Howard Jacobson, J (2014)

First off, the novel is not called J. It is called J-crossed-through-with-two-horizontal-lines. The fonts with which my computer is supplied do not have the actual letter, but you can see it on the title page there:

The best I can do is: J; but Jacobson wants the double strikethrough, partly for emphasis, partly because it mimics what the main character, Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen does whenever he speaks any word that begins with ‘J’: ‘he put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp sucking on a cigarette butt he’d found in a rubbish bin. This he always did to stifle the letter j before it left his lips’ [6]. Kevern doesn’t know why he does this. He does it because his Dad used to do it.

Which brings me to S. Why do I put one finger across my mouth when I say this letter? Because Spoilers arouse fiery feelings in some people; irrational hatreds, ferocities. And there’s simply no way to review this novel without letting some sibilant Spoilers out of the bag. I’ll hold back for a paragraph or two, and then warn you again, dear reader; because the best way to read this novel is to do so blind, so that the significance of the double-strikethrough-J creeps up on you.

And in a way, the first third (or so) of the novel—before Jacobson gets more specific—is easily the best. It’s a remorselessly grim, near-future portrait of Britain, focussed on our hero ‘Coco’ Cohen, who makes a living turning wood in his seaside cottage near the run-down, charmless village of Port Reuben. With thwunking irony, Cohen’s main productions are wooden love-spoons, sold in the village shop—ironic because nobody in this place seems to know anything about love. Married couples scream in the village inn at one another to eat shit; couples are either drunkenly fighting-grappling one another, or else drunkenly rutting like pigs in car-parks and up against walls. Cohen, thoughtful and sensitive, is more-or-less shunned. When he finally starts a relationship, with the beautiful, younger Ailinn Solomons, she is amazed that he just kisses her—rather than, like all the other men, punching her hard in the face. The locals are boorish, beery, aggressively quick to take offence and ready with their fists. There are references to some collective trauma in the near past, referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. After this happened, if it did, a national programme called ‘Operation Ishmael’ was instituted, and the entire country worked to forget what happened (if it happened). Everyone changed their names to Jewish ones, drew a line under the past and looked to the future. This was not a matter of centralised diktat, or top-down authority. Indeed, there don’t seem to be any actual laws in Port Rueben; just a collective sense of what is permitted and what isn’t—a state of affairs (Jacobson makes a good job of persuading his reader) more, rather than less, tyrannical. ‘History books were hard to come by, diaries were hidden or destroyed, and libraries put gentle obstacles in the way of research’ [5]. The one thing everyone seems to agree on, sometimes violently, is that nobody has anything to apologise for. Black has been ‘outlawed’, since it might be confused with mourning clothes, and nobody has any reason to grieve over what happened (if it happened). Lots of things from the past, like Jazz music and foreign travel, are strongly discouraged.

This, then, is where the novel starts. The tender but cranky relationship between Ailinn and Kevern is well drawn, and their world, though in many ways schematic and sharply tendentious in its dramatization, sort-of works. Which is to say, it works as the setting for a fable, a Saramago-like milieu. A second story strand is woven in early-on, from a generation before: a young girl called Esme Nussbaum is looking-into WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. Uncoincidentally she is knocked down by a motorcycle and hospitalised in a coma. A third strand, the least successful of the novel I think, centres on a series of violent murders in the village, and the policeman Gutkind, much given to conspiracy-theories, who investigates them. These killings are there to illustrate Jacobson's belief that literally murderous violence is always bubbling away millimetres below the surface of ordinary English village life. This is also the moral, surprisingly, of the Miss Marple novels; and I have to say I don’t really believe it, in either textual incarnation. And actually, to speak more practically, the murders are also there to give some narrative heave and motion to what is otherwise a pretty static piece of novel-ising.

Still, as we move into the second two-thirds of J the whole artifice of the book starts to stall and judder. Willing suspension of disbelief gives way to grudging suspension of disbelief, and finally morphs into uh-oh-there-goes-my-disbelief,-crashing-down-like-a-rodeo-clown-tossed-from-the-back-of-an-unusually-skittish-colt. There are more murders. Kevern is prime suspect. Ailinn and Kevern go on an in-country holiday, eventually pitching up in London—never called ‘London’ in this novel, only ever referred to as ‘the Necropolis’. Esme Nussbaum, having survived her coma and grown old, now inserts herself into the life of Ailinn and Kevern, for her own frankly mind-boggling reasons. I’d explain what they are, but S! Hmm. S… s… s.

I’m hissing like that because, from here to the end of this review, the snake-tongue Spoilers will flicker forth. Then again, you may have already guessed what the reveal is. WHAT HAD HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED turns out to have been WHAT HAD BEEN DONE [225]. And what was that? The mass-murder of Jews by the population of Great Britain. This, it seems, was a spontaneous ground-up atrocity. One character refers to the crucial tipping point as 'Twitternacht'—not as witty a pun as Jacobson perhaps thinks it is. We are not given any specific rationale for this new Holocaust, because one of Jacobson’s main points in the novel is that such ‘rationales’ are always spurious. Pogroms happen, he says, because the ancestral, endless hatred the world feels for the Jews bubbles over from time to time. Pogroms cannot be explained, and no more can they be legislated against or prevented. 

This second Holocaust seemed to me a fundamentally unbelievable thing. What I mean is: I do not believe there is any prospect of a second Holocaust in Britain in the near future; and I certainly don’t believe that it is liable to happen out of a sort of spontaneous action of the twittering classes, suddenly deciding en masse to pick up tire-irons and anything else to hand and brain all the Jews (this is, more or less, how Jacobson portrays the WHAT HAPPENED). Mind you, and rather cleverly, my reaction is already part of the structural fabric of Jacobson’s novel. His point (and it is a powerful one) is that people thinking ‘it could never happen here’ has always been the prelude to it happening. The Jews in multicultural, civilised 1930s Germany believed it would never happen there, and they were catastrophically wrong. Insofar as his novel acquires the kind of weight and resonance that justifies its place on the Man Booker shortlist it is by framing its catastrophe as un-rememberable, not because it is forgettable but precisely because it is unforgettable. That-which-cannot-be-spoken is the leitmotif of the book. The word ‘Jew’ nowhere appears in it, except that it appears with every doubly-struckthrough J, from the title page on.

The pogrom was proceeded by ice-cream vans—of all things—touring the countryside.

‘Those vans were going round the country painted with the slogan “Leave Now or Face Arrest”. Bethesda Academy did the artwork.’
‘Ice-cream vans?’
‘Yes.’
‘Telling people to leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which people?
‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people.’ [198]

These vans keep their chimes: ‘Greensleeves’; ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Jacobson is not afraid of walloping his readers pretty hard with the irony stick. Elsewhere he gives over a long, long section to one of the murderers, a regular Briton, justifying his killing of a nine-year-old Jewish girl (burned to death in an art gallery because said gallery traded Jewish art) as ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’. The closer it gets to its melodramatic death-plunge ending, the clunkier the novel gets.

Perhaps I say so because I’m a gentile, and complacency about the level of anti-Semitisim in my homeland is my part of my white privilege. I don’t think so, though. The self-evident foolishness of the dodo's ‘it could never happen here!’ is not the universal solvent Jacobson perhaps thinks it is. Now, it should not need saying, but always bears repeating: there is never a ‘justification’ for genocide. But saying that is not the same thing as insisting that the desire to murder Jews is fed by the quasi-mystic ancestral darkness that has always swirled in the violent hearts of gentiles since time immemorial. The man who murdered the nine-year-old confesses his reasons to his schoolgirl lover (he is himself a middle-aged schoolteacher) in a long speech like something out of The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. He desired the girl’s Jewish mother in direct proportion to how much he hated her and wished her dead. ‘The more I hated her the more fascinated I became’. This Jewess is the defining Other to his gentile masculinity:

‘It's you or them. You can’t both breathe the same air. Some people are too different. I am who I am because I am not them, you tell yourself. That’s why you fall in love at first—this clean break with yourself. Because if you are not them, they are not you. But then you realise it isn’t anything about them that you love, it’s the prospect of your own annihilation. They say before the executed die they fall in love with their own executioner.' [245]

He says having sex with this Jewish lover was like being ‘in a sarcophagus making love to a mummy’. There was ‘something ancient about her. I don’t mean in appearance. I mean in what she represented. She went too far back. History should have finished with the likes of her by now.’ As for his actual murderous actions, he claims ‘they weren’t mine alone. I was just repeating what had been done countless times before … I’d been culturally primed to do it.’ The ultimate effectiveness of this novel, it seems, will stand or fall on whether you buy this. I don’t. It is possible to insist that there can never be a ‘justification’ for things like the Holocaust whilst also insisting that things like the Holocaust happen for reasons of ideological and socio-political specificity, not out of a mystic swirl of ancestral hate. And I really couldn’t piece together in my mind the circumstances in which the people of Britain would spontaneously rise up and beat all the Jews to death with tire irons. I didn’t see how—let’s say—outrage at the Gaza situation would scale up. (Jacobson gives us no specifics). I’m certainly not trying to pretend that there is no anti-Semitism in Britain. But I suppose I am suggesting that it has to jostle in the scrum alongside the pervasive anti-Catholicism, anti-Black and anti-Pakistani prejudices, not to mention Islamophobia, Euroscepticism and general dislike of foreigners. The Jew is not the only Other.

Jacobson’s belief in this malign form of Jewish exceptionalism speaks to his personal situation as a prominent British Jew, of course. But his novel has to make it work as more than just the sophisticated paranoia of an individual well-versed in the last millennia European history. I don’t mean that to come over as dismissive. How have moral panics actually manifested themselves in Britain recently? Take a word beginning with P: I mean the sporadic ground-up self-righteousness about paedophiles that prompted mob action some years ago, satirised so well by Chris Morris’s Brass Eye ‘Paedogeddon’. There was a similar group idiocy about this (attacking the houses of paediatricians because the mob didn’t comprehend the difference in the two words and so on); and I daresay a tangle of psychological paradox underlining it of the sort Jacobson attributes to his Jew-murdering teacher—that is, the people who most vehemently demonize ‘paedophiles’ and the people who derive erotic enjoyment from ogling 16-year-old page three girls may be doing the former in order to split off their ‘bad’ selves from their self-acceptable identities. Of course, ‘paedophiles’ are defined as a group by their socially repellent actions, where Jews are defined simply by their ethnicity (the same is true of ‘Blacks’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Irish’ and so on). Individual Jews are good or bad, depending; Jewry is neither of those things. Indeed Jacobson makes this point in (again) slightly clunky manner early on. All the popular singers in his imagined future world are Black. Why?

No laws or duress. A compliant society means that every section of it consented with gratitude—the gratitude of the providentially spared—to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean 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. [14]

This is aiming for a wry deadpan, I know. But even so. The problem is that Jacobson can’t resist the allure of the sweeping, vatic statement; as if the business of the novel is very much not to give you the specific details of actual lived-experience, but instead always to extrapolate to the pretentious-general. ‘Women talked of resisting love because it weakened them,’ says the narrator [183]. Really? Is that what 'women' do? When his girlfriend chides him that he’s not having a crisis, Kevern replies ‘the behaviour of men is the proof we’re in a crisis.’ ‘That’s a tautology,’ she returns [116]. Wait—really? Discussing art with a librarian called Rozenwyn, Kevern agrees that ‘to be an artist is to have the freedom to think anything’, including ‘the freedom to think evil.’ Rozenwyn agrees, and recalls a (fictional) writer called Everett, of whom she says: ‘he likes to play with the idea of wrongdoing. It thrills him. He’d be another Sade if he had the balls. They all would.’ [197]. Wait: all of us?

This is where the greatest strength of Jacobson’s novel becomes, I think, its greatest weakness. That strength is in the way he has reconceptualised near-future dystopia, or post-apocalyptic writing. It has hitherto almost entirely been the case that post-apocalyptic novels, from On the Beach to The Road have predicated their stories upon an actual material catastrophe—comet collision, zombie uprising, whatever. Jacobson does something much cleverer: his catastrophe is a moral one. And he is, I think, absolutely right to insist that living in the aftermath of a moral catastrophe—like the decisions taken by the German state to murder all its Jews—is as materially damaging as any zombie-phage-asteroid-collision fantasy version would be. He's also right that this post-apocalyptic situation is a collective, rather than just a personal, one. Hence, 'dystopia. But, that said, the lineaments of Jacobson’s version of this post-traumatic social logic are full of holes. ‘Operation Ishmael’, by which the nation collectively tried to forget what it had done, entailed amongst other things people and places abandoning their old names and taking on names like Cohen and Solomons. Is this supposed to be like the planetary settlers in Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles? Or a counter-intuitive psychological tactic? Un-memory doesn’t work this way.

Remember the word beginning with P, above? There’s another one of those unspoken P-words in this novel: Palestinian. Imagine (imagining things is the currency of the speculative writer) that Israel made the tactical decision to nuke Gaza and kill every Palestinian. It would not, I think, then institute an ‘Operation Aladdin’, and change everybody’s name to Maħmūd and Haroun. When genocide has happened in the world, it has usually been followed by—simple forgetting. Modern Turkey doesn’t consider itself defined by the Armenian genocide of 1915. Today’s Republic of Rwanda (motto: ‘Unity, Work, Patriotism’) is building a lucrative tourist industry that depends upon rather pointedly not mentioning the mass murder of a million Tutsis two decades ago—the tourism board website boasts not just that ‘Rwanda is a green undulating landscape of hills, gardens and tea plantations, home to one third of the world remaining Mountain Gorillas’, but also that the people are ‘friendy’: ‘Rwanda is a thriving, safe country with one of the lowest crime rates in Africa.’ Maybe the repressed doesn’t always return. Maybe forgetting is one of the superpowers with which we ordinary Clark Kents all happen to be gifted.

Jacobson’s J is not about the Gaza conflict, or modern Israel (neither place is mentioned; and this absence is not freighted in the way the lack of the word ‘Jew’ is). Jacobson’s novel is about Britain; and a very unflattering portrait it paints, a country filled with casually violent, beer-swilling, blinkered idiots and fools. Maybe that’s true. But I don’t think so; or to put it more precisely, I don’t think that’s the whole picture. It lacks nuance, and that’s a problem—because Jacobson’s labour in this novel is all about suggesting not telling, about the potency of inflection and the eloquence of innuendo. It has to be, because if we strip it back it might look as if the response of one of Britain’s most esteemed novelist to the recent Gaza war is: ‘why do you keep going on about those dead Palestinian children? It’s Jews who are the real victims here. Jews are the ones at risk!’ And put like that, without nuance, that looks a little, shall we say, crass.

Reading the novel put me in mind of Lyotard’s Heidegger and the ‘jews’ (1990), not only because of that work’s insistence (reinforced by the deliberate use of scare-quotes and the lower-case-j) that ‘jew’ is a larger category of abjected and persecuted Other than ‘Jew’. Jacobson’s book is about not just present dangers but about the actual, measurable psychic and social violence a people does to itself by refusing to remember its history. Lyotard has a different perspective on the injunction ‘never forget!’ What does it mean to insist that the Holocaust must always be remembered?

Here to fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. It means to fight against forgetting the precariousness of what has been established, of the reestablished past; it is a fight for the sickness whose recovery is simulated. [Lyotard, 10]

This looks more tricky, perhaps, than it actually is: for Lyotard is saying that categorical ‘remembrance’ is as or more distorting than the evasions and repressions of traumatised non-recollection. Genocide has been a ghastly feature of human history for millennia, but the Nazi Holocaust, of all genocides, is surely the one that most runs the risk of becoming the kind of calcified ‘officially remembered’ reification that Lyotard is talking about here. When, a little later he says that where trauma is concerned ‘psychoanalysis, the search for lost time, can only be interminable, like literature and like true history (i.e., the one that is not historicism but anamnesis): the kind of history that does not forget that forgetting is not a breakdown of memory but the immemorial always “present”’ [20], it made me wonder if Jacobson’s novel isn’t too terminable. This is how Lyotard’s short book ends, and where he finally defines what he means by ‘jews’:

The debt that is our only lot–the lot of forgetting neither that there is the Forgotten nor what horrors the spirit is capable of in its headlong madness to make us forget the fact. “Our” lot? Whose lot? It is the lot of this nonpeople of survivors, Jews and non-Jews, called here “the jews,” whose Being-together depends not on the authenticity of any primary roots but on that singular debt of interminable anamnesis.

‘Which people?' ‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people. All people.’ Still: the moment I find myself asking 'ah, but is the anamnesis of Jacobson's novel sufficiently interminable?' is clearly the moment to give all this a rest. Is this novel a masterpiece? Is it fundamentally rubbish? It's very hard to say.