J (2014)
Howard Jacobson
Crown, 312 pages
* * * *
Howard Jabobson’s chilling dystopian novel J dares ask three questions: Can there
be reconciliation without truth? Can there be history without memory? Can
either love or hate exist within the other?
Jacobson—who won the Man Booker Prize for his
2010 novel Finkler—takes us to a
future Britain that is failing to recover from a cataclysm so vague that it is
always referred to as “WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.” Britain already has a
problem—basic linguistics theory has long held that naming is a necessary
precursor to mastery. But before Jacobson probes this, he opens with a parable
of a wolf and a spider in which the ravenous lupine falters and the patient
arachnid survives. Readers need to be spiders as well, as Jacobson spins a web
that emerges slowly before it takes shape. In fact, it’s not immediately clear at
first we are in England, as opposed to Germany, Russia, or maybe Wales. And, of
course, we're not sure what happened, if it happened. There are rumors of mass
killings, but where are the bodies? If it happened, how can the victims have
simply disappeared?
Jacobson’s dystopian Britain isn’t one out of
Children of Men—it’s more terrifying
and more English. After the thing that might not have happened, Britain is
dying a death from a thousand paper cuts in a land that doesn’t “ban” things
outright; one simply doesn’t do certain things: listen to jazz, travel abroad,
read most books, collect fancy furniture, stand out, or think about the past.
Especially the latter, which is dissuaded by public campaigns to “let sleeping
dogs lie,” think of “memory as useless,” and view the past as an obstacle to
thinking “about the future.” Powerful social conventions are (usually)
passively enforced by Ofnow, an enforcer branch of government, which occasionally
dissuades individuals directly. Mainly, though, society is held in check by an
elaborate peer pressure network in which everyone is watching everyone else for
any signs of “unusual” behavior, defined mostly as being vaguely unconventional
or solitary. It’s as if every citizen is involved in a network that’s like a
grassroots mash-up of Stasi and Savak.
Still another oddity: everyone has a
Jewish-sounding last name, which we learn was the project of Operation Ishmael
after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. The book centers on two individuals who
must be suspect because they are unusual: Kevern Cohen and Ailinn Solomons.
Kevern lives in Port Rueben, where he carves wooden spoons for the tourist
trade—often under the tutelage of a mentor Professor Everett Zermansky, who
heads the division of Benign Visual Arts. (It just isn’t done to make
distressing expressionist or abstract art.) Kevern is a dour, naïve, and
exceedingly cautious man more disposed towards being a hermit than part of a
group think society. That suits Kevern fine—he was raised to be invisible by a
cheerless mother and a disengaged father whose most notable trait was that he
made a sport of placing two fingers in front of his lips before pronouncing any
word beginning with the letter “J.” Kevern falls in love with the quirky, perky
Ailinn, whose favorite book is Moby Dick.
Love serves mainly to raise Kevern’s caution flags higher as he knows it’s
unlikely for two “aphids”–a word used by those who think they are above the hoi
polloi—to expect happiness. Moreover, why is Ailinn’s former roommate, the
mysterious Esme, so invested in wanting the two of them to have a child?
How does one discover the truth of anything
in a land where Densdell Kroplick, the village barber, is also the official
local historian cranking out pamphlets that are piles of folktales and
sanitized stories of artisan crafts? How does one recover the past in a place
where memory is only two-generations deep? Is there a future in a land in which
moroseness and violence are creeping upward? When Kevern and Ailinn travel to
the capital city of Necropolis (London), they encounter a glum, dangerous, and
shabby place—but mostly it exudes a gray soullessness that dissolves into a
metaphorical obscuring mist that’s as foggy as what happened (and it’s clear
something did).
What’s Jacobson on about? A clue comes in the
fact that many in Necropolis are wearing keffiyahs. Another is the J word never
spoken: Jew. And when a character begins to speak in obvious riddles—“What is a
culture but ghosts?” “What’s Ahab without his whale?”—and insist upon an
“equipoise of hate,” an “H” word is suggested: Holocaust. Jacobson has been
vocal in his denunciations of how Islamophobia is often invoked to excuse
modern-day British anti-Semitism. Is Port Rueben a living museum, an incubator
for a better future, a shtetl awaiting a new pogrom, or something sinister?
This is, simply, an amazing work of
literature. Jabobson often writes is long, sweeping sentences and uses
beautiful words—some of which will send you scurrying to your dictionary. I
have seldom read such a chilling and gripping work in which tension is
sustained in silences rather than actions, and terror looms most ominously in
passivity.
Rob Weir
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