimes he just can’t resist a joke. One early passage on the new world order splashes from the sinister into the ridiculous, reducing seething social tension to cartoon Orwelliana:
“A compliant society meant that every section of it consented with gratitude – the gratitude of the providentially spared – to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean origin were suited by temperament and physique to entertainment and athletics, and so they sang and sprinted. People originally from the Indian subcontinent, electronically gifted as though by nature, undertook to ensure no family was without a functioning utility phone. What was left of the Polish community plumbed, what was left of the Greek smashed plates.”
But these are minor complaints, since for most of the time Jacobson juggles his toxic material with enviable ease. Many of the conceits in J were treated non-fictionally in a short essay on the Holocaust that Jacobson published as an Amazon one-off last year: the idea that it’s impossible to forgive people to whom we’ve done a great wrong, for example, or the concept that “anyone who cannot bear to look at the reflection of his conscience in the mirror of a crime has only to smash the mirror to feel innocent”.
Readers of this author’s previous work will also espy recurrent preoccupations in the viewpoints of certain characters, particularly those who talk about the value of “a shapely, long-ingested cultural antagonism, in which everything, from whom we worship to what we eat, is accounted for and made clear… We are who we are because we are not them.”
As the basis of a novel, however, these conceits deepen and creep outwards, embracing the reader in persuasive vocabularies of coercion and control. Contemporary literature is overloaded with millenarian visions of destroyed landscapes and societies in flames, but Jacobson has produced one that feels frighteningly new by turning the focus within: the ruins here are the ruins of language, imagination, love itself. “We’ve lived through the end of the world,” says one character. “This is the aftermath. This is the post-apocalypse.”
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