A future far from perfect
Something is missing from the society portrayed in Howard Jacobson’s Booker-shortlisted 13th novel, a seemingly placid retro-future Britain. 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 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 Booker-winning 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.
Some 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.
So much for the setup — but what a setup 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, Ailinn Solomons.
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,” 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.