J

So far as dystopian government messaging goes, this is not the menace of Big Brother is Watching You, but as it constantly scrolls across the bottom of television screens, the attempt at control is the same:

Smile at your neighbour, cherish your spouse, listen to ballads, go to musicals, use your telephone, converse, explain, listen, agree, apologise. Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love.

In Howard Jacobson's fascinating novel J, we are introduced to a near-future world where no one alive was actually witness to the event that formed their new reality; where the books that are available are heavily censored; where school children learn benign racial stereotypes (Arabs are generous! Afro-Caribbeans are good at sport and song! Asians are quietly industrious!); where people are discouraged from investigating history or family lineages; a world where, if people speak of the foundational event at all, call it WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED (or in private, as The Great Pissastrophe or Twitternacht; but only as meaningless phrases); a world where, after Operation Ishmael, everyone was forced to assume Celtic first names and Jewish last names. The average person has no clue as to why they live the way they do, are discouraged from asking questions, and are obliged to constantly apologise to one another for reasons they don't understand. 

The government that maintains this civilisation isn't heavy-handed like Big Brother either: although everyone knows that they are not supposed to have heirlooms or old records, letters and books, it seems that everyone does (even a police detective enjoys his contraband Wagner). These records aren't banned exactly: simply not played. Encouraged to fall into desuetude, like the word desuetude. Popular taste did what edict and proscription could never have done, and just as, when it came to books, the people chose rags-to-riches memoirs, cookbooks and romances, so, when it came to music, they chose ballads.There aren't any middle of the night goon squads disappearing the dissidents, but for that matter, there aren't any dissidents. What the government does do is maintain its citizens' quarantine from the rest of the world (this is presumably Jacobson's native Britain): not allowing travel, internet, long distance phone calls, foreign news or mail. The country's capital, Necropolis, attempts to put a happy face on this culture-without-history with bunting festooned on the long-abandoned construction cranes and -- since black clothing had been banned long ago to prevent mourning over WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED -- the citizens all wear brightly coloured fabrics. Out in the countryside, however, all of this forgotten history and forced apologising is having a perverse effect: working at simple trades, the people are brimming with violence and unfocussed hostility: the men drinking and knocking down other men and women alike; the women sleeping around or at least grabbing any man they want for aggressive snogging; all frantic tongue and tooth. 

Esme (an employee from Ofnow, the non-statutory monitor of the Public Mood), recognises that the hostility stems from a lack of a common enemy; the Other that was completely eradicated in WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. It's said that people are culturally primed to hate the Other -- I am who I am because I am not them -- and Esme understands what their new society is missing:

You have to see a version of yourself -- where you've come from or where you might, if you aren't careful, end up -- before you can do the cheek-to-cheek of hate. Family lineaments must be discerned. A reflection you cannot bear to see. An echo you cannot bear to hear. In other words, you must have chewed on the same bone of moral philosophy, subscribed to a similar spirituality and even, at some point in the not too distant past, have worshipped at the same shrines. It was difference where there was so much that was similar that accounted for the unique antipathy of which they were in search. And only one people with one set of prints fitted that bill.

Esme knows that the only release valve would be to discover and present to the hostile public the appropriate scapegoats; people who likely didn't even realise what they really were. Enter Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen: two people who had always felt an otherness; always vaguely under threat. And although their meeting was engineered, their awkward and halting love story is touching and authentic (and the source of much of Jacobson's trademark brand of humour).

There's a quirk in J that occurs early: every time Kevern's father says a word that begins with a "j", he swipes two fingers across his mouth, a habit Kevern eventually picks up. As though there is something forbidden -- or at least frowned upon -- about words starting with "j", the reader will eventually realise that, although it's obvious that WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED must have been a second, more horrifically successful Holocaust, words like Jew and Jewish are never used. There are hints about people who had "double allegiances", and a crazy woman (her self-appellation) who tried to work out the links between blood and money and defilement as excuses for what had happened, and discovered letters from someone who refused to believe that "it could happen here", and the hints are enough to identify who the Other needs to be; the entire book an explanation, in its way, for why anti-Semitism hasn't been and won't be eradicated from our own world. Jacobson doesn't hold the Jewish people totally blameless for the hostility they inspire either -- there are a few stories about unpleasant personal interactions recovered from before, and it would seem that the trigger for WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was a shocking attack that Israel made on the Palestinians (which, in the Twitter-obsessed world of before, led to angry, homicidal mobs outdoing the outmoded Nazis).

Jacobson totally hooked me with J: the dystopian world was revealed slowly in all of its idiosyncrasy, through shifting points of view, letters and diary entries; the characters were strong and distinct -- even the unlikeable ones were intriguing to meet; the dialogue was believable and often darkly funny; and there was an agreeable tension maintained throughout the plot. I cared about what happened and had tears in my eyes at the end. J, at its essence, does what 1984 and Brave New World did so well: create a fictional society in order to highlight a failing in our own, but while we can hope to avoid the totalitarianism of Big Brother and the triviality of life in the World State, Jacobson's message seems more fatalistic: the Jews will always be hated; it is, in fact, necessary. I enjoyed J much more than The Finkler Question, totally understand why it made it to the Man Booker Prize shortlist, but have reservations about the grim conclusions it makes; were SOMETHING TO HAPPEN, I don't personally feel culturally primed to pick up a rock and join the mob.

And I'm not actually naive about anti-Semitism when I say I have "reservations about the grim conclusions". A few weeks ago, there was an article in the paper about a newly discovered Nazi gas chamber, and since I also follow my newspaper on facebook, it was the comments section there that gobsmacked me: after a few dumb people posted things like "why is this still news after 70 years?", some idiot posted something like "Lies propagated by Jewish-run media! There was no Holocaust -- isn't it convenient that Jews say that 6 million of them disappeared from Europe and that's the EXACT same number of Jews who then went to occupy the Palestinian lands in the Jewish lie called Israel? They didn't die, they became squatters!" Is that what the tinfoil-hat crowd is saying now? To answer the question of the first people to post, that's why we need to keep talking about the Holocaust: education is the only defense against ignorance; conspiracy thrives in a vacuum. But even if Israel made some crazy attack on Palestine as hinted at in this book -- even if they somehow massacred every single Palestinian -- I can't see every Jewish person here in Canada being hunted down an killed in turn. And since I don't personally despise any Other, I don't accept that that phenomenon is necessary to society.

Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2014, with my ranking:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

J by Howard Jacobson

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee

To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris

How to Be Both by Ali Smith

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Now that I'm through the shortlist, I'll say that I'm glad that The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the Booker but J was a close second: I would give Jacobson the advantage in actual writing and Flanagan the nod for fully executing his plan.